What is intention? In moral or philosophical terms, it is defined as the deliberate aim or purpose behind an action. It reflects what a person consciously chooses or wills to bring about.
To expand slightly for clarity:
It is not just a vague desire or hope.
It involves awareness and direction: the person knows what they are doing and why.
It often implies forethought and a goal.
It cares if that goal is morally good, neutral, or bad.
It is not simple though. You can simulate, go through the motions. You can do something that looks like it aims for x when the real reason you did it was because you felt like it.
And our desires, and especially hopes, may be a lot vaguer than we say. Nobody likes to come across as too indecisive. We are pressured by society to act as if we know what we think is best for us.
We don't have the time to think of everything. That means your intention is more about having to act than about you and what you need. It is not as free as it should be.
Those problems lead to intentions being often lazy and people often condone that laziness by praising our goodwill. It makes them feel better about their own sloppiness.
And as for goals, we know that we can aim for a and get b. You can only guess.
And there is the dreadful issue of how if a is followed by b, even all the time, that does not mean a caused b. Correlation is not causation. We continually make mistakes over acting as if it is.
If we have free will, we have the problem of using it in the way that is right for us.
We have a problem with free will in the first place.
Free will is saying you can choose y or z or anything - choose other than what you choose.
But it is not real. We are saying that if you go for x and the clock could be turned back you will go for it again. And if the clock is turned back for all eternity it will always be x. That is not free will. You feel free but how you feel is irrelevant.
In my worldview, a choice is redefined as a reaction where you are not forced by anything outside of you or anything obvious like a drug.
The way I am is unable to allow me to do anything different. This is not as obvious as somebody forcing you to do something. How obvious it is has nothing to do with it being free or otherwise.
We also know that even if choice is real, we find it hard to know if we are really choosing or reacting. Feeling is no guide. Reacting can feel free too. You feel free when you kick the car that won't start.
For this study, we will ignore the question if choice is real or not.
Intention is only an excuse for doing harm if you really have no choice, and have tried hard to find more choices. Most of us use the "I had a good intention" excuse to get called good though what we do causes grave harm. Only the intender can know the truth even though she or he often does not.
We must be careful to be fair when assessing an intention by another. Yet we are pressured to put the best interpretation or spin on what anybody does and ignore any signs of recklessness. We know people will say there is evil in us if we fail to give others the benefit of the doubt. They say we want to see in others the evil that is actually in us. This can have a subtle bullying effect.
There is a debate is about whether intentions are as good as we are told. Only the evidence can tell you how to evaluate an intention. You cannot read the mind of another. Often you cannot read or clearly see your own intentions. Assuming their intention is good means you are suggesting it may be bad but you decide to forget that. So there is a judgment there at the back of your mind.
So there is no direct evidence. You have to embrace indirect evidence. Also, this will be based on how you see that the number of people seeming to be genuine inside is statistically significant.
There is a bottom line. It is that no matter how awful it is if people trust nobody, the bad results of not trusting do not prove them wrong to be so suspicious. This suggests you have no right to manipulate, pressure or bully anybody to trust others as much as you do.
People will take advantage simply because of how their motives cannot be seen by others. Plus good intentions go wrong anyway. Disaster can come in their aftermath. But you never know if the person meant more of that harm than they say.
Arguing that God does his good in and through the people he made and so we should assume their intentions are good is going to get us to put down our guard too much. Faith is a threat.
Let us list the problems with giving everybody, or too many, the benefit of the doubt.
First what if the intention is bad, or as bad as it is good, and you are glorifying it or accepting it?
Second if the intention is good it is only subjectively good. That says nothing about how it may harm. A devil might want you to have good intentions for his plan to work. The road to hell really is paved with well-meaning efforts.
Third it is up to the evidence to show what kind of intention may be present and sadly only indirect evidence tells you what you should believe is there. We should be extremely cautious when something cannot offer straightforward evidence. Indirect evidence is okay but the danger is it may be interpreted wrongly.
Fourth you are seeing the intention as good for you want the praise that comes from people who think that you are too good to see the bad in anyone.
Fifth it is downright terrible if what the supposedly good intention is doing is costing innocent people a lot of suffering. That covers God's intention too. If God is hurting people, for he does not care or is spiteful, then we need to know and more importantly they need to know.
Sixth, you do not want to encourage or be a part of the universal human weakness which sees good intention where there is no intention, a bad intention or an indifferent one. If you make that mistake you become part of the reason why people disguise bad or semi-good intentions as good ones.
Seventh, free will if real may be still inactive or as good as. Eyesight when your lids are glued shut permanently is real but as good as inactive. So sensing you can see though all you have is blackness remains a valid experience. If this is all you know, you will feel there is something free about seeing only blackness. The feeling is subjective and is lying to you. When the sense of freedom which is so basic can be lying to you, how much easier is it for you to see your good intentions as good even if they are not? To put it simply, freedom is a problem as regards perception so how do you know you are free to have a proper good intention? We are more focused on the good intentions of others rather than ourselves. I do not live and cannot live as an island. So it is alarming that if I question my own good intentions, I know even less about those of others.
Eighth, you want to believe your intention is good or better than an alternative. Why? For it self-rewards. You get a glow. You feel something moving inside reaching for the self-reward. Which is why your intention is still very much about you even if no glow comes for some reason. In many this glow fix progresses until eventually they don't care what harm they do with "good" intentions as long as they feel and/or think they meant well enough. Altruism is a myth propagated by Jesus and Kant and others. Another glow appears too. You want your intention to be good or great even if is bad or just okay and mediocre. Why? Because you don't want to feel that others rarely have good intentions for you. So if you are wonderful in your intent, that makes it easy to imagine that others are like you. Thinking everybody else does not care or care much is too scary and threatens your need for relationships and safety. All that tells us good intentions are less good than you want to think and are trouble for they get weaker over time.
Ninth, we assume our free will, that we think we have, is a great thing and that God is right to keep out of it if we decide to do grave harm. We think that good will rise out of the evil we do. That is the real reason why we think it is so amazing and we feel that even when we are bad in time it will be known that are not that bad.
Tenth, our good intentions are put into a manufactured framework where we over-simplify a lot. Every action is a ripple in the pond. We will never see all the results or identify them. Our real intention is to do something and hope that it is good.
Objection: Saying that everything is very complex risks us arguing that the evil we see or think we see is part of a bigger picture and one that is for the best. The answer is that we know from evidence and experience that few things really are that complex.
Reply: Heads of State love this lying argument. They use it as an excuse to wage war with huge loss of life. If you only look at a few goals and don't want to see any more, the war will go badly wrong. It will drag on. It will lead to too much loss of life. And you can set some goals in the first week of war but next week it will be a new crop of goals to consider. And while we hold that a nation should only go to war to defend itself against a nation that has already started the war against it, such considerations get thin if the enemy is piling up nuclear weapons. Most would declare that a pre-emptive strike is needed to avoid their nation perishing under a mushroom cloud.
The objection only impresses people who select problems and answers that they think they can handle. It is not about their convenience. And if they think it is, it is no wonder we find that the absence of war is not the same thing as peace. Their aggression and prejudice are thriving as in a cold war.
Conclusion
To impute good intention to another's actions may seem virtuous, but it often functions as a lazy shortcut—an escape from the discomfort of doubt, the burden of discernment, and the unsettling possibility that harm can come from even the most sincere motives. Intention is too often romanticized, treated as morally redeeming when it may in fact be vague, misdirected, or self-serving. We forget that the feeling of freedom is not proof of its reality, just as the glow of good intention does not prove moral value.
We cannot see into the minds of others—or fully into our own. What we call free will may be little more than complex reactions dressed in the illusion of choice. And yet we use the language of intention to judge, justify, and excuse. This is dangerous. It erodes accountability and encourages blindness to outcomes. Worse still, it opens the door to moral manipulation, where trust is demanded not because it is earned, but because skepticism is shamed.
The cost of overestimating intention is not merely theoretical—it is paid in suffering, injustice, and the persistent failure to prevent avoidable harm. If faith in good intention weakens our critical faculties and blinds us to reality, then it becomes not a virtue but a vice. We owe it to ourselves, and especially to the vulnerable, to stop glorifying intention and start respecting evidence—even when it tells us what we’d rather not hear.