The intention paradox

You have a desire to achieve a certain goal, or you want to have something, or you have another desire like that. If the desire is really effective and not simply a vague wish, we say that you have an intention. Then you make a plan of action how to attain your goal and you perform the action or actions as planned. For instance, you get the desire to go to a concert tomorrow evening. So you look on the Internet for the programs of several concert halls in your town and in the towns nearby. You make your choice and buy your ticket online and tomorrow evening you go. This is a simple example of what happens when you have an intention and you have the chance to fulfil it and often it works fundamentally this way, also in more complicated cases like when you want to make a tour through South America. I could call it the direct way to fulfil an intention.

Take now this well-known case, described for the first time by Roderick Chisholm: Carl intends to kill his rich uncle because he wants to inherit his fortune. He believes that his uncle is at home and drives towards his house in order to execute his intention there. This agitates him that much that he drives recklessly. On the way he hits and kills a pedestrian, who happens to be his uncle. Therefore we can say that in an indirect way Carl’s intention made him kill his uncle. An intriguing question then is, of course, whether Carl is also responsible for the killing of his uncle, in view of his intention, for it may be so that at the moment of the accident Carl didn’t break any traffic rule and that the pedestrian (his uncle) suddenly crossed the road. I’ll bypass this problem, for here I want to raise another question. When we have an intention, it can be fulfilled in a direct or in an indirect way, as we just have seen. However, is it possible that an intention we have can be fulfilled only when we don’t have it or when we drop it? I think that such intentions exist. Emotions are a case in point, for, to take an example, we can never be happy unless we refrain from trying to be so. Then the intention has become its own paradox: Sometimes we get things we intended to get just because we didn’t intend them.