Can Unintended Side Effects Be Intentional? Resolving a Controversy Over Intentionality and Morality

Abstract

Can an event's blameworthiness distort whether people see it as intentional? In controversial recent studies, people judged a behavior's negative side effect intentional even though the agent allegedly had no desire for it to occur. Such a judgment contradicts the standard assumption that desire is a necessary condition of intentionality, and it raises concerns about assessments of intentionality in legal settings. Six studies examined whether blameworthy events distort intentionality judgments. Studies 1 through 4 show that, counter to recent claims, intentionality judgments are systematically guided by variations in the agent's desire, for moral and nonmoral actions alike. Studies 5 and 6 show that a behavior's negative side effects are rarely seen as intentional once people are allowed to choose from multiple descriptions of the behavior. Specifically, people distinguish between "knowingly" and "intentionally" bringing about a side effect, even for immoral actions. These studies suggest that intentionality judgments are unaffected by a behavior's blameworthiness.

Variations in judgments of intentional action and moral evaluation across eight cultures

“…Finally, we do not believe that potential cultural differences in understanding of intentional action can fully explain our results. The classic side-effect effect is observed across a wide array of theory of mind concepts, including several variants of intent and belief (McCann, 2005;Beebe & Buckwalter, 2010;Guglielmo & Malle, 2010). To our knowledge, none of these articulations of desire or belief states evoke the inversion of the side-effect effect noted here.…”

“…This asymmetry in intentional action attributions has been replicated with other scenarios (Knobe, 2003b;Knobe & Mendlow, 2004;Mallon, 2008;Nadelhoffer, 2004aNadelhoffer, , 2006Shepard & Wolff, 2013;Uttich & Lombrozo, 2010;Wright & Bengson, 2009), with children as young as four years (Lesle, Knobe, & Cohen, 2006), with participants who suffer from deficits in emotional processing due to lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Young, Cushman, Adolphs, & Hauser, 2006), and, for at least some versions of the scenarios, with adults with high functioning autism or Asperger's (Zalla & Leboyer, 2011;Zalla, Machery, & Leboyer, 2010). The asymmetry has also been reported with word changes in the original script introducing varying concepts such as intention and intending (McCann, 2005), deciding, being in favor of, advocating for (Pettit & Knobe, 2009), knowledge (Beebe & Buckwalter, 2010), belief (Beebe, 2013;Tannenbaum, Ditto, & Pizarro, 2007), awareness (Tannenbaum et al, 2007) remembering (Alfano, Beebe, & Robinson, 2012), and desire (Guglielmo & Malle, 2010;Tannenbaum et al, 2007).…”

Mens rea ascription, expertise and outcome effects: Professional judges surveyed

“…Instead, critics of this view argue, differently valenced side-effects engender asymmetric attributions of outcome-related desires (Guglielmo & Malle, 2010), beliefs (Alfano, Beebe, & Robinson, 2012), perceived norm-violations (Alfano et al, 2012; deeply held values and principles (Sripada, 2010(Sripada, , 2012Sripada & Konrath, 2011), or attention paid to the possible consequences (Scaife & Webber, 2013). The difference in ascriptions of this sort is, in turn, taken to explain the asymmetric ascription of intentionality.…”

Causal Conceptions in Social Explanation and Moral Evaluation

“…To unpack these factors, one would need a prohibitively large experimental design, and even this would not solve the inherent asymmetries in what it means, for example, to not care about helping versus harming the environment. Perhaps an even more problematic aspect of this CEO story is that in a free response format, very few participants characterize the CEO's behavior as intentional regardless of the peripheral outcomes it achieves (Guglielmo & Malle, 2010).…”