The Normative Power of Punishment
Giulia Andrighetto (European University Institute, Fiesole, Firenze
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology, Rome, Italy)
Punishment plays a crucial role in achieving and maintaining norm compliance.
Several experimental works have shown that cooperation greatly increases when
punishing opportunities are allowed (Fehr & Gachter, 2000; Yamagishi, 1986;
Boyd and Richerson, 1992). However, these studies have mainly looked at
punishment from the classical economic perspective, as a way of changing
people's conduct by increasing the cost of undesired behaviour. This approach
to punishment is in line with the economic model of crime, also known as the
rational choice theory of crime (Becker, 1968), claiming that the deterrent
effect of punishment is obtained by increasing individuals' expectations about
the price of non-compliance. This Beckerian approach to punishment is at odds
with some recent experimental data showing that (a) in some circumstances
punishment has a detrimental effect (Gneezy and Rustichini, 2000); (b) the way
in which punishment is implemented affects its effectiveness in promoting norm
obedience (Houser and Xiao, 2010) and that (c) when perceived as legitimate
punishment is much more powerful (Faillo et al. 2010).
The aim of this paper is to claim that the way of looking at punishment only
as a carrot and stick mechanism is incomplete, and to argue that a more
insightful understanding of this enforcing mechanism is available once its
norm-signalling nature has been identified (Masclet et al. 2003; Galbiati and
Vertova, 2008; Xiao and Houser, 2009, Giardini et al. 2010). In particular, it
will be contended that punishment (explicitly or implicitly) signals to the
offenders (and possibly to the audience) the existence and violation of a
norm, that the violation is not condoned, and that norm compliance is
requested. As proposed by several psychologists (Cialdini et al., 1991) and
philosophers (Bicchieri, 2010), this norm focusing effect and the associated
normative request to comply play an important role in eliciting norm
compliance. Thus, punishment promotes norm obedience and discourages
misconduct by combining the motivating power of social norms with the driving
force of the individual's expectations about the price of non-compliance. To
test this theoretical intuition, we employ an experimental approach.
Up to now, the large part of experiments on punishment has been designed in a
way that its signalling nature has been scarcely emphasized, thus making
difficult a proper appreciation of it (for a different approach, see Xiao and
Houser, 2009). In this paper, we present recent data from a public good game,
where three different punishment treatments are available (Andrighetto,
Villatoro, Solaz, Brandts, in preparation). Like in Fehr and Gaechter (2000),
the first consists in the possibility to impose costly punishment. The second
treatment is identical to the first one, except that the punisher has also the
possibility to communicate the fact that a norm has been violated and to ask
for its compliance. Finally, in the third treatment, only the message (not
reducing the payoff of any agent) is available. This experiment is similar to
the one of Noussair and Tucker (2005), but the content of the message is
different: unlike expressing disapproval about others’ contribution levels, it
communicates a norm violation and it asks the subject to comply with the norm.
Our results show that when a combination of costly punishment and normative
message is available, contributions and overall welfare are higher than when
only punishment or only message are available.
The Centrality of Belief and Reflection
in Knobe Effect Cases
James R. Beebe (University at Buffalo, USA)
There seem to be more explanations of the Knobe effect on offer than there are
experimental philosophers.
Few of these explanations, however, attempt to
address the full range of Knobe effect data, which involve not only the
concept of intentional action but also the concepts of desiring, deciding,
favoring, opposing, advocating, knowing, believing and remembering.
After
reviewing recent experimental work on attributions of knowledge and belief, I
offer a unified account of the data that I have developed with Mark Alfano
(Notre Dame) and Brian Robinson (Grand Valley State University) that appeals
to a heuristic that links attributions of belief with attributions of
practical reflection or deliberation.
In short, our explanation is that
attributions of intentionality, desire, knowledge, belief and remembering will
increase as the degree of reflection in which subjects are taken to have
engaged also increases.
The Explanation Explanation of Side-Effect Effects
Gunnar Bjornsson (Linkoping & Gothenburg)
Beginning with Knobe (2003), numerous studies have revealed asymmetries in
folk judgments about a variety of relations between agents and side-effects of
their actions to which the agents are indifferent. When the CEO of a company
cares solely about profit and knowingly decides to implement a project that
will harm the environment, subjects tend to say that he harmed the environment
intentionally, that he is blameworthy for doing so, that he was for harming
the environment, that he decided to harm the environment, and that he achieved
profit by harming the environment. When the same CEO instead knowingly
implements a profitable project that will help the environment, subjects are
unwilling to say that he helped the environment intentionally, that he is
praiseworthy for doing so, that he was for helping the environment, decided to
do so, or achieved profit by helping the environment (see e.g. Pettit & Knobe
2009).
Given that the CEO was equally indifferent to and aware of the environmental
effects in both cases, the asymmetry might seem puzzling. A number of accounts
have been proposed, and there is reasonable agreement that the asymmetries
depend on norms, or on evaluations of the different effects (see e.g. Nichols
& Ulatowski 2007; Knobe 2007; Knobe & Mendlow 2004; Knobe forthcoming; Cole
Wright & Bengson 2009). What is not clear, however, is what the nature of this
dependence is.
In this talk, I outline some problems with prior explanations and provide an
account that handles all the relevant cases. The basic explanans is that in
the harm condition, there is a straightforward and intuitively striking
explanation of the effect in terms of the agent’s motivational states: the
environment was harmed because the CEO didn’t care enough about the
environment.Nothing similar is available in the help condition. This
difference in intuitive explanatory judgments between the harm and help
conditions is in turn explained by the fact that differences in normative
expectations make certain factors seem explanatorily more significant than
others (cf. Hitchcock & Knobe 2009). To various degrees, these differences
affect judgments of intentionality and related folk-psychological judgments
(concerning what was decided, what an agent was for, what was done by doing
what, etc), when such judgments are seen as playing an explanatory role: for
this purpose the action in question needs to be understood in terms that
connect to motivational states that explain the agent’s actions. Given an
assumption defended elsewhere (Björnsson & Persson forthcoming) and supported
by new empirical evidence, the same is true about judgments of blame- and
praiseworthiness: they depend on attributions of responsibility for the
outcome, and judgments of responsibility are themselves a species of
explanatory judgments.
If this ‘explanation explanation’ is correct, we can expect similar
asymmetries in the case of intended effects of actions performed under
microscopic chances of success, and we can expect side-effect asymmetries
triggered by non-normative considerations that affect the explanatory
relevance of agents’ motivational structures. And this is indeed what we see
(Nadelhoffer 2004).
Intuitions as Evidence, Philosophical Expertise
and the Developmental Challenge
Steve Clarke (Oxford)
Appeals to intuitions as evidence in philosophy are challenged both by critics
such as Hintikka, who complain of the lack of a theoretical account explaining
why such appeals can count as evidence, and by experimental philosophers who
have shown up significant variability in folk philosophical intuitions. A
common response to this latter challenge is to argue that only professional
philosophers’ intuitions count as evidence in philosophy because it is only
these that are sufficiently invariant to be truth apt. This ‘expert intuitions
defence’ is inadequate for two reasons. First, recent studies have shown up
significant variability in professional philosophers’ intuitions. Second, the
academic literature on professional intuitions across disciplines gives us
good reasons to doubt that professional philosophers can develop truth-apt
intuitions. The onus falls squarely on those who mount the expert intuitions
defence to meet these objections because every professional philosopher
started out as a non-professional philosopher and it is implicitly being
claimed that training and practice caused professional philosophers to acquire
reliably accurate intuitions. So, we are owed an account of how this
transformation takes place. A possible response to the apparent inadequacy of
professional philosophers’ intuitions is to attempt to reform philosophical
practice so as to improve the quality of those intuitions. Another possible
response, advocated here, is to reform philosophical practice by avoiding
appeals to intuitions as evidence.
Judgments about moral responsibility in patients with
frontotemporaldementia: still compatibilists!
Florian Cova (Swiss Center for Affective Sciences)
Are people natural compatibilists or incompatibilists? A first set of studies
run by Eddy Nahmias and his colleagues suggested that people might in fact be
natural compatibilist: they would have the intuition that agent in
deterministic world are free and responsible for their behaviour. Three
studies replicated these results using various descriptions of determinism.
Nevertheless, a second set of study, ran by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe
suggested that things might be much more complicated. Indeed, they found that
people’s answer changed dramatically depending on apparently irrelevant
factors. Thus, people gave compatibilist answers to a concrete particular case
but formed incompatibilist judgments when faced with an abstract question. To
account for this difference, Nichols and Knobe advanced what they call the
“performance error model”, according to which people have an incompatibilist
theory of freedom and moral responsibility but can be emotionally biased
towards compatibilist answers.
Thus, in concrete case, people give incompatibilist answers because they are
motivated to blame by the emotional reaction inducted by the crime. In
accordance with thus hypothesis, they were able to show that people gave less
compatibilist answers to concrete scenarios that are less emotionally loaded.
But is Nichols and Knobe’s “performance error model” right? Many objections
have been raised against it. First, it cannot account for some cases, in which
people give compatibilist answers to emotionally neutral scenario. Second,
Nichols and Knobe have been accused to use vignettes that do not properly
describe determinism.
In this paper, we want to contribute to this debate about Nichols and Knobe’s
“performance error model” by testing one of its implication. If compatibilist
answers really are the result of an affective bias (or even of unbiased
emotional reactions), then we should expect people with poor emotional
reactions to give less compatibilist answers. To test this prediction, we ran
a study using materials drawn for Nahmias et al. and Nichols and Knobe’s
studies on patients suffering from frontemporal dementia (a frontal syndrome).
Patients suffering from frontotemporal dementia indeed have impoverished
emotional reactions. We compared their answers to these scenarios with answers
from two control groups: healthy subjects and patients suffering from
Alzheimer’s disease.
As a result, we found no difference between our three groups of subjects. In
fact,
patients
suffering
from
frontotemporal
dementia
gave
highly
compatibilist answers to our questionnaires. Thus, we argue that these results
spells trouble for Nichols and Knobe’s “performance error model” and point
several shortcomings in their study that could explain their pattern of
results.
Judgments in Trolley Problems
Natalie Gold (Edinburgh)
Trolley problems were designed to test moral intuitions that apply across a
range of domains. Philosophers aim to come to a reflective equilibrium between
their intuitions in these problems and a consistent ethical theory. Although
trolley problems involve life and death decisions, the resulting theory
(doctrine of double effect, the doctrine of doing and allowing, etc.) is
supposed to be applicable across a range of domains. For instance Quinn (1989,
p. 287 fn 2) says, “Harm here is meant to include any evil that can be the
upshot of choice, for example, the loss of privacy, property, or control. But
to keep matters simple, my examples will generally involve physical harm, and
the harm in question will generally be death.” It is not at all obvious that
intuitions in cases involving life and death will be the same as intuitions in
cases involving other types of harms. I present the results of an experiment
designed to test whether trolley intuitions (specifically, what Judith Thomson
called “the trolley problem”, namely the difference in most peopleʼs intuitions
between the bystander at the switch and pushing someone off a bridge) are
preserved in different domains of harm. I will also discuss an experiment that
aims to bridge experimental philosophy and behavioural experiments in
economics and philosophy, by constructing decisions that share the key
features of trolley problems but involve financial incentives.
Agent and patient simulation in moral judgment
Ivar Hannikainen (University of Sheffield) and Fiery Cushman (Brown
University)
A typical moral situation – e.g., an act of theft or a charitable donation –
involves two people: the person who does something morally right or wrong (the
agent), and the person to whom something morally right or wrong is done (the
patient). We hypothesized that when you witness a moral situation, you can
make a judgment about it by adopting either perspective, roughly, by focusing
on the agent’s action or on the patient’s experience. We set out to track
these two kinds of mental simulation through psychology. In what follows we
report some preliminary findings.
In a first experiment, we investigated the contribution of agent and patient
simulation to the well-known trolley problem. We presented participants with a
set of either personal dilemmas (like the footbridge dilemma, where the agent
forcefully harms the proximal victim in order to save the distal victims) or
impersonal dilemmas (like the switch dilemma, where the agent harms the victim
without physical contact and as a side effect of saving the distal victims).
After every moral dilemma, participants reported how much they had adopted
each perspective. As predicted, participants thought more about the agent’s
perspective (p=.05) in personal scenarios than impersonal scenarios. We found
also that agent perspective-taking correlated with deontological moral
judgment more for personal compared with impersonal cases (β = .63, p = .05).
There was no such effect of victim perspective-taking on moral judgment.
Does this relationship hold in cases where the agent must choose whether to
help a proximal patient or a group of distal patients? In a second study, we
contrasted perspective-taking between dilemmas of personal help and harm. We
found that participants adopted the agent perspective more on harm scenarios
than on help scenarios (β = .91, p = .018) and the proximal patient
perspective less on harm scenarios compared to help scenarios (β = 1.01, p =
.005). Whereas focus on either patient’s perspective was associated with
saving them or acting in their favor (proximal β = -.42, p = .01; distal β =
.47, p=.005) and this pattern held across both help and harm, the effect of
agent perspectivetaking on moral judgment was asymmetrical (p = .04).
Specifically, agent perspective-taking was associated with deontological
judgment in harm cases (β = -.49, p = .006) but did not affect moral judgment
in help cases.
Together these findings highlight the role of agent simulation in driving
deontological moral judgment: it is not the heavy man on the footbridge we are
thinking about when we judge it morally wrong for Frank to use him as a
trolley-stopper, it’s Frank.
In ongoing work we are testing the relationship between this phenomenon and
moral foundations theory: Why do political liberals moralize only two of the
five foundations of morality while conservatives care about them all? We have
suggested a way in which agent and patient simulation as psychological natural
kinds might subserve distinct philosophical positions in ethics. We now hope
that this distinction will shed light on the moral psychology of liberals and
conservatives as well as point to the psychological basis for their
recalcitrant moral disagreement.
Normativity in Action:
How to Explain the Knobe Effect and Its Relatives
Frank Hindriks (Groningen)
Abstract. Normative factors have turned out to influence our intuitions about
folk psychology. (1) Joshua Knobe presents their influence as surprising. (2)
He explains it in terms of moral valence. (3) And he argues that the
explanation he offers for intentional action generalizes not only to other
folk psychological notions such as deciding, but also to notions such as
freedom and causation. I argue that these three claims are mistaken. First,
the asymmetries in our folk psychological intuitions are considerably less
surprising once one realizes that they run parallel to another asymmetry, one
that concerns moral responsibility: praise for bringing about an effect
requires that the agent actively seek to realize it, whereas blame does not.
Second, the connection to responsibility makes it plausible that our
intuitions can be explained in terms of beliefs about reasons. Folk
psychological notions are commonly taken to concern an agent’s frame of mind.
An important advantage of invoking beliefs about reasons instead of moral
valence is that this idea can be retained. Third, as the notions freedom and
causation are more objective than these folk psychological notions, the reason
explanation that I defend here does not generalize to them. They can indeed be
explained in terms of moral valence. The Knobe effect and (only) its close
relatives are to be explained in terms of beliefs about reasons instead.
Do health behaviours mediate moral intuitions? A glance at
the role of disgust in smoking behaviours
Courtney Humeny (Carleton)
Smoking, a once socially acceptable behaviour in Western society is now viewed
with repugnance and social isolation. Along with its harmful health effects,
smoking is associated with numerous disgust elicitors, including the chemicals
that make up cigarettes, air pollution, poor hygiene, and disease. Arguably,
this shift in views of smoking is the result of moralization: the process of
internalizing a previously held preference into a value on both an individual
and societal level (Rozin, 1999).
Disgust, which generally manifests in the form of an unpleasant feeling and
avoidance behaviours may have evolved as a protective emotion against
behaviours harmful to survival. Disgust reactions may encourage individuals to
engage in behaviours that benefit the well being of others as well as
themselves. Research has found disgust reactions contribute to harsher moral
judgements (Schnall, Haidt, Clore & Jordon, 2008), intuitive (but not
explicit) disapproval of gays (Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe & Bloom, 2009), and
result from moral violations (Rozin, Lowery, Imada & Haidt, 1999).
However, whether disgust has a role in linking morality to smoking remains
unclear. To investigate this link, the current study applied the Knobe Effect;
a phenomenon describing the tendency of individuals to evaluate an agent, who
knowingly carries out a behaviour that produces a negative (as opposed to
positive) outcome as 1) morally wrong, and 2) intentionally causing the
negative side effect (Knobe, 2003). Recent research suggests individuals
evaluate a behaviour as intentionally caused if the behaviour lead to a
negative side effect they considered to be morally valuable (Tannenbaum, Ditto
& Pizarro, 2011).
The current study investigated whether emotional reactions may index an
internalized moral value and if individuals use their own behaviours as a
basis for evaluating the moral status of that behaviour in others.
Participants (N=38) were assessed for smoking behaviours, disgust sensitivity,
and completed a modified version of the Knobe Effect vignettes/measure, which
depicted the side effect of a harmful (smoking) and health promoting
(exercising) behaviour. It was hypothesized that lower disgust sensitivity
would be related to 1) engagement in smoking, 2) approval of smoking, and 3)
viewing smoking as not intentionally carried out to be harmful. Results
indicate an interaction effect between smoking and disgust sensitivity for
explicit but not intuitive moral judgements. Individuals with higher smoking
behaviours indicated lower disgust sensitivity. Further, although smokers
explicitly ascribed the moral status of smoking as wrong, this did not match
up with their intuitions and evidently their behaviours. These findings will
be discussed in the context of norm compliance and disgust as a moralizing
emotion.
Mere Exposure to Bad Art
Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin and Margaret Moore
(Philosophy, University of Leeds)
In this paper we present the results of an experiment testing judgments of
preference for low quality paintings, carried out in January – March 2011. The
experiment was designed to test an objection raised to a series of studies by
the psychologist James Cutting (2003; 2006) which explored the significance of
mere exposure effects for artistic preference. Cutting exposed undergraduate
psychology students to canonical and lesser-known Impressionist paintings over
the period of an academic semester. The lesser-known paintings were presented
four times more often than the canonical paintings, with the result that
preference for the lesser-known paintings was increased among the experimental
group, in comparison with the preference demonstrated by a control group. In
short, mere exposure significantly altered preferences for paintings. This led
Cutting to conclude that artistic canons are largely promoted and maintained
by mere exposure (2003: 335).
Cutting’s results are of philosophical interest since they might be thought to
support scepticism about the role of aesthetic value in determining aesthetic
judgement and to undermine standard philosophical assumptions regarding
aesthetic expertise, artistic canons and the test of time (Hume). They also
speak to debates about the unreliability of aesthetic judgment (Kieran 2010;
2011), aesthetic testimony (Meskin 2004; 2006)) and the objectivity of taste.
A natural objection to Cutting’s deflationary conclusion is that the paintings
used in his experiment were of high artistic quality. Even the lesser-known
works were by masters such as Degas, Monet and Renoir. One might then explain
the increase in preference that followed repeated exposure by appealing to
improved recognition of the good-making features of the lesser-known
paintings. Rather than preference following mere exposure, preference might be
increased by subjects being given practice in detecting what is good in the
paintings. In short, subjects may have become better appreciators of good
works through multiple exposures to them.
In order to test this hypothesis, we designed an experiment to investigate
whether mere exposure effects arise where subjects are repeatedly exposed to
bad art (viz., the works of the American painter Thomas Kinkade). If it turns
out that preferences for these stimuli increased—where it is implausible that
subjects are gaining practice identifying valuable features of the paintings—
Cutting’s conclusions are strengthened. Alternatively, if preferences remain
unaltered or decreased the objection to Cutting discussed above is supported.
We are currently analysing the data, and preliminary results suggest that
repeated exposure to the Kinkade paintings decreased liking for them. Further
results will be presented at the workshop.
While the results are of interest to psychologists and philosophers of art,
the experiment raises a number of methodological and philosophical issues
which are of broader significance for experimental philosophy. Hence, in
addition to presenting our results, we shall discuss some of the
methodological issues raised (e.g., use of Likert scale and choice of
statistical tools, selection of stimuli, wording of probe, potential
confounds) and briefly address the significance of empirical aesthetics for
normative aesthetics.
Self-Sacrifice and the Trolley Problem
Ezio Di Nucci (Duisburg-Essen)
In one of the infamous thought-experiments of analytic philosophy, a runaway
trolley is about to kill five workmen who cannot move off the tracks quickly
enough; their only chance is for a bystander to flip a switch to divert the
trolley onto a side-track, where one workman would be killed. In a parallel
scenario, the bystander’s only chance to save the five is to push a fat man
off a bridge onto the tracks: that will stop the trolley but the fat man will
die. Why is it permissible for the bystander to divert the trolley onto the
one workman by pressing the switch while it is not permissible for the
bystander to stop the trolley by pushing the fat man off the bridge?
This is the so-called Trolley Problem, resulting from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s
(1976 & 1985) adaptation of an example from Philippa Foot (1967). If it is
permissible to intervene in the so-called Bystander at the Switch scenario
while it is not permissible to intervene in the so-called Fat Man scenario,
then the Trolley Problem arises and we must explain the moral difference
between these two cases (which many do by appealing to the Doctrine of Double
Effect). And if the results of Marc Hauser’s Moral Sense Test are to be
believed, then according to public opinion it is indeed permissible to
intervene in the former case (around 90% of respondents to the Moral Sense
Test thought as much – Hauser 2006: 139) while it is not permissible to
intervene in the latter case (only around 10% of respondents thought it
permissible to intervene).
Thomson herself (2008) has recently argued that the Trolley Problem is not
actually a problem because it is not permissible to divert the trolley to kill
the one workman in Bystander at the Switch. Thomson introduces a new scenario
in which the bystander has also the possibility of sacrificing herself to save
the five workmen to argue that those who would not sacrifice themselves in
this new scenario may not kill the one workman in the traditional Bystander at
the Switch. Bryce Huebner and Marc Hauser (2011) have argued against Thomson
on the ground of experimental philosophy data that, in the new three-way
scenario, 43% would still kill the one (38% would sacrifice themselves and
19% would let the five die).
In this paper I argue that Huebner and Hauser have asked the wrong question
and that, when the right question is asked, the results support Thomson’s
argument. Thomson’s argument is about the implications of her new three-way
scenario on the traditional Bystander at the Switch scenario: namely, those
who are not willing to sacrifice themselves in the three-way scenario may not
kill the one workman in the traditional scenario. The correct test of
Thomson’s argument, then, is not just to ask what people would do in her new
scenario; but rather to test how people react to the traditional Bystander at
the Switch after having been presented with the new three-way self-sacrifice
scenario. I have done just that: participants who were not previously familiar
with any of the trolley scenarios were presented first with Thomson’s new
three-way scenario and then with the traditional Bystander at the Switch.
Answers to Bystander at the Switch were radically different from the 9 to 1
proportion identified by Hauser, so much so that the majority (73%) of
respondents opted to let the five workmen die.
Act-Type Asymmetry and the Knobe Effect
Lilian O'Brien (University College Cork) and Jonathan Phillips (Yale)
Joshua Knobe’s work has marshalled considerable support for the view that everyday
judgments of whether an action is intentional are dependent upon evaluative
judgments of that action:
Dependence Hypothesis (DH): If people negatively evaluate an action, then they
are more likely to judge that the agent did what she did intentionally.
In the well-known seminal survey that supports DH respondents are presented with
two scenarios. In one of these a businessman knowingly harms the environment as a
side-effect of an intentional action, and in the other he knowingly helps it as a
sideeffect. In both scenarios the businessman expresses indifference to whether he
harms or helps. Respondents are much more likely to say that the businessman
intentionally harmed the environment than they are to say that he intentionally
helped it. Knobe has argued that it is (moral) evaluation of the action that
affects the responses of the participants.
We defend a competing alternative hypothesis that promises to explain the data it differs from all other competing hypotheses that have been offered so far. This
is the Act-Type Asymmetry Hypothesis. In brief, the asymmetry in people’s
responses can be explained by a hitherto unnoticed asymmetry between the act-types
of help and harm. The act-type of helping is, we maintain, closely associated with
intentions to help and general dispositions to be helpful. Attributing a tokening
of this act-type to an agent implicates, although it does not imply, that she has
such attitudes or dispositions. As a result, such attributions better fit agents
who display such attitudes and dispositions than ones, like the businessman, who
don’t. This explains respondents’ unwillingness to say that the businessman
intentionally helps the
environment – they are reluctant to say something simpler, namely, that he helps
the environment. By contrast, the act-type of harming is not associated with such
attitudes or dispositions: an attribution of harming does not, by itself, suggest
much if anything about the agent’s attitudes and dispositions to harm.
Consequently, respondents are willing to attribute the act-type of harming to the
businessman.
We have conducted surveys mimicking Knobe’s businessman case to test
thewillingness of respondents to attribute the act-types of harm and help. In one
survey where there is a helpful side-effect of the agent’s actions to which the
agent is indifferent, we ask respondents to say whether or not they agree or
disagree with the following claims:
(a) the agent helped
(b) the agent’s behaviour helped
In scenarios where there is a harmful
indifferent, we test these claims:
side-effect
to
which
the
agent
is
(c) the agent harmed
(d) the agent’s behaviour harmed
We predicted that respondents would be more willing to agree with claim (b) than
with claim (a), because, according to our hypothesis, in (a) but not (b) things
are implicated about the agent that are incorrect. We predicted that there would
be no significant difference in their willingness to agree to claims (c) and (d),
because, according to our hypothesis, the act-type harm does not implicate much if
anything about the agent’s attitudes and dispositions. Our prediction was correct.
We believe that this offers support for the Act-type Asymmetry Hypothesis.
Value-Assessments and Mental State Attributions
Mark Phelan (Lawrence)
People experience joy and pain, appreciate brilliant colors, want, reason, and
remember. They also attribute these and other mental states to various
entities. Recent research in philosophy and psychology suggests that such
mental state attributions are discontinuous; people normally attribute
intentional mental states, such as beliefs, to some entities to which they
will not normally attribute phenomenally conscious states, such as pain. Two
separate proposals have suggested that the discontinuity of mental state
attributions depends in important ways on value-assessments of states or
entities. Here, I argue against these evaluative views and offer some
deflationary explanations of the purported discontinuity for groups and
certain singular individuals.
Variation in relativist moral cognition
Katinka Quintelier (Ghent)
Certain philosophers and psychologists argue that we think or have to think of
normative rules as non-relative. In this study, we first ask to what extent
lay people’s speech acts are in accordance with moral relativism. In line with
previous studies, our study confirms that some participants relativize their
judgments about particular moral issues. We also find that different people
adhere to different kinds of moral relativism. We then, second, ask how
different kinds of ‘relativists’ vary in self-reported commitments to aspects
of toleration. We discuss our findings in relation to the broader aim of these
studies, which is to shed light on the psychological feasibility and practical
desirability of endorsing a relativist view towards moral rules.
Solving philosophical problems through web-based
statistical analysis
Kevin Reuter (University of London)
In this paper, I explore the world wide web as a tool for philosophical
investigations. Instead of relying on armchair intuitions or tedious surveys,
I demonstrate that for various philosophical problems, the web can be utilised
to uncover fascinating results about the way concepts and, more broadly,
language is used. Moreover, due to the enormous amount of data available, many
studies will be statistically significant. This paper is divided into two
parts. First, I present two examples which show how webbased statistical
analyses can illuminate traditional problems in the philosophy of mind.
Second, I highlight certain challenges and difficulties we might face with
this project. The first example I present, provides the statistical foundation
for an argument (forthcoming in Journal of Consciousness Studies) against the
claim that pains and pain experiences cannot be distinguished. I have
conducted an empirical analysis into our use of the expressions ‘I feel a
pain’ and ‘I have a pain’, which reveals that there is a correlation between
different pain expressions and the intensity of pain. In order to find out how
people describe their pains, I have used three search engines (Yahoo, Bing,
Google) to look for differences in the use of pain expressions when the
intensity of pain varies, e.g. whereas ‘I feel a little pain’ (884 hits) is
used almost as often as ‘I have a little pain’ (951 hits), the ratio between
‘I feel a severe pain’ and ‘I have a severe pain’ is 1:7. This ‘intensity
effect’ can be best explained by people’s varying confidence about their pain,
and indicates an appearance-reality distinction of pain.
The second example investigates the iterability of concepts like LOOKS and
SEEMS and shows that people iterate these concepts but that the iterability of
these concepts depends on context-specific information like conditions of
perception. As far as I am aware, these studies are the very first which use
web-based reports to evaluate traditional problems in the philosophy of mind.
In principle, any philosophical study that examines the way people use
language, and in particular, how specific concepts work, may draw on the
wealth of data on the internet. However, there are also certain challenges
that this kind of empirical analysis faces, of which I discuss three: (1) Are
search results that are not statistically significant, qualitatively valuable
for conceptual analyses? (2) How reliable are search engines in filtering
certain information? (3) How relevant is the fact that many non-native English
speakers contribute to many fora and blogs and thus may distort the statistics
on the ‘proper’ use of concepts? Although these and other challenges are to be
expected when using the web as an empirical corpus for philosophical
questions, I argue that philosophers cannot afford to neglect the plethora of
information, which other disciplines have already started to exploit.