By

Bill Cottringer

“One kind deed is more beautiful than a thousand good intentions.” ~Matshona Dhliwayo.

     What is more important—the intentions of your behavior or its impact? Or, are they both equal in importance? Psychologists would tell you that intentions are hard to get at, and since the mind is mostly unconscious, why make the assumption anyone does anything intentionally?  But unfortunately, most of us do and that is a problem worth looking at.

     Our criminal justice system doesn’t agree with the popular current trend of recognizing the myth of free will and criminal law is actually founded on the questionable assumption of a criminal’s intent in being fully responsible for his or her crime. That assumption always leads to harsher punishment for the already harsh impact of their crimes on victims and society. Ironically. To the contrary, civil liability law considers usually weighs in the consequences of an act in deciding liability.

     A good question worth asking is:  Do we even need to consider whether or not a person does something on purpose or not, given the plethora of other more plausible explanations, just one big one being the extent of social conditioning that goes on in our world? And of course, the social media have extended this influence even further. Another good question is:  What is the purpose of considering intentions and impact? To understand a person’s behavior and motives better?  What for—to arrive at a the most just punishment or reaction? Keep in mind justice is just a way to repair injustice, at least according to Plato.

     It would seem that fair punishment and right reactions to wrong-doing can be arrived at simply by bypassing any attempt at analyzing intentions and just considering the impact or consequences of the act. Ironically, that is what the law normally does, except when it comes to degrees of murder, where intentional premeditated murder rises to the top of the totem pole with the harshest penalty. But then again, what happens with two people with the very same intent of shooting and killing the victim? If one is unfortunate enough to be a good marksman and the other fortunate enough to not have a good aim, guess who gets the chair or needle? Here in this case, it is the impact that counts most.

    Moving to some less serious scenarios, such as workplace misconduct, we can easily see how to avoid the trap of assuming an employee commits work misconduct intentionally. Only the impact of the misconduct on the business interests, its customers or others can really be objectively measured. Back in the eighties when sexual harassment training came onto the scene, it wasn’t the harasser’s intentions that mattered most in proving violations but rather the victim’s perception of the harm from the behavior. This is still true today. And, pleading ignorance of the law is generally not a winnable defense.

    Some States have very smart work misconduct statutes. One is Washington State, which gathered all the relevant trial and error case law to develop a smart three part law: (a) the legal definition of misconduct with the critical elements that must be present in proving it (b) specific per se examples of work behaviors that inherently imply intentionality by their very nature, e.g. you cannot be insubordinate unintentionally (c) what conditions and circumstances that disqualified conduct from being misconduct, or what misconduct isn’t under certain circumstances like an inadvertent lapse of judgment.

    So maybe it is time to stop professing to know and understand something we never will (at least until the body of brain research gets us there with advanced technology), such as a person’s intentionality of doing anything, good or bad. It is just like effort vs. results. You can make admirable efforts to do something right, but unless you get some noticeable results, unfortunately those efforts are for naught. And like the opening quote, efforts are just animated intentions, when the resulting good deed is the only thing that counts.

     I think one of my all-time favorite quotes concludes this brief essay in intentions vs. impact most appropriately:

“You can’t think your way out of a situation you behaved yourself into.” ~Anonymous.