Unintended and unanticipated consequences of action

In my blog on the unintended consequences of actions last week, sometimes I spoke of the unintended consequences of actions and, following Robert K. Merton, sometimes of their unanticipated consequences. By using these terms interchangeably, actually I mixed up two types of effects. For what is unintended need not be unanticipated. What is unintended can both be anticipated (polluting the environment when driving your car), as unanticipated (some shortcuts are closed for cars during certain hours of the day, if too many drivers use them during rush hours). On the other hand, what is unanticipated can be unintended (that the shortcut is closed during rush hours) but it doesn’t need to be so (if you take your bike for saving the environment, your physical condition becomes better, and that’s just why you recently joined a fitness club). The latter example makes clear that unintended and/or unanticipated action consequences need not be undesirable. The terms say only something about how we perceive them, not about how we value them, and unintended and unanticipated consequences of actions can be negative as well as positive.

This little analysis helps to plan and evaluate actions in view of their side-effects. Let me discuss again the points just mentioned for getting a better oversight. I’ll add some short characterizations of the different possibilities.
I) If successful, an action has intended and anticipated consequences. We call them the purpose of the action. No surprise, of course, for that was what we were acting for.
II) However, an action can have a range of side-effects, as we just have seen:
a) unintended unanticipated consequences
- positive: good luck or unexpected benefit
- negative: bad luck or unexpected drawback
b) unintended anticipated consequences
- positive: bonus
- negative: resignation
c) intended unanticipated consequences
- positive: good fortune
- negative: doesn’t happen, for who is striving for ill fortune?
(if you prefer a schematic overview of the consequence of actions, although different in some respects, go here)

All this is yet relatively simple, although complicated enough, in case you are going to analyse real actions before they happen, since most practical situations are rather complex and cannot be surveyed in detail, for instance because the details are unknown. That’s just why actions always have unintended and/or unanticipated consequences that are not part of the agent’s purpose (the “law of unintended consequences” – see my blog last week). Matters become even more complicated if we must allow for possible recursive effects of the unintended and/or unanticipated consequences of what we intend to achieve with our action. Here, I want to mention only one, but very important recursive effect, that can even frustrate your action purpose: the perverse action consequence. It is an often-happening unintended unanticipated action effect. We call a negative action consequence perverse if it has not only negative consequences for others and for the (social) environment, but if it makes more difficult if not prevents your action purpose being reached or even makes the matter worse than before the action involved was performed. The boycott of Russian oil and gas mentioned in my last blog is a case in point. I quote (with one correction in view of the present blog): “As a way to stop the Russian attack on Ukraine the western countries have imposed a boycott of gas and oil against Russia. The idea is that it will deprive Russia of an important source of income. However, a perverse consequence of the boycott is that world market gas and oil prices have become so high that, despite the boycott, Russia earns more on energy than before the boycott was imposed.” At least the short-term consequence of the gas and oil boycott is perverse. Whether it will be so in the long run, cannot yet be foreseen because of possible unintended and unanticipated consequences.