Why, not what

In Campbell's model, intent is not a wish or a plan. It is the mechanism by which a consciousness interacts with anything outside itself — and he puts it about as strongly as it can be put: you, at the being level, are your intent. Your intent is the essence of you that interacts with all that is not you.

Which produces the model's sharpest moral claim. Two people perform the identical kind act, and only one of them grows. His own example is helping an old lady across the road: it depends on the intent, on why they are helping her. If the intent is right, growth happens.

The official framing separates two things that usually get muddled. Will answers what — the goal. Intent answers why, and carries the motive. And the moral weight attaches to the second, not the first: it is not so important what you do, but why you do it.

There is a catch, and it is the whole difficulty. Your ego is good at hiding your real intent from you, because the fears underneath it are the last things it wants examined. So this is not a matter of introspecting once and getting an answer. It is a habit of suspicion about your own account of yourself.

One thing intent is not: a lever on the world. The material is explicit that its effect on events is bounded — shifting a one-in-a-million probability by three orders of magnitude still leaves it vanishingly unlikely. This is a moral orientation, not a wishing engine.