Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

An influential objection to the view that intentions are non-derivatively relevant to the moral permissibility of actions states that if intentions were relevant to permissibility in such a way, one would have to take them into account in decision making, which would be odd (in some morally relevant sense of ‘oddness’). The paper outlines and assesses three candidates for the oddness: that considering intentions in decision making is an unordinary practice, that it is impossible or conceptually confused, and that it (...) assigns intentions the weight as moral considerations that they intuitively do not have. The paper rejects the first two and shows that the third is probably what motivates most critics of the relevance of intentions who raise this objection. If this is correct, the objection is a non-starter as it assumes what it has to prove. Towards the end, it is argued that the objection does not serve as a plausible error theory either. (shrink)