Are intentions of equal importance to actions? For example, if I were to be deliberately harmed by another who claimed they had no good reason for their action, or was equally harmed by someone who claimed to hate me because I am a woman why could the latter be more harshly punished, if deemed a hate crime, than the former?

There are some interesting and deep questions here about the relevance of motives to duty, blame, and punishment. For starters, we might want to distinguish the legal question of the relevance of motives to punishment from the moral question about their relevance to duty and blame. We should also distinguish the descriptive question about how the law actually treats these issues and the normative question about how it should treat these issues. As a descriptive matter, there are two ways the criminal law can acknowledge the relevance of motive. It can make motive an ingredient in the offense, or it can treat motive as relevant as a mitigator or aggravator at sentencing. For instance, some crimes make a motive an ingredient in the offense, as when murder is understood, at common law, as killing with malice aforethought. In this way, one might define separate crimes that are like other crimes but involve the additional element of a bad motive. This is what is done with hate crimes. Alternatively,...