In the current paper, we present and discuss a series of experiments in which we investigated people's willingness to ascribe intentions, as well as blame and praise, to groups. The experiments draw upon the so-called "Knobe Effect". Knobe [2003. "Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language." Analysis 63: [190][191][192][193][194] found that the positiveness or negativeness of side-effects of actions influences people's assessment of whether those side-effects were brought about intentionally, and also that people are more willing to assign blame for negative side-effects of actions than they are to assign praise for positive side-effect of actions. Building upon this research, we found evidence that the positiveness or negativeness of side-effects of group actions influences people's willingness to attribute intentions to groups (Experiment 1a), and that people are more willing to assign blame to groups for negative side-effects of actions than they are to assign praise to groups for positive side-effects of actions (Experiment 1b). We also found evidence (Experiments 2a, 2b, 3 and 4) that the "Group Knobe Effect" persists even when intentions and blame/ praise are attributed to groups non-distributively, indicating that people tend not to think of group intentions and group blame/praise in distributive terms. We conclude that the folk are collectivist about group intentions, and also about the blameworthiness and praiseworthiness of groups.

It is sometimes said that certain hard moral choices constitute tragic moral dilemmas in which no available course of action is justifiable, and so the agent is blameworthy whatever she chooses. This paper criticizes a certain approach to the debate about moral dilemmas and considers the metaethical implications of the criticisms. The approach in question has been taken by many advocates as well as opponents of moral dilemmas who believe that analyzing the emotional response of the agent is the key to the debate about moral dilemmas. The metaethical position this approach is most naturally associated with is sentimentalism. Sentimentalists claim that evaluation, and in particular moral evaluation, crucially depends on human sentiment. This paper is not concerned with the question whether moral dilemmas exist, but rather with emotion-based arguments used on both sides of the debate. The first aim of the paper is to show that emotion-based arguments by friends or foes of moral dilemmas cannot garner support from sentimentalism. The second aim is to show that this constitutes a serious problem for sentimentalism.

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