Chapter 6 - The Irrelevance Theory and More Objections

Summary

Chapter 6 responds to five objections to double effect from proponents of the Irrelevance Theory, the theory that an agent’s intentions and motivating reasons are not fundamentally relevant to assessments of moral permissibility. The objections are the following: (i) It is mysterious why something in the agent’s mind should matter for the moral permissibility of her bodily actions; (ii) the PDE leads to inconsistent judgments about cases; the PDE is objectionable from the perspective of the deliberating agent, either (iii) insofar as it makes the moral permissibility of doing things such as dropping bombs turn on the agent’s intentions rather than objective features of her situation or (iv) insofar as it requires a deliberating agent to focus her attention inward on her own mental states rather than on the world; (v) the PDE sometimes has absurd implications for how we ought to respond to agents with bad intentions. I argue that none of these objections seriously damage the PDE.