Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account

Abstract

Can you perform an action intentionally if there was only a small chance your action would succeed? Researchers studying the folk concept of intentional action have documented complex patterns of intuitions in these cases. We propose to explain the data in terms of a causal theory of intentional action, according to which people consider an action intentional if there was a strong causal link between the agent’s desire for the outcome and the outcome itself. When the outcome of an action is left to chance, people judge that the agent’s desire was a weak cause of the outcome; this results in corresponding low intentionality judgment. Supporting our proposal, we find that in situations where people deny that a lucky outcome was brought about intentionally, they also deny that the outcome happened because of the agent’s desire for that outcome. Intentionality judgments track causal judgments to a larger extent than they track other factors previously proposed to explain the luck effect. Our findings support the idea that a robust causal link between desire and outcome is a key component of the folk concept of intentional action.