The importance of epistemic intentions in ascription of responsibility
Katarina M. Kovacevic,
Francesca Bonalumi,
Christophe Heintz
Abstract:We investigate how people ascribe responsibility to an agent who caused a bad outcome but did not know he would. The psychological processes for making such judgments, we argue, involve finding a counterfactual in which some minimally benevolent intention initiates a course of events that leads to a better outcome than the actual one. We hypothesize that such counterfactuals can include, when relevant, epistemic intentions. With four vignette studies, we show that people consider epistemic intentions when ascr… Show more
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