Are intentions more important than actions?

Why would you even think about this rhetorical situation seems disturbing to me..

I think even if they are full of terrorists, you are still not allowed to just kill them so you will go to jail for a very long time, sure if they are 100% dangerous you may saved others from stuff they might do in the future but that still doesn't give you a free pass to murder people like that.

If a little girl decides to help her mom and accidentally drops a large stack of dishes, then yes, intentions are more important. In your example you are a hero, I'd say. A hero who requires a great deal of help from mental health professionals while staying in a prison for vigilantism, but a hero nonetheless. Basically, I think that generalization is impossible here.

people will think you're a hero, as long as they don't know why you were there with a gun in the first place. But what people think and what really is are two different things entirely.

Define "intentions". What made you decide to change your target? What made you want to shoot that school in the first place? As long as we don't know the underlying intentions it's impossible to say if they're more important than the resulting actions. Those kids could carry a disease that would eventually kill hundreds of people. Those terrorists could be planning to liberate a country from its oppressive government. You could be a psycho, a vigilante or some sort of secret agent. If we don't know the causes we can only judge depending on the acts.

I invoke Godwin's law.

As a civil, you aren't supposed to "kill the entire terrorist population" unless imminent perish.

Those are two different intentions.

It's like asking if going to see a movie but then instead you stop and get groceries are the same. They're not.

No one can ever truly see or prove another's intentions. By extension, no one can prove their intentions without actions. The only thing that truly matters are one's actions and the consequences thereof, because events cannot change through intentions alone.

While your example is way overboard, I'll try to answer the original question.

Actions are more important, because I don't know the intentions of everybody. I only know their actions.

There's a saying about it: The path to hell is full of good intentions.

Aliens are fake and please don't shoot kids.

i dont understand how you can say that killing an entire base of aliens is an objectively good thing, and wouldn't you need to have an intention to kill the aliens? Sorry but I don't think your example works with your question.

There is obviously no correct answer to this question. Whatever you answer will reveal the logistics of your moral system, but nothing else, and even then only in theory, not in a practical situation, since reality is almost never clear cut enough to make such distinctions (in a reasonable amount of time). In the real world you wouldn't end up coming across a situation where indiscriminate killing of anyone turns out to be an action that's "obviously" morally correct.

That intentions are more important than actions is very hard to argue, however -- actions are what actually impact other people's lives, intentions are not (unless you communicate them, but that would itself count as an action). At best you could argue that they should somehow factor in when we decide how actions should be judged, and in fact this is a component of most real world law systems if you commit a crime, the mens rea. In many if not most jurisdictions, killing a person and intending to do so is seen as worse than killing a person without intending to do so, even if the ultimate result (and possibly even the actions) are the same in both cases -- it's the difference between murder and manslaughter.

This principle is not usually applied in the inverse, because there is no (formal) system in place for rewarding good deeds, only for punishing bad ones. If I commit what would otherwise be a crime but did not intend to (or even intended to do good), this may lessen my sentence or even result in no punishment at all. If on the other hand I do something heroic but intended to do harm, it's not like my medals will be made of bronze instead of gold, especially not since I'm not required or encouraged to disclose my intentions.

What's more, in the hypothetical you describe your intentions do not even apply to actions you actually undertake -- if you don't shoot up a bunch of innocent people because you spent the ammo in another way (whatever way that may be), that ultimately just means you didn't shoot innocent people. Unless carrying the loaded weapon is itself a crime or morally repugnant action (and that depends), there is no direct link between your original intentions and what you ultimately did (which in the hypothetical is supposed to be a heroic act). There is only the intent to shoot the bad guys, and you actually shooting the bad guys, which (again, hypothetically) is supposed to be all good in both cases. Ultimately, then, your question boils down to "should my original thoughts of doing harm and the initial action to prepare to do harm matter if I end up not doing harm?" And that, again, boils down to how your morality works, there is no objectively correct answer. Many moral systems do condemn merely thinking of doing bad even if it's never followed up by a morally objectionable action, especially when religion gets involved, but whether you subscribe to them is up to you.

Ethics has kept philosophers busy for many centuries now, and it's likely to keep them busy for quite a while longer. Since I'm not a philosopher, the above probably doesn't even scratch the surface of where you can go with things.

If you kill the aliens as the Ted Bundy faced, Hitler-legged motherfuckers that they are and no one knows that you were on your way to your own school shooting - you will be treated as a hero. I wouldn't say you are one, but circumstances made you one in the eyes of the public. For the moment, school shootings might not be off your agenda yet after all, you might just be out of ammo?

If it was already known that you were going to shoot up the school, or if it is discovered afterwards, the whole thing will be written off as two terrorist factions warring with each other. No one will think you are a hero.

It's like hearing about murderers in jail that kills jailed pedophiles. Do we like what they did? Yes. Do we like them, do we think they are heroes? No.

Imo, intentions mean nothing.
If you go around referring to, I don't know, black people as n-words, gay men as f****s because you just didn't know any better, that doesn't mean what you said wasn't hurtful, despite your "good intentions" of making lighthearted jokes or whatever.
As for bad intentions, as long as no one's acting on those, how's there even an issue? In your example the kids ended up living, and while one could argue that they "maybe wouldn't be that lucky next time", it's not the intention that's gonna kill them, but actions. Idk, seems pretty cut and dried to me.

> They don't look anything human, they walk on 4 Adolf Hitler.
wtf 😂

Formulating it like this might be more... interesting / fitting?...: You decide to commit mass murder but everyone that was killed was evil. (Let's assume killing is good in this case.)
bad intention -> unintended good action.

More generalized that could be:

Have the intention to do A(evil), then do B (assumed good)
but with two possibilities:

• do A which leads to B.
• do B instead of A (intention still might be present but can't be performed anymore)

In the end actions will have an effect, no matter the intentions. But are they thereby more important?
I think it can't be really generalized you can construct examples for all cases. And the hidden truth and possible reactions can't be known.

Situational answer: Give you a medal then throw you into an asylum.^^ (but normally we wouldn't know the bad intention)

... it's to alte for my brain.

Keep your thoughts to yourself. You'll get committed to an asylum for this sort of rant.

Years ago a guy told me that he thought about a scenario where he went to a school and shot some kids because he was bullied in school. He claimed he would never do it, just thought about it btw. I was bullied in school and would never have dreamed of such a thing. Good thing he lived on the other side of the world, so I'd never meet him. Kinda freaked me out.

This rhetorical question just weirded me out in the same way. Sorry.

So many brain farts .... or study stuff

Rhetorical, hypothetical, generalization, extreme black and white situation..... blablabla

Go out and live.

What you did by taking out the terrorists would normally be considered a heroic move, but you're a horrible piece of shit because you're just like them, as you would have killed all those kids in the school.

On one hand, it feels like comparing action to reaction. Both are part of the same puzzle, but they can't be truly compared in the same categories, because they are their separate things.

Ultimately however, I think that the situation skews towards actions being more important. If 30 people, each and every one of them with their own intentions do the same thing, their intentions don't really matter from one point of view, since the action made was still the same for all of them.
What if action in the end turns out to go against the original intent? It would mean that the action, once taken, has a possibility of making intent irrelevant by making it either unfulfilled, or even harder to achieve in the future, simply by person being unable to predict such outcome.
On the flipside, your intent can't affect the result of taken action.
And lastly - the world reacts not to our intents, but to our actions.

Which is not to say that intent is irrelevant. Without it, there would be no action at all, no matter if it aligns with intent or not in the end. Also, while not mattering to the world, intent may be of interest to people, and most importantly, to the person taking the action.

In the end, you'd probably be a hero in such a situation.