Why care about intention, and death on the bridge
When the thing you thought was accidental turns out not to be
On the third day of school, a message went out to parents saying that Interstate 95 was closed in both directions. A significant motor vehicle incident on the bridge connecting New Hampshire and Maine had created a closure that spanned a quarter mile, creating a huge traffic jam. “Find an alternate route,” the message said (and also “we get that you’re probably going to be late”).
Our school drive doesn’t involve 95, but later as I planned errands I checked the status to see if the highway had opened. I expected a report of a fatal car accident. Instead I discovered that it wasn’t an accident at all but rather that murders had been committed and the incident involved a police confrontation with the perpetrator. The suspect had evidently driven to the bridge with a corpse in his car. What I thought was a vehicular tragedy was actually a bizarre, traveling case of homicide. I was shocked.
Why do I tell you this? After all, we each confront new stories of every kind – many tragic – every day. For all of us, though, news of unexpected death is upsetting and even confusing, and we’re pushed to try to make sense of it. This is where the shock and curiosity come from.
We find, as we think about it, that the type of death matters quite a lot. This is because the death of a person in an accident, the unintentional killing of a person, is very different from the intentional killing of a person, a murder. What’s going on here, exactly? After all, the end result is the same for both: a person who was alive before the incident is now dead. And yet the actual situations, one and the other, aren’t remotely same.
The answer is intention. The person who’s responsible for the death: what was his disposition toward the event?
Intention is “something that you want and plan to do.” It’s an aim, an act you set out to accomplish. You mean to. An action isn’t just about the event itself, you see; it’s about what happened before that caused it to occur.
Let’s make the concept a little more everyday. When you say something without thinking to or around someone you know, your comment might hurt your listener’s feelings. Afterwards you might realize you hurt them and think, “I can’t believe I said that! I didn’t mean it the way it came across. I never meant to upset him.” But in a different case you might be angry with your listener and purposely drop a comment you know will tick him off (even if you pretend to be oblivious). You want to hurt his feelings, and you say something that accomplishes that goal.
In both cases the guy walks away hurt, but in the first case it was accidental and the second it was intentional.
Or another example. You might tell your classmate the movie starts at 5, and when she arrives she finds it started at 4 and she missed most of it. If you told her it started at 5 by accident, or because your thumb hit the wrong digit on your screen as you texted, you would have inadvertently misled her – it would be an annoying mistake. But if you knew when you told her that you were giving her faulty info, you would be knowingly misleading her, telling her an untruth. You’d be lying. The end result in both cases would the same, the girl missed most of the film, but the situation and the relationship wouldn’t be the same at all.
Bottom line: intention matters a lot. Life is partly about what happens and partly about why it happens – our aims are behind our actions. (And other people’s aims that involve us.)
This is why natural law – which says there are objective goods that are accessible to humans in all times and places, and we can use our reason to know and enact them – has loads to say about intention.
We’re shaped by what we intend as much by what we do. Our intention is the part of our action that remains behind inside us, after the action’s done. If I purposefully say an untrue thing, I am a person who lies – even after the incident is past (and even if I didn’t get found out). If I deliberately say things to hurt people, I am eventually an unkind person (even if I pretend I didn’t mean to cause offense). If I kill a person on purpose, I am a murderer (even if I never get caught). The intention is what molds our inner person.
What we aim for and mean to do directs who we become. It’s no exaggeration to say that our character is simply a series of intentions that we cultivate and act on.
In a utilitarian world, it’s easy for us to not think about intention, or to just discount it. Life happens. You might say, “She would have been late to the movie anyway” or “she just gets offended easily” … and both might be accurate statements. But they’re not the whole story, and for you, not what matters most. What matters most for you is who you are becoming.
So let’s be people who set on our intentions on the good, the basic goods: life, friendship, beauty, knowledge, play, and practical reasonableness. Let’s intend for, and act for, those transcendent values. It’s the only way to flourish in the long run. You will never be perfect, and things will never be perfect; there’s no flawless person or ideal state. But even still, purposefully walking this path towards the good is the one that brings fulfillment over the long term. Here’s to it.