Thought for the Evening: Vicarious Intention
There are clearly situations in which people have vicarious intention, i.e., intention on behalf of another. An obvious example is parenting, which often involves intending on behalf of one's child; various kinds of representation and mediated agency are more complicated forms. This is not something for which we have any obvious theory. There are a few things that need to be considered, however.
(1) Vicarious intention is distinct from intention on one's own behalf with another in view. Most of our social intentions (including in situations that can involve vicarious intention) involve intending for ourselves while nonetheless taking others into account. Vicarious intention requires a tighter integration of the other into one's intention.
(2) Vicarious intention is, or is typically, personative. The person vicariously intending for another is usually personating them, i.e., acting as part of their person, as their agent in personal action. This personative role has to involve a number of things:
(i) a personator
(ii) a personated
(iii) an end of personation
(iv) a deontic structure appropriate to that end
(v) a range of actions allowed by that structure that are relevant to actual situations
For instance, a parent (i) can make a decision on behalf of a child (ii) for the child's good (iii); the child's good involves a set of obligations and responsibilities that the parent must consider and that 'authorize' the parent to make and treat certain kinds of decision as if their child was the one making decision (iv). This constitues the whole panoply of power and action involved in parenting (v).
(3) The vicarious intention is the intention of both the principal intender and the one on whose behalf the principal intender intends. Given such a personative role, then the actual decision on behalf of the child is an action done with vicarious intention. Note that we should distinguish decisions on behalf of the child from decisions for the child; the latter need not be vicarious at all, and can simply be an imposition of authority. When acting in a personative role, the parent is standing in the child's place, making the child's decision.
(4) One of the contexts in which vicarious intention is found is in infant baptism. As St. Thomas puts it, the infant "can be said to intend, not by their own act of intention, since at times they struggle and cry; but by the act of those who bring them to be baptized" (ST 3.68.9 ad 1). This has all of the features noted above. Obviously we have personator (i) and personated (ii); the end of personation (iii) is the spiritual care for the child, which requires and authorizes (iv) relevant adults to take steps toward the child's salvation and spiritual health (v). The full rite makes the personator cooperative here -- it is not just the parents/sponsors but the whole Church with them that carries that is intending on behalf of the child. However, the latter introduces an aspect to this kind of vicarious intention that is not common to all forms of vicarious intention, namely, charitable communion; as Aquinas also says, the Holy Spirit "unites the whole Church together, and communicates the goods of one member to another" (ST 3.68.9 ad 2). One of the effects of this is that much more can be vicariously intended than could usually be done.
The closest analogue to this in non-grace contexts seems to be political representation. While it doesn't have the communion made possible by the virtue of charity, it does have a community, and a common good. But more than that, I think the particular aspects of common good that create the deontic structure authorizing vicarious intention are fixed by human nature. In particular, they are due to humans being political animals and therefore requiring civil society for their complete development. It is thus natural for us to form into a moral person, the civil society, and this requires that there be decision-makers making the moral person's intention, on behalf of all of the members relevantly concerned. This is rather different from that which the Church exercises specifically as a sacramental body of Christ (although the Church also has this kind), but it also, within the range of actions allowed by the end and deontic structure, allows much more to be vicariously intended than could usually be intended.
It is worth noting that infant baptism is an unusually complicated case, because the vicarious intention is layered: the parent as member of the Church, the Church as a political community, the Church as a sacramental communion. The result is that baptism of a child is an act within a family (part of the parent's educative work on behalf of the child), an act of initiation into the society of the Church, and an act of faith, hope, and love exercised on behalf of the child in the order of grace.
In any case, this is all quite rough, but one must begin somewhere.
Various Links of Note
* Matthew Minerd, Christocentrism in the French School: Revisiting Charles-Louis Gay, at "To Be a Thomist"
* Johan E. Gustafsson, A Godelian Ontological Proof with More Plausible Axiological Principles (PDF)
* Miriam Ellis discusses a previously unknown letter by J. R. R. Tolkien.
* The Vesuvius Challenge, which is scanning the burned papyri from Herculaneum, has reached a milestone: they have fully deciphered the first scroll, PHerc 1667, and have a preprint paper on it. Since the scroll was itself in not-very-good-shape, what they have is fragmentary, but enough to know that it probably discussed Stoic ideas. (They suggest that it was a Stoic work, but it could also be an Epicurean work discussing and criticizing Stoicism, or the Stoic part of a doxographical account about several philosophical schools.) And, of course, even given its fragmentary nature, its always possible we may find another partial copy of the same thing, either here or somewhere else, or that future scholarship may discover that some reference already extant may be an allusion to this work.
* David Horan's translation of the Platonic dialogues at the Foundation for Platonic Studies.
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Michael Flynn, Eifelheim
Antonio Rosmini, Certainty
Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale
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Ursula K. LeGuin, The Tombs of Atuan
Ursula K. LeGuin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion
Jim Butcher, Small Favor