INTENTION, Allwin Mathew T.

Intention has seemed to be crucial ingredient in an account of action. The adverb 'intentionally' may be put to work in marking out a class of actions and the verb 'intend' introduces a state of mind of a person's intending to do something, which may be present even where the person does not actually do the thing, but which is directed towards action.

Some philosophers have distinguished between intentions directed at particular pieces of present behaviour and intentions directed a future action. The former sort, called 'act related', may be thought to be present wherever something said to be the things of which we have an experience in acting, so that they may be used to account for the distinctive phenomenology of agency. It is the latter sort, the 'future directed', with which accounts of intention are usually primarily concerned.

One aim of intention is to connect the concept with related ones, so as to see how a person's intending to do some features in practical deliberation and in action. An account may start from the question whether intention can be reduced to desire and belief. Like desire intention moves people to action. But where as you may desire what you think is impossible of attainment. Like belief, intention sets constraints on what is done. But intentions, unlike belief, are not straight forwardly evaluable as true or false. An account of what it is for one intention to be consistent with another is different from an account of what it is for one belief to be consistent with another. Intention it seems, must be treated neither as an affective state like desire, nor as a cognitive one like belief, but as a distinctively practical state, subject to its 'rationality requirements'.

Although intention is situated at the level of knowledge, it has ethical dimension. Sometimes we aware about our intentions of our deeds and sometimes may not be. The question is that does our intention promote a moral action? We, human beings always try to look with our own part by avoiding the positions of our community members. So our intentions sometimes make hurt on others. So we should aware about our intention before we start to do something.  Sometimes our intentions may be good but it provides a bad result and sometimes opposite thing also takes place. But how can we distinguish whether our intention is good or bad. It is only through our moral conscience.