Topics Ethics

Question Can you be punished for planning a crime? Say your planned to do forgery and you called up friend who has the 'talent.' The friend say she wouldn't do it. Another person knew about you planning to forge and tells the school authorities. Does the school authority have the right to impose punishment on you for contemplating to do forgery? When you think evil things such as stealing does that already make you immoral? What do philosophers say about planning to do evil?

Accepted:
September 26, 2007

Comments

Sometime you can be punished for planning a crime: if it's a case of criminal conspiracy. That's an agreement with at least one other person to commit a crime. Just what the standard of proof might be is a question that I'd have to leave to a lawyer, but conspiracy has long been illegal.

If a single person plans to commit a crime, this wouldn't count as criminal conspiracy. One reason for the difference, perhaps, is that people can't be prosecuted for their thoughts, and proving that I really planned to do something wrong, rather than merely fantasized about it, would be hard. When you plan together with someone else, however, you've gone past the stage of merely thinking.

The school case is complicated; schools are allowed to discipline students for conduct that isn't criminal. Best to ask someone who knows the relevant law. But I think your underlying question wasn't legal.

You asked if thinking evil thoughts makes a person evil, and you asked about planning to do evil things. I'd make a distinction. Most of us are tempted to do wrong from time to time. If someone has a momentary impulse to steal a book from the bookstore, but recognizes it as wrong and resists the temptation, it would be odd to call them evil. Being tempted isn't the same as forming an intention. But if you plan to rob the bookstore (or worse), you haven't just been tempted to do wrong; you've given in. You've decided to do something that you know is wrong. That doesn't mean the law should get involved, but we're still entitled to a moral judgment: if you've formed the intent to do something wrong, you're already in the wrong.

There's room for interesting conversation about how best to describe the wrong, but some philosophers have argued that fundamentally, moral judgments are about intentions. On that view, seriously intending to do evil makes you as bad, or almost as bad, as actually doing the deed. Of course, this is complicated. People's intentions don't just float free of their actions, and someone who takes steps to do evil might be said to have more serious intent than someone who merely thinks about it. But in either case, actually intending to do evil is giving in to evil, and that's a bad thing.