Normativity in Action: How to Explain the Knobe Effect and its Relatives

Abstract

Abstract. Intuitions about intentional action have turned out to be sensitive to normative factors: most people say that an indifferent agent brings about an effect of her action intentionally when it is harmful, but unintentionally when it is beneficial. Joshua Knobe explains this asymmetry, which is known as 'the Knobe effect', in terms of the moral valence of the effect, arguing that this explanation generalizes to other asymmetries concerning notions as diverse as deciding and being free. I present an alternative explanation of the Knobe effect in terms of normative reasons. This explanation generalizes to other folk psychological notions such as deciding, but not to such notions as being free. I go on to argue against Knobe that offering a unified explanation of all the asymmetries he discusses is in fact undesirable.Frank Hindriks (f.a.hindriks@rug.nl), University of Groningen Knobe (2010a, 316) defends the view that 'moral considerations actually figure in the competencies people use to make sense of human beings and their actions'. This means that moral considerations legitimately influence attributions of folk psychological notions. His point of departure is the finding that has become known as 'the Knobe effect', which is an asymmetry in our use of the term 'intentional action'. Knobe discovered it when he ran his seminal chairman experiment. Consider a chairman of a company who sets out to implement a profitmaximizing business strategy. As it turns out, the strategy has an unintended effect on the environment. The chairman, however, disavows any interest in the environment.In the help condition of the experiment, the effect on the environment is beneficial; in the harm condition the side effect is harmful. Most people (82%) say that the chairman harms the environment intentionally, even though only a minority (23%) say that he helps the environment intentionally (Knobe 2003a). Apparently it makes a difference to our intentionality attributions whether an effect has moral significance or not, and whether its moral significance is positive or negative. Knobe's Unifying Competence Theory: Moral ValenceMany commentators regard the Knobe effect as surprising or puzzling, and many believe that it is a bias in our attributions of intentionality. Nadelhoffer (2004bNadelhoffer ( , 2004cNadelhoffer ( , 2005Nadelhoffer ( , 2006a, Nado (2008) are among those who regard the effect as a bias. 5 so they argue. Many of them also believe that the fact that people blame the chairman for harming the environment leads them to say that he harmed the environment intentionally. 4 As they are not inclined to praise the chairman for helping the environment, people are not motivated to impute intentionality to him. Knobe (2010) refers to this as 'the Motivational Bias Hypothesis'. 5 He criticizes this approach, arguing that no positive evidence for this hypothesis has been produced (ibid., 323). 6It is important to realize, however, that all those who regard the Knobe effect as puzzling have reason to embrace a bias ex...

“The Group Knobe Effect”: evidence that people intuitively attribute agency and responsibility to groups

“…On the one hand, the correlation is consistent with Knobe's original conjecture that the asymmetry of intention-ascriptions is driven by the asymmetry of blameworthiness/praiseworthiness ascriptions. On the other hand, there also exist explanations of the Knobe Effect which, while predicting a correlation, reject the idea that the asymmetry in intentionality judgments is driven by the blame/ praise asymmetry (Hindriks 2014). What our data do establish, however, is that the same evaluative processes are at work for group agents as for individual agents.…”

Intentional action and the frame-of-mind argument: new experimental challenges to Hindriks

“…As stated by Hindriks (2014), one way to compare evaluative accounts of the Knobe Effect (such as Knobe's) and internalizing accounts (such as NoRIA) is to find a pair of cases in which participants' judgments and the agent's judgments about what counts as a reason not to act are diametrically opposed.…”

“…In a series of paper, Hindriks (2008Hindriks ( , 2011Hindriks ( , 2014 has developed a complete account of intentional action, which he dubs the 'Normative Reason account of Intentional Action' (NoRIA). In its first appearance (Hindriks 2008), this account also failed to account for the Terrorist case.…”

“…In a recent paper, Frank Hindriks (2014) gives us one reason to reject evaluative accounts of the Knobe Effect. According to Hindriks (2014, 58), it is "a core commitment in our understanding of intentional action is that acting intentionally is acting with a certain frame of mind" and "as a first approximation, this means that to characterize a behaviour as an intentional action is a matter of attributing intentional attitudes to the agent."…”

“…However, this claim goes directly against a key conceptual intuition about intentional action -the 'frame-of-mind condition', according to which judgments about intentional action are about the agent's frameof-mind and not about the moral value of his action. To preserve this intuition, Hindriks (2008Hindriks ( , 2014 has proposed an alternate account of the Knobe Effect. According to his 'Normative Reason account of Intentional Action' (NoRIA), a side-effect counts as intentional only when the agent thought it constituted a normative reason not to act but did not care.…”