In 1998 the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan was destroyed by American cruise missiles. The site was purportedly use by Al Qaeda to manufacture chemical weapons. The indefatigable Noam Chomsky, describing America as “a leading terrorist state,” called bullshit. He described the event as an atrocity that would predictably lead to the deaths of tens of thousands. He later judged it worse than 9/11.
The result of the bombing, and the status of Al-Shifa as a chemical weapon manufacturer, are unclear. What is clear is that that the event set off a technically decades long debate about the nature of intent that culminated in a 2005 Sam Harris blog posting ominously titled The Limits of Discourse in which be publishes a long series of emails between himself and Chomsky. Ask yourself, what happens when two leading public intellectuals get into a long written debate about about the nature of intent and moral responsibility? Nuance? Deep mutual respect for different ways of thinking? Not quite. But there’s plenty of name calling and psychoanalysis, phrases like “you began at the end of your patience” and “your effort is indeed embarrassing and ludicrous.” It’s entertaining, but you have to work hard to find it edifying.
I bring up a discussion based on The Media Very Rarely Lies. In part three, Scott lays out seven possibilities for a news story:
Reasoning well, and getting things right
Reasoning well, but getting things wrong because the world is complicated and you got unlucky.
Reasoning badly, because you are dumb.
Reasoning badly, because you are biased, and on some more-or-less subconscious level not even trying to reason well.
Reasoning well, having a clear model of the world in your mind, but more-or-less subconsciously and unthinkingly presenting technically true facts in a deceptive way that leaves other people confused, without ever technically lying.
Reasoning well, having a clear model of the world in your mind, but very consciously, and with full knowledge of what you’re doing, presenting technically true facts in a deceptive way intended to make other people confused, without ever technically lying.
Reasoning well, having a clear model of the world in your mind, and literally lying and making up false facts to deceive other people.
He concludes lying is case 7 and especially egregious examples of case 6. In other words, according to Scott, intent matters. Oh good.
The case for intent:
Andrés Escobar, aka The Gentleman, was one of select few people in this world who know what it’s like to be the best at something. Having excelled at soccer his entire life, having skill well beyond what’s fathomable by mere mortals, he was selected as a starting centre back for Colombia during the 1994 world cup. In a pivotal game against the United States a dangerous cross was sent into the box in front of him. He lunged to stop it and deflected the ball into his own net. Colombia lost, 2-1.
He was killed five days later by a fellow countryman, who shot him six times at point blank range and yelled ‘Goal!’ for each bullet “once for each time the South American football commentator said it during the broadcast.”
To a Westerner this is injury to insult. Why kill your own soccer player because he made a mistake? It would be like a Lakers fan killing LeBron James during the playoffs because he missed a free throw. It would be like a D&D player rolling a d6 instead of a d12 when she desperately need at least 6 damage because her d12, (by her own account a fair die) had a bad roll last time. It represents some fundamental misunderstanding about causality.
But it turns out Westerner’s are WEIRD.
Cue Joseph Henrich’s book, The WEIRDest People in the World, in which he gives the following two scenarios:
A)
Two men, Bob and Andy, who did not know one another, were at a very busy outdoor market. There were lots of people. It was very crowded and there was not very much room to walk through the crowd. Andy was walking along and stopped to look at some items on display, placing a bag that he was carrying on the ground. Bob noticed Andy’s bag on the ground. While Andy was distracted, Bob leaned down and picked up Andy’s bag and walked away with it.
How good or bad was what Bob did?
B)
Two men, Rob and Andy, who did not know one another, were at a very busy outdoor market. There were lots of people there. It was very crowded and there was not very much room to walk through the crowd. Rob was walking along and stopped to look at some items on display, placing a bag that he was carrying on the ground. Another very similar bag was sitting right next to Rob’s bag. The bag was owned by Andy, whom Rob did not know. When Rob turned to pick up his bag, he accidently picked up Andy’s bag and walked away with it.
How do you judge Rob?
If you’re like me, you judge Bob harshly. He’s a criminal, and if I’m in an especially bad mood, I might tell you people like Bob are scum and should be shot 6 times at point blank range while shouting “goal.” Rob, on the other hand, might be my good friend. It’s possible he’s a bit clumsy, but fundamentally he is a good person in an unfortunate circumstance.
Curiously, not everyone thinks this way. Amongst the Yasawa in Fiji, there is virtually no moral distinction made between Bob and Rob. They’re an extreme example, but most societies in history are probably more similar to Yasawa than they are to me. In Henrich’s words:
“It turns out that how much people rely on others’ mental states in judging them varies dramatically across societies. As usual, WEIRD people anchor the extreme end of the distribution, relying heavily on the inferences we make about the invisible states inside other people’s heads and hearts.”
I am extremely thankful for this. It has saved me a lot of grief on numerous occasions. I’m reminded of a phone call from an exasperated roommate asking if perchance I had seen his wallet. I checked my back pocket and pulled out, to my great relief, my own wallet. But at his insistence I continued my search and another perfunctory pat discovered a second lump. With a great feeling of foreboding (please God let it be butt cancer) my fingers slithered in and I pulled out a wallet that was very much not my own.
I apologized profusely to my roommate, drove his wallet back to him, and we both returned to be functioning members of society without further incident. In a different moral system I’d be subject to jail, exile, or maybe a fist fight. If you think this is hyperbole, know that these are better case scenarios. In the old world I might be accused of being possession by a demon and routinely killed. Seriously.
The case against intent:
Why have most human societies for most of human history put low value on intent?
“Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.” Says Vito Corleone in the novel The Godfather. The movie elaborates, “I’m a superstitious man. And if some unlucky accident should befall my son, if my son is struck by a bolt of lightning, I will blame some of the people here.”
Sometimes accidents have a pattern. Maybe you loan a book to your friend and they (miraculously) return it to you at a later date. But liquid has been spilled on the book, some of the pages are stuck together, and those that do open are covered in a patchwork of goo and crumbs. As you weigh forgiveness, you peruse their own book collection and notice it’s pristine. It’s not they had bad intent, your realize, it’s that they didn’t care.
For cases like the sticky book it is constructive to measure moral acts on consequence, not intention. This encourages the right motivations. I’ll give you the most extreme example of this I can think of. In The Dawn of Everything one learns that killing family members, servants, and other officiants when a leader passes is common throughout human history:
“Burials of kings surrounded by dozens, hundreds, on some occasions even thousands of human victims killed specially for the occasion can be found in almost every part of the world where monarchies did eventually establish themselves, from the early dynastic city-stae of Ur in Mesopotamia to the Kerma polity in Nubia to Shang China. There is also credible literary descriptions from Korea, Tibet, Japan, and the Russian steppes. Something similar seems to have occurred as well in the Moche and Wari societies of South America, and the Mississippian city of Cahokia.”
Henrich has taught me that I should assume every strange thing a culture does is functional. But how could so many societies (many quite successful) develop a cultural practice that is so obviously destructive? Hasn’t history told us that a smooth transition of power is extremely important, that it is greatly facilitated by bureaucrats and officials from previous regimes?
The best explanation I can give for the bloody practice is intent insurance. It does not take a great stretch of the imagination to think that a leader would garner a lot more whole hearted support if, were they to be hit by a bolt of lightning and die, everyone near to them would be dead too. [Note the the practice does not involve burying sworn enemies or rivals with the ruler, or those who obviously have bad intent. Rather, servants and family, who might regularly be given the benefit of the doubt.]
If you want one more gut punch, consider that no one has ever claimed ill-intent. Osama Bin Laden was stopping evil imperialists. The United States was fighting terrorism. Any single murderer out their was seeking justified revenge. Sam Bankman-Fried was doing it for effective altruism. A young man driving drunk at 70 mph in a 30 mph zone who unfortunately gets into an accident and someone dies? They were being a little reckless, but please consider what a great guy they are and how much they did not intend for this to happen. Hitler, Stalin, you name it, good motives.
We should bury the legislature with Biden and other reasonable conclusions
Why is intent Western-centric? Are we foolish ones? Henrich gives us some clues.
“WEIRD populations have among the highest levels of impersonal trust. Impersonal trust is part of a psychological package called impersonal prosociality, which is associated with a set of social norms, expectations, and motivations for impartial fairness, probity, and cooperation with strangers, anonymous others, or even abstract institutions like the police or government.”
He contrasts the WEIRD attitude with that of the Chinese, who maintain a historically more common kinship-based structure
“In China, people report trust with ‘people around here’ but explicitly distrust strangers, foreigners, and new acquaintances.”
From this perspective we value intent when we trust people. When I stated that I didn’t intend to steal my roommate’s wallet, the extent your were sympathetic probably matches the extent you view me as your friend and ally. This is when the the ‘basketball player missing a free-throw’ analogy makes the most sense. You assume we are working towards the same common goals. Hurt me, and you only end up hurting yourself.
Unfortunately this psychology rarely survives an outgroup. Imagine some weird rule that requires a member of your basketball team be someone who hates you, your team, and maybe basketball itself. Every time they miss a shot or make a bad pass you may wonder if their actions are purposeful. Although they may not be intentionally throwing the ball away, you can be certain they aren’t in good faith helping the team win. For them, every moment on the court would offer a choice between conserve energy (and lose the ball) or try really hard and help the team win. Each sloppy turnover they make will erode your belief in intent as a moral standard.
Conflict theory and Mistake theory
The problem with Noam Chomsky isn’t that he’s wrong. He certainly has a point. The problem is that he paints a very clear picture of America as a completely self interested actor. He’s a conflict theorist. It’s overwhelmingly true that America is self interested. But to play the devil’s advocate, it’s also true that there’s little historical precedent for what America, and (most of) the allied powers did after WWII. They returned sovereignty to the defeated side. They treated the greatest atrocities in human history as a mistake. They set up a system of rules that involved trusting and cooperating with their greatest enemies. It was wildly successful.
Imagine if Chomsky were your marriage counselor. He would meticulously point out every action in your marriage that was self interested. Every time you proclaimed your love to your spouse Chomsky would dismiss it as propaganda. ‘Why, if you love your spouse, do you not simply write their anniversary in your notebook and buy a gift.” Thanks Chomsky, that’s a good point. “You said flowers were expensive, but they represent a negligible amount of your net income. The candy bar you bought Cindy in the third grade was a greater investment.” Damn man, I don’t know.
It’s not that he’s wrong exactly. But it also feels true that no marriage could survive his meticulous narratives. Building a relationship requires someone who assumes the best, someone who sees mostly the good.
Addressing the media
There’s an aspect of game theory to all of this. In the intent model we assume motives are good even if the results are bad. If a newspaper publishes an article that is misleading, they weren’t lying, they made a mistake. But this allows defectors to exploit the good will of society, it allows them to publish what is most profitable without regard to accuracy. The intent model is ripe for exploitation.
But without the intent model we invite conflict. Without intent, a newspaper that publishes something misleading is doing so with purpose, they are lying. This behavior should reasonably be punished. Traditionally, this is solved by exile or violence.
If you’re thinking yeah, probably we should destroy Infowars, or Elon Musk, or the NYT, you’re not alone. It’s likely we’re on an uptick of tribalism. We’re not the bastion of cooperation we used to think of ourselves as.
But this is where I think Scott’s model is correct. Where his nitpicky observation that The Media Very Rarely Lies is important.
The assumption that everyone is telling the truth is the assumption everyone, deep down inside, is cooperating. It allows us to put down our assault weapons for a moment and test the limits of this cooperation. It resets the narrative.
It sets the stage for progress. One final thought experiment. Imagine if you flew back through time to survey the history of cooperation. Imagine if you publicly decreed after every senseless murder, trivial war, or basic betrayal that the very nature of humanity guarantees this as the state of mankind, that full cooperation is hopeless. You’d be overwhelmingly correct. If your predictive powers invigorated you into a frenzy, you might also declare that civil discourse with respect for the truth is folly, you could inform the crowds (who have come to see you, a time traveler) that you have seen the truth drown in a sea of selfishness and tribalism a million times over. You’d be 99% correct. But that missing percentage has meant more to people on this earth, has built more, than any prophet from the past has dared imagine. We should hold it in high esteem.