Laughing, while an injured person is nearby, may naturally be felt as an insult by the injured. This, even though the laughter may not be meant to be ill-intentioned. This is true whether the injury is like hunger, or some human weakness, or social weakness.
Is the laughter an injury? Does the injured man have cause for complaint?
The question is about the meaning of our actions. This may not be clear, and possibly may not even be fully determined. – That is, the dynamics I’m describing may be part of the dynamics through which the meaning of certain actions is determined. It is meant to reveal part of the social (as opposed to private) nature of such determination.
The laughing man may want to resist. He may want to insist on the ownership of his own actions. He may say: “I did not intend to insult, but to laugh.” The injured man may want to say: “this is not a laughing matter”; Meaning: there is no (logical) space for laughing here. Whatever you do here will not be laughing (just as whatever you do to a chair may not be insulting it). – A tension between sense of humor and moral sensibility; or between lack of sense of humor and lack of moral sensibility.
What you do may come apart from what you mean to do—may attain meaning beyond what you expected. You may need to chase what you do sometimes.
In any case, blame and praise are naturally accorded for what you do, not for what you mean to do. The coming apart of what you do from what you mean to do is a kind of lack of self-knowledge. Knowing yourself is, partly, the ability to possess your own actions—to do what you mean. And insofar as what we do can come apart from what we mean to do, we may be blamed for lack of self-knowledge.
Follow-up: Intentions and consequences
Intentions come before the action and consequences come after. But the “before” and the “after” here indicate different kinds of spaces: consequences are never part of the action; they are by definition external. Intentions are by definition internal. And this is indicated by the fact that when intention and action come apart, we are in limbo with regard to the action: The action is not an action in the full sense of the term; questions about the concept action open.