3:55am October 22, 2013

Intent matters.

A friend of mine, who was involved in disability and LGBT political movements, remembers the point when “Intent isn’t magic” became popularized. Many people doubtless remember that as a very liberating phrase. I remember finding similar phrases liberating before anyone came up with that one – I have a poster in my house somewhere that says “Meaning well is no excuse.” But my friend remembers it as a time when things really started to get ugly. And I think that’s important.

The point of saying things like that is that just because you meant well doesn’t mean your actions didn’t harm someone. And my friend and I would both agree that this is true.

However.

When it began becoming a really popular slogan to throw around in political arguments, it became something more than just a statement of that fact.

It became a way to say “I’m right, and you’re wrong, and you can’t even argue with me because your intent is completely irrelevant.”

And the idea that intent is completely irrelevant? Just as bad as, sometimes worse than, the idea that intent solves every problem.

And the idea that the person making accusations of harm is always right? Really dangerous. And my friend sees the invention of that phrase as a huge turning point in the ability of people making accusations to paint themselves as always right, and the accused as always wrong, and even to paint being upset by (possibly wrongful, although in this view they can never be wrongful, so the idea of wrongful accusation becomes irrelevant) accusations of wrongdoing as a sign of being wrong and of having the wrong political analysis.

I didn’t notice that point in time as much as my friend noticed it.

I think I was too busy seeing it from the other side. Thinking of all the times I’d had conversations similar to…

The one where the mother of an autistic man was publicly mourning the fact that her adult autistic son would never be a true adult, not like his brother was.

And I tried to step in and say how harmful such a statement was to autistic people. I was truly trying to avoid attacking her, or her intentions, or her feelings. I was trying to say, “Please look at the consequences of your actions, which are still consequences of your actions regardless of intent.”

She was a high-profile blogger. Higher profile than I was. She was immensely popular among other ~autism parents~. People listened to her. They took her seriously.

The idea of autistic adults as being eternal children means awful things for adults with every kind of developmental disability. Every time that idea is reinforced in people’s minds, the damage is more likely. And here are some of the forms that damage takes:

* We may be subject to guardianship, because everyone assumes there’s no possible way we could run our own lives.

* I had a shrink tell me that I would never truly be an adult, and then proceed to outline exactly how he would manipulate my parents into controlling my life in accordance with whatever his wishes were.

* We can be sterilized against our will, forced to avoid having sexual and romantic relationships, kept from marrying our lovers.

* We can be treated as if we are all heterosexual cis people who are only being corrupted by LGBT friends. And then prevented from seeing those friends.

* Other people have to authorize us to have interactions with friends and lovers.

* We are subject to levels of surveillance that would be considered invasion of privacy in anyone but a child.

* We can have someone else making all of our medical decisions even when we are fully competent to do so. This often results in us dying young because our guardians see no reason for our lives to be saved in dire situations.

* We can be told that we should not get life-saving medical treatment, and instead should go die in hospice or something, because we would supposedly be unable to handle the complex treatment regimens associated with things like transplants.

* We can be threatened with having life-saving or life-extending medical equipment taken away from us on the grounds that we are like children who can’t take care of it because we’d “play with it and break it”. (I get this all the time with my feeding tube.)

* We can be prevented from having children ourselves, or raising them. I know of people right in my town who gave birth only to have their children whisked away and never seen them again.

And none of these effects are changed, regardless of the intent of the person saying that we are like children. So I at first regarded “Intent is not magic” as something you could say at times like this. Although I don’t think I used that exact phrase very often.

I actually got into a long argument with the mother in question, because she thought I was attacking her on a personal level, and I was trying to tell her that her words were harmful no matter how she meant them and that she was doing actual harm to her son, to me, and to everyone who shared labels with us. I was actually trying to use the intent thing to soften the blow, but it backfired and I got flamed by all her close friends online, with her not lifting a finger to defend me, because all they saw me as doing was “attacking a poor defenseless parent who was only stating her honest feelings”. They told me I was making her the “bad guy”.

So I made a long post about how I didn’t even see the world as good guys and bad guys. I talked about how I myself have made statements about my brother not really being older than me (I was repeating what my parents had said about him) by virtue of his disabilities, and that without someone saying “EXCUSE ME!?!?!!” and correcting me very forcefully, I’d never have even known something was wrong with what I was repeating. That this isn’t about “such and such is a bad person”, it’s more about “saying this thing harms people whether you mean to or not”.

But “Intent isn’t magic” rapidly went beyond just situations like that one, where you can clearly see that intent doesn’t change the outcome.

It rapidly became used to actually attack people. In situations where they really were facing accusations where intent actually mattered, a lot. In situations where the accusations rapidly became personal attacks, personal attacks that the “rules of the game” said they weren’t even allowed to defend themselves against. In fact defending themselves made them even worse people. And there really was a “you’re a bad person” vibe to the whole thing, it wasn’t just “you’ve done something wrong” anymore. And there was this whole set of social rules set up such that the person making the accusation was always right and the person being accused was always wrong, and there was nothing the person being accused could possibly do to change the situation.

And those situations were a real mix. Because sometimes the accusers were right, but sometimes they were wrong. And sometimes intent mattered in the situation, but sometimes it didn’t. And sometimes it was people really trying to make the world a better place, but other times it was just a way to cyberbully in increasingly intense and damaging ways while being seen as the good guy.

And that’s why my friend sees “Intent is not magic” as the beginning of something ugly. And I couldn’t see it at the time… but looking back, I completely agree. There are many situations that phrase is used for, where intent actually matters, a lot. And there are many situations that phrase is used for, where instead of saying “You’ve said something that could harm people,” people are saying “You’re an awful person and nothing could ever redeem you.” Or assorted variations on that. And when you’re assessing a person's actual personal character, then what they’re intending to do matters just as much as the effects of what they’ve done. Even in the situation I described above, there’s a big difference between a mother who says her son isn’t an adult because she’s got a lot of weird unresolved thoughts and feelings around the idea of developmental disability and adulthood that might not be the best… and a mother who says her son isn’t an adult because she knows perfectly well what the effects of her statements are, and she wants to control him as much as possible and make sure that others like him are subject to unethical levels of control from their parents and guardians. And there are several other possibilities as well, each in a position where intent has certain effects regardless of what the outcome is, just as outcome has certain effects regardless of what the intent is.

Intent is complicated. There’s a lot of different ethical layers at work when talking about intent and consequences and responsibility. But pretending that intent doesn’t matter at all, only sets us up for another form of irresponsibility, which makes it easier for, among other things, certain forms of cyberbullying to take place unremarked upon.

A world without intent mattering is just as fucked up as a world without the outcome of your actions mattering. You have to have both. And which amount each one matters, and how they matter, depends on the situation.

Notes: