Action, deed and responsibility

The question what an action is has long been a hot topic in action theory. Recently yet, I have written a blog about it (see my blog “What is an action?”). But take now this case: A hired assassin kills the wrong person, a thing that now and then happens. To keep my example simple, let’s say that the assassin kills by mistake a passer-by, when pointing at his intended victim. Then the question is: What action did the shooter perform? This is not only a philosophical question, but it is also important to know if we want to ascribe responsibility and administer punishment.Generally we can say that an action is a piece of behaviour with an intention, as I have explained in my blog just mentioned. But suppose that a policeman pushed the shooter in his back at the moment that the man pulled the trigger. It made that the shooter missed his intended victim and killed by accident the passer-by. Can we attribute then the killing of the passer-by to the shooter? For isn’t it so that the shooter did not intend to do so and that he didn’t aim at the passer-by and that he was pushed in his back?Take this: A woman has a cup of coffee in her hand and she spills the coffee. She can have done it intentionally, she can have done it unintentionally, someone pushed intentionally against her hand, someone did this unintentionally, etc. In the third and fourth cases we wouldn’t say that it was the woman who spilled the coffee. In the same way, we can say that in case the shooter got a push in his back it wasn’t he who killed the passer-by. If it was someone who killed the passer-by, it was the pusher, so the policeman. Right? Is this true even if the policeman wanted to prevent that the shooter would kill the intended victim? Maybe, we should say the policeman should have been more careful and that he can be blamed for that, but nevertheless we would say that it was the shooter who killed the passer-by. Even more, the shooter can be punished for having killed the passer-by. Why? For isn’t it so that the shooter didn’t intend to kill the passer-by, as we have seen, and wouldn’t have shot if he had known before that he would have been pushed in his back?Let’s compare again the coffee spiller and the shooter. The coffee spiller did not intend to spill the coffee, i.e. she did not intend to move her hand that way that she would spill the coffee. Moreover, she couldn’t expect that someone would push against his hand. So far, the cases of the shooter and the coffee spiller are analogous: both do what they do unintentionally, at least if we look at the consequences of what they do. The shooter, however, did have the intention to move his hand that way that he would shoot, albeit in a different manner. He hadn’t expected that someone would push his back, indeed, but the shooting as such was intentional, or, as I want to say, the deed of shooting was intentional. On the other hand, the spilling of the coffee was simply a movement of her hand for the spiller: It happened to her. The hand movement wasn’t a deed of hers The shooting, however, didn’t merely happen but was done by the shooter himself and someone who shoots knows that by shooting much can go wrong, like that there is a chance that he will miss. This shooting that made that a passer-by was killed was an intentional act, while the hand movement that led to spilling the coffee was not (for the coffee spiller). And, as Donald Davidson says: “a man is the agent of an act if what he does can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional.” (p. 46) Therefore, although in a sense we can say that the killing of the passer-by was not an action the shooter performed (for it wasn’t his intention to perform this action), it was something that the shooter did, while the spilling the coffee was not something that the coffee spiller did, since it merely happened to her. That is why the shooter is responsible for the consequences of his shooting while the coffee spiller isn’t. And maybe the punishment for the shooter will be even more severe for having killed an innocent man than if he had killed his intended victim. But that’s what the court decides. 

Source
Davidson, Donald, “Agency”, in Essays on actions and events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; pp. 43-61.