Against intent
Agency rules, intentionality drools
I work as a referee for a local youth soccer league.
Because the kids are little and their parents want us to coddle them, the rules for calling a handball are quite generous:
Play is whistled stopped [sic] when the ball is deliberately handled by a player other than the keeper. Unintentional touching of the ball should not be whistled and play should continue. It is at the referee's discretion as to if a hand ball [sic] is deliberate or unintentional.
(Since ‘deliberate’ is juxtaposed with ‘unintentional’, I take it to mean exactly ‘intentional’.)
Most players are somewhat poorly coordinated, and at least a little afraid of the ball, so there are lots of instances where my discretion is called upon.
I’ll pose to you some example scenarios from my most recent day of officiating:
Scenario 1
Alan is standing around, paying little attention to the game. His hand is hanging down by his side. Brian kicks the ball at Alan: it ricochets of his hip, grazes his forearm, then bounces away to the other team.
Do you call a handball?
Scenario 2
Claire is making a run past the defenders. (There’s no offside rule for this age group). Doris lobs a pass over the other team to Claire, who tries to knock it down with her chest, but misses slightly, so the ball bounces limply off her upper arm instead. She quickly regains control of it and scores.
Is that a handball?
Scenario 3
Emma is defending inside the penalty area. Fran blasts a hard shot at goal over Emma, and Emma instinctively, subconsciously raises her arms above her head and knocks the ball down.
Should you award Fran a penalty kick?
I chose not to blow my whistle for either Scenario 1 or 2, but did call for a penalty in Scenario 3. The coach for the offending team was upset, and he called out to me in protest, “Isn’t it not supposed to be called if it’s an accident?”
I called back, “It wasn’t an accident! She raised her arm.”
“But she’s eight years old!” he protested.
I think I know what he was trying to get at: Emma was too young, too new to the game, to be breaking the rules strategically. And if she didn’t have strategic intent in breaking the rules—she couldn’t really have intended to at all.
In the moment, all I could think to shout back at him was, “There’s a difference between conscious and intentional!”
He seemed dissatisfied with that explanation, and I am too.
But it does gesture at the coach’s confusion: he was under the impression that an eight-year-old’s split-second instincts are determined outside her will—she can’t control her choice. And if she didn’t make a strategic choice to slap the ball out of the air, he figured that it couldn’t really be intentional.
Of course, as a good probablistic determinist, I think everyone’s split-second instincts are determined outside their will. All of their conscious (illusions of) choices are!
So we can’t draw some special age- or development-based line for this situation. When Emma reached up to block the ball, it was different from Scenarios 1 in that she physically moved her hand to where the ball was, as opposed to the ball bonking Alan where he stood. That’s it! Her intent to handle the ball illegally consisted of nothing more than the physical consequence of an instinct she had no control over.
Even though Emma had no more ability to stop her hands from rising above her head than Alan had to stop the ball from brushing his forearm, sufficient ‘intent’ existed for a foul to be called. Just by virtue of the physical reality of the situation: she moved to the ball, not it to her.
And this is what I was trying to express to the coach: even if Emma’s brain didn’t form the thought, “I should reach up and block this ball so it doesn’t go into the goal,” she did reach up and block the ball. It was an intentional handball in the sense that it was her movement caused the illegal contact—even if it wasn’t intentionally intentional.
But what does that leave of intent?
If it can only be determined by its physical impact, does intent separately exist?
Strictly, no. Intent is incoherent. It’s obviously predicated on will, so when we reject will, we must reject intent.
Still, I called a handball! I call them all the time! (I cannot emphasize enough how uncoordinated and foolish all these kids are…) How can this dissonance be?!
In the real world, we actually consider agency, not intent.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity.
Standard theories of agency (indeed, the Standard Theory of Agency) tend to include both intentional and unintentional acts on the part of an agent. Plenty of philosophers have plenty of disagreements about all this—“some have argued that this view altogether fails to capture agency, because it reduces actions to mere happenings”—but we get to take a shortcut out.
All acts are unintentional acts! Of course this view “reduces actions to mere happenings”—actions are mere happenings!
But these mere happenings are differentiated from all the other mere happenings happening by their source: an agent. “A being with the capacity to act.”
A soccer ball cannot be an agent—so when it hits Alan’s hand, that really is a non-agentic ‘mere happening’. But when Emma’s hand reaches out and hits the ball, we have agency, because Emma is an agent!
I’ve failed to justify that last statement, though: that Emma is an agent.
If she’s subject to the same indifferent cosmic forces as the soccer ball, what gives her agency but not it?
My answer: consciousness!
Emma’s thoughts can think about each other, she has an experience of the world—it’s like something to be Emma. This generates agency. No one has the capacity to act with total free will. What agency really means is the capacity to act and observe oneself acting or capacity to act and experience one’s own actions.
After Emma raised her arms to block the ball, she looked at me sheepishly and hung her head. She knew that she had done something (and that it had been wrong). This is a necessary condition for an agentic foul, if not a strictly intentional one.
Interestingly, just about any time a player touches the ball with their hand (even if it really is accidental), they look at me sheepishly and hang their head. Some even try to hide the offending hand behind their back (no doubt, hoping that act will propagate back in time so they won’t have hit the ball in the first place).
So I don’t think awareness of the act is a sufficient condition for agency. The indiscriminate guilt reflex means that even when no action was actually taken (like in Scenarios 1 and 2), an agent may feel responsible for the consequences. We need both the action itself and conscious recognition of that action for it to be an exercise of agency.
This isn’t a rigorous piece of philosophy, nor is it really meant to be. My definition of agency is probably flawed; even my belief in determinism could be.
But I think it’s an interesting demonstration of how the metaphysical is very directly important to the conduct of life.
Belief in determinism lets me call instinctual-but-not-strictly-intentional handballs just as much as it makes for a good party trick.1
And of course, there’s a self-improvement-y lesson to be found too. Don’t worry too much about what you do or don’t mean to do. Worry about the consequences: consequences you’ll be forced to observe, to experience, to remember.
So, hey, make a donation today!
Agh, totally unrelated anecdote time: I was at a misleadingly-advertised and generally-disappointing school event recently, and overheard (eavesdropped on) a conversation between two people I don’t like:
A: [doing obnoxious fun and cool things]
B: “Oh man, A, you should come to a real party sometime. I feel like you’d just be the life of it!”
I cannot express to you how much hearing that hurt me. ‘Cringe’ doesn’t begin to describe it. My soul melted. I cursed God and the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons for creating a language in which those sentences could be spoken. I don’t know that I’ll ever recover.