Person as Scientist, Person as Moralist

Abstract

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widelyheld view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people's moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.

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

“…In general, these findings have been interpreted to suggest that our concept of intentional action, along with other theory of mind concepts, is fundamentally moral or morally driven (Knobe, 2005) and that this role is deep and pervasive (Knobe, 2005(Knobe, , 2006(Knobe, , 2010. Further support for such moral underpinnings comes from the fact that there is a pervasive asymmetry in the ratings of blame and praise (Knobe, 2003a).…”

“…For example, numerous findings report that people are much more likely to judge that bad outcomes are brought about intentionally compared to good outcomes, the socalled side-effect effect or Knobe effect (original research by Knobe, 2003aKnobe, , 2003bKnobe, , 2005Knobe, , 2006Knobe, , 2010Knobe & Mendlow, 2004; see additional studies by Cova & Naar, 2012;Cushman & Mele, 2008;Ditto, Pizarro, & Tannenbaum, 2009;Lanteri, 2012;Nadelhoffer, 2004aNadelhoffer, , 2004bNadelhoffer, , 2005Nadelhoffer, , 2006Pellizzoni, Girotto, & Surian, 2010;Sousa & Holbrook, 2010;Wright & Bengson, 2009). The side-effect effect has been claimed to reflect deep and fundamental facts about human cognition.…”

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

“…e.g. Hindriks, 2008;Knobe, 2010b;Machery, 2008;Pettit & Knobe, 2009;. According to Knobe, for instance, intentionality ascriptions are sensitive to moral concerns since the concept of intentionality itself is constitutively tied to moral features.…”

“…Nadelhoffer thus suggests to subsume the Knobe effect under Alicke's culpable control model, whose explanatory scope extends beyond side-effects. We consider this a plausible move (for discussion see Alicke (2008), Nichols and Ulatowski (2007), Cole Wright and Bengson (2009), Knobe (2010b)), and will briefly outline the culpable control model, as it can serve as a theoretical framework for our experiments. Alicke (1992Alicke ( , 2000Alicke ( , 2008 questions standard moral and legal theories of blame, according to which a ceteris paribus increase in personal control warrants an increase in blame (schematically: control → blame).…”

The means/side-effect distinction in moral cognition: A meta-analysis

“…One might try to explain the small effect size or the inconsistent data by pointing to another body of research on the side-effect effect. Participants are consistently more inclined to say that an individual brought about a side effect intentionally if the side effect is bad as opposed to good (Knobe 2010). When researchers try to study the means/byproduct effect, they generate cases in which the protagonist is generating bad outcomes, such as the death of an innocent person.…”