A Sartrean (or new intentionalist) analysis of the fallacy of the intentional fallacy: thought, consciousness and conflicts of interests

Incorporating Sartre’s work on consciousness and adapting those dualistic elements of the literary argument over the ‘intentional fallacy’, this paper involves a critique of the new-materialist trend that typifes agency and intentionality in materialist terms. It will argue that attempts to dissolve all dualist distinctions (as, for example, posthumanists are inclined to do) are problematic when dealing with conficts of interests especially those of non-human animals. This critique applies particularly well to environmental ethics and animal ethics because ethicists and decision-makers need to be able to make moral judgments regarding cases in which the interests of creatures (conscious and nonconscious ones included) confict, and where many diferent interests need to be weighted.