Harmful Thoughts

Private thoughts can lead to public harms in a variety of ways. They can do so by motivating those who harbor them to perform harmful acts, by motivating their own hurtful or destructive communication, and by being unintentionally disclosed by persons who don’t mean to communicate them. In addition, although mind-reading is presently impossible, that may change in the future, and if it does, it will be a further source of mischief. The questions that this chapter addresses are, first, whether a thought’s actually causing harm in one of these ways can make its previous occurrence morally wrong, and, second, whether a thought’s posing the risk of causing harm in one of these ways can make having it now morally wrong. Of these questions, the current chapter answers all versions of the first, and some versions of the second, in the negative. The remaining versions of the second question are carried over to the following chapter.