Indifference and moral responsibility
The best blog on the Internet posts the curious result of a study. The thought experiment is that there are two scenarios: one where a chairman proceeds with a program despite its harm to the environment, the other where he proceeds with a program that happens to help the environment. In both cases, the chairman does not care about the effect on the environment. It is supposed to be surprising that more people blamed the chairman in the first case than praised him in the second case. Respondents think he harmed the environment “intentionally” in the first case, but didn’t help it “intentionally” in the second.
Joshua Knobe is quoted:
“It seems very puzzling that all we changed was this one word, just changing the word harm to help, and yet we’re now having completely different judgments about whether what he did was intentional or unintentional. Yet it seems like it’s only the moral status of what he did that is changing. … Somehow the moral judgments people are making are affecting their intuitions about something like how the mind works.”
I don’t think this is quite right. There is an apparent substantive moral difference between the two cases. But first, let’s distinguish three morally relevant elements in the scenario. Two elements are each of the effects on the environment – one deleterious, the other beneficial. A third element in the scenario is the attitude of the chairman, which remains the same in both cases. In both cases we could say the chairman is blameworthy in being indifferent to an important effect of his actions. Note that in both scenarios he is willing to harm the environment for company profit.
However, there is another important aspect of the two scenarios. Generally, it is more blameworthy to consciously act immorally than it is praiseworthy to consciously act morally. No one praises a man for not being a rapist, but we do blame a man for being a rapist.
So I think it is this distinction that is at work in the study, which is a good distinction. There is no reason to think, as does Knobe, that respondents are changing their minds about whether an action is “intentional.” What has happened is that the respondents have just been tricked by the curious addition that the chairman is indifferent to the effects of his actions, which makes his character just as evil in both cases. But this is hard for a non-philosopher respondent to pick out, since the scenarios draw special attention to the results of the chairman’s actions. It is relatively trivial that if someone does something evil to achieve an end, they are blameworthy for that action. Whether or not they’ve done the evil “intentionally” is somewhat ambiguous – it does us no good to give people a messy thought experiment. It is also trivial that if I cure cancer incidentally in the process of playing a video game for pleasure, I’m not any more praiseworthy than someone who played the game without curing cancer.
The response seems to me to be reflecting an accurate intuition about this moral difference, not some deep contradiction in folk metaphysics or psychology of intention.
So, like much experimental philosophy, this study teaches us only something very trivial: some thought experiments have subtleties, which you have to think about for more than a second.
UPDATE: Notice that the percentages actually are quite consistent. They are roughly 80% that think he intentionally did something bad in the first case, and 20% that think he did something good in the second. Probably the same 80% voted “no” in the second case, because they recognize, correctly, that the chairman’s apathy with respect to doing evil makes him bad in both cases, and that we are more blameworthy for bad we knowingly do incidentally than we are praiseworthy for good we knowingly do incidentally. This has nothing to do with people’s intuitions about “how the mind works.”
I find the experiment philosophy of Josh Knobe quite tiresome. Some scattered thoughts:
* We have known since the time of Socrates that the common man holds contradictory definitions for common concepts. Why is this result somehow more interesting if it is backed up with surveys of the sort made by a Psych 201 class as tested on volunteers from a Psych 101 class? It is good to get the perspective of non-professional philosophers on certain questions, but the survey is not the proper means of evaluating the input we receive from non-professionals. In the limit, X-Phi ends up making absurd proclamations about how they have found the roots of morality and settled our metaethical disputes because in a survey 8 out of 10 four-year olds thought it unfair to steal the cookies when Mom was out of the room. (I wish that was a greater exaggeration than it is.)
* This particular experiment clearly turns on the word “intentional.” What does that word mean? For a philosopher in psychology of mind or metaphysics, it means “intending an object.” For an epistemologist, it means “aware of” and then a debate ensues about whether awareness must conscious or can be unconscious. For a moral philosopher, it means “with an awareness that brings moral culpability.” The public is clearly interested in the last definition, because there’s no point in asking if the chairman intended in the sense of having an object of awareness. Of course the chairman had an object of awareness! That’s part of the set up of the problem! Why would you possibly ask someone about this? Is it a reading comprehension test? On this basis, the lay person decides that what the question must mean is something like, “Is the chairman blameworthy in the bad case? Praiseworthy in the good case?” As you note, the answers to these questions clearly diverge, and there is nothing self-contradictory in their convergence unless you confuse the morally relevant kind of intending with merely holding an object of thought. It should be apparent to anyone who thinks about the question that it takes more to trigger praise than it does to trigger blame. If you then call this triggering “acting intentionally” you can pretend to catch a contradiction.
* Knobe assumes (incorrectly) that he himself is in a position to judge to whether the common person has contradictory impulses in this case, and he then judges that the common person is somehow “irrational.” If Knobe believes the common person to be helplessly irrational then he ought to be expending considerable effort to ensure that his own analyses are rational. However, based on what I have seen of his talks about his work, he spends no effort in ensuring that he is in a position of greater rationality than the common person. If he did, then the second point ought to have occurred to him, as it did to you. As he has not spent this effort, he is no greater position to know than his survey victims.
* Finally, we must ask, why call this activity philosophy? I certainly have no problem with philosophers doing experiments or getting involved with the world in general. But these “experiments” are pure scientism. The core assumption seems to be that the survey can do our thinking for us. This is absurd. To call yourself a philosopher, you must love wisdom. To show your love of wisdom, you must think about problems at a deeper (“meta”) level. Knobe has not done this. Frankly, these results would be dull if they came from a psychology student, but it would excusable, because her profession has not taught her the importance of reflexive thinking, etc. But this is inexcusable in someone who wants to call himself a philosopher. To be an experimental philosopher should mean being a good philosopher who also does experiments, not a poor experimenter and a poor philosopher.