I think the takeaway line is, “So every year, American taxpayers pay 70 million dollars to have the opportunity to lose a billion dollars in productivity costs.” This fellow claims that he nickels are worse than pennies, but he fails to note that nickels fulfill one of his criteria for usefulness, i.e. they are not excluded as acceptable currency in certain common exchanges, such as (some) vending machines and parking meters.

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.”

During a conclave with reporters, the NYT reports, the Pope gave a “direct condemnation” of “the sexual abuse crisis.” Playing its own Devil’s Advocate, the article immediately refutes itself, showing how the Pope issued nothing but non-sequitur. Raising the Christian persecution complex to new institutional levels, Ratzinger portrayed “the church” as a victim. Indeed, the Church is attacked “not only from outside,” but also from inside. That is to say, the anti-Catholic media and the clergy who molest children share a common victim: “the church.” Ratzinger thinks the church must “relearn” “conversion, prayer, penance.”

What is so obnoxious about these statements is that they amount to changing the subject. The object of public outrage is divided into a couple of areas: (1) the disturbingly frequent occurrence of child molestation and rape even at very high levels and (2) the cover-ups, transfers, and delays issued in response to the crimes when they were first brought to supposed spiritual authorities, including Ratzinger, now the “Vicar of Christ on Earth.” Will he ever address those topics with anything other than obscurantist generality? Notice that everything he says about this scandal would be true without it. When does the Church not need to relearn “conversion, prayer, penance”? Such fluffy theological language always applies. When is there not sin in the Church? Etc.

There are of course extra theological embarrassments, e.g. that Ratzinger is Pope partly due to getting some of the child rapist vote. In general, claims that the Catholic Church makes for itself and its Pope are so inflated that perhaps this scandal is what will put wavering Catholics over the edge. But lucky for Catholicism, much of its inflated membership is constituted by cultural Catholics, Catholics who show up once or twice a year, and so on.

I will end by stating the morally obvious: There are indeed identifiable victims; they are children who have been molested, raped, and psychologically damaged for the rest of their lives by Catholic clergy, including at the highest levels. Victim status actually can be shared by some outside parties – namely, the parents of the children. The Catholic institutions of authority and humans who populate them are the opposite of victims. Some of them are direct molesters and rapists, others are culpable for protecting and advocating for molesters and rapists (for the good of the “church”), others are culpable for looking the other way, others were ignorant of the whole affair, and the last group includes those who tried and failed to do something about the issue. Ratzinger, an accomplishment of whose is forgiving child rape (on behalf of …? did someone molest the church?), now says that “justice” is important. Therefore, he should take everyone in the first three groups above, including himself, and submit to civil authorities in the relevant domains. This ultimate fate, common for poor offenders, for cults, etc., will not befall Catholic officials.

The issue here is not some general spiritual combat involving the church. The problem is very particular, involving identifiable individuals and events. The only broad or general implication is that these individuals and events were supported and protected within the Catholic institutional structure. But unless you think that the church and its authorities are magical, it doesn’t strictly matter that it is the church. The same issues and objections would arise for any other institution founded and sustained by humans (say, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts of America, or the United Nations). But the Catholic Church and its leadership, who are now making morally grotesque public statements with regularity, are so colossally arrogant that they can’t think of themselves in this lowly way.