Bribes and conditional intentions

You are trying to get a permit that you are both morally and legally entitled to, but an official requires a bribe to give you the permit. Are you permitted to pay the bribe?

I always thought: Of course!

But now I think this is more difficult than it has seemed to me. Initially, it seems that your action plan is very simple:

1. Give the bribe in order that the official give you the permit.

But suppose that you pay the bribe and the official never notices the money slipped onto her desk, though when you lean over her desk, from that angle you look just like her nephew, so she gives you the permit out of nepotism. In that case, while you got what you wanted, you didn’t fulfill your plan–your bribery was not a success. That shows that (1) is only a part of your action plan. More fully, your plan is:

2. Give the bribe in order that the official be motivated by it (in the usual way bribes motivate) to give you the permit.

But now it seems to be a moral evil that an official be motivated by a bribe to do something, even if the thing she is motivated to do is the right thing. So in setting oneself on plan (2), it seems one intends something immoral.

I wonder if this isn’t a case similar to asking a murderer: “If you are going to kill me, kill me painlessly” (which one might even put in the simple phrase “Kill me painlessly”, with everybody understanding that the request is conditional). In that case, your intention is not that the murderer kill you painlessly, but that:

3. If the murderer kills you, she kills you painlessly.

And that conditional isn’t a bad thing.

One makes the request of the murderer on the expectation–but certainly neither intention nor hope!–that the the antecedent of the conditional will turn out to be true. Nonetheless, one does not intend the consequent.

Perhaps in the bribery case one has a similar intention:

4. If the official isn’t going to be motivated by duty, she will be motivated by the bribe.

One then gives the bribe on the expectation–but neither intention nor hope–that the official will be unmotivated by duty.

But things aren’t quite that simple. Suppose that I prefer Coca Cola to cocaine, and in a really shady restaurant I place this order:

5. I’ll have a Coca Cola, but if you can’t do that, then I’ll have some cocaine.

Here I’ve done something wrong: I’ve conditionally procured illegal drugs. But how to distinguish (5) from (3) and (4)?

One psychological difference is that in (5), presumably I desire the cocaine, just not as much as I desire the Coca Cola. But in (3) and (4), I don’t desire the painless killing or the taking of the bribe. (Compare this case: Malefactors will forcibly give you Coca Cola, cocaine or cyanide. You say “I’ll have a Coca Cola, but if you can’t do that, I’ll have some cocaine.” Here, I presume, you don’t desire the cocaine, but it’s better than the Coca Cola. That’s more like (3) and (4) than like the restaurant version of (5).)

But I don’t really want to rest the relevant moral distinctions on desires.

Here’s what I’d like to say, but I have a hard time making it work out. In (5)–the restaurant coke/cocaine order–when the antecedent of the conditional is met, your will stands behind the consequent. In (3)–the killing case–your will doesn’t stand behind the consequent even when the antecedent of the conditional is met. Even when it is inevitable that you will be killed, you don’t intend to die, but only not to die painfully. But I worry about this. Suppose then you die painlessly. Isn’t your intention not to painfully die satisfied by the painless death, and hence the painless death was the means to avoiding the painful death? And in the bribery case you intend not to have your request denied, but wasn’t the taking of the bribe the means to the request?

Perhaps there is something much simpler, though, that doesn’t involve intentions so much. Perhaps it’s not morally wrong for the official to give the permit because of the bribe. What is wrong is for the official to give the permit solely because of the bribe. But you needn’t intend that. On the contrary, you might have emphasized to the official that you are morally and legally entitled to the permit. There are many ways the bribe can work. It might be the sole motive. But it might also be a partial motive. Or it might be a defeater for a defeater: "It's a lot of trouble to give permits, so I won't bother. But if I get a bribe, then the trouble is worth it." Of course, that still leaves the probably purely hypothetical case where you know that the only way the bribe will work is by being the sole motive. But now it's not so clear that it's permissible to give it.

And in the case of the murder, you are trying to dissuade the murder from killing you painfully by drawing her attention to the argument that option C is bad because there is a better–albeit still bad–option B? She might then go for option B or she might go for the good option A. Either way, she refrains from doing C. There is, in fact, a way in which the murder case is easier than the bribe case, because your being killed painlessly is not a means to your avoiding the painful death–it is what occurs in its place. If I am offered coffee or water and I go for the water, my drinking water isn’t a means to avoiding coffee, though it happens in its place.

Conditional vs. means-limited intentions

This morning, I set out to walk to the Philosophy Department. If asked my intention, I might have said that it was to reach the Department. And in actual fact I did reach it. Suppose, however, that as I was walking, my wife phoned me to inform me of a serious family emergency that required me to turn back, and that I did in fact turn back.

Here’s a puzzle. The family emergency in this (fortunately) hypothetical scenario seems to have frustrated my intention to reach the Department. On the other hand, surely I did not intend to reach the Department no matter what. That would have been quite wicked (imagine that I could only reach the Department by murdering someone). If I did not intend to reach the Department no matter what, it seems that my intention was conditional, such as to reach the Department barring the unforeseen. But the unforeseen happened, so my conditional intention wasn’t frustrated—it was mooted. If I intend to fail a student if he doesn’t turn in his homework, and he turns in his homework, my intention is not frustrated. So my intention was frustrated and not frustrated, it seems.

Perhaps rather than my intention being frustrated, it was my desire to reach the Department that was frustrated. But that need not be the case. Suppose, contrary to fact, that I was dreading my logic class today and would have appreciated any good excuse to bail on it. Then either I had no desire to reach the Department or my desire was conditional again: to reach the Department unless I can get out of my logic class. In neither case was my desire frustrated.

Let me try a different solution. I intended to reach the Department by morally licit means. The phone call made it impossible for me to reach the Department by morally licit means—reaching the Department would have required me to neglect my family. My intention wasn’t relevantly conditional, but included a stipulation as to the means. Thus my intention was frustrated when it became impossible for me to reach the Department by morally licit means.

The above suggests that our intentions should generally be thus limited in respect of means, unless the means are explicitly specified all the way down (and they probably never are). Otherwise, our intention wickedly commits us to wicked courses of action in some possible circumstances. Of course, the limitation, just as the intention itself, will typically be implicit.