Experimental Philosophy

Welcome!

We have two new contributors to the blog: A philosopher, Justin Sytsma (Pittsburgh, HPS), and a psychologist Lisa Lederer (Pittsburgh, Communication Sciences & Disorders). Welcome!

Moral Judgments and Happiness part 2

In an earlier post I described an experiment that I believe provided some evidence for the following hypothesis:

That the folk concept of happiness involves some normative or evaluative element such that, of the things that determine whether we take somebody to be happy, one is whether we think that this person is living a good life or not.

This means that, if we think that somebody is living a bad life---perhaps by being a morally bad person---then we might not attribute happiness to her even if we believe that she likes and wants to continue living in the way that she does. See this link for a description of the earlier experiment:

Moral Judgments and Happiness

Now on to a new experiment that I believe gives further support for this partly normative theory of the folk concept of happiness. In this new experiment, the subjects (71 Michigan undergraduates) were all given one and the same vignette, namely the following one:

Bruce was brought up in a religious home and used to go to church every Sunday. However, since coming out as gay, Bruce has stopped going to church. He now meets new people at nightclubs, parties, and bars, instead of in church as he did before.

One of Bruce’s strongest desires is to find a man to have a long-term relationship with. He thinks that Andrew, whom he just recently met, might be what he is looking for. One of the reasons Bruce thinks this is that they are very compatible, sexually speaking.

Occasionally Bruce feels a little guilty about being in a relationship with a man. It goes against his upbringing; he was raised to think that one of the most important things in life for a man is to find a wife. But, most of the time Bruce does not feel these kinds of guilty feelings. And, when he does, Bruce reminds himself that he thinks he really has no reason to. Bruce then also reminds himself that he really likes Andrew and the people they socialize with. And so he doesn’t want to change anything about his lifestyle.

Subjects were then asked three questions (which were in different orders on different surveys): (1) Would you agree with the statement “Bruce is happy”?, (2) How much distress do you think Bruce feels? and (3) Do you think Bruce’s lifestyle is immoral? Subjects recorded their answers on a scale from 1 to 7 where 1 meant “disagree”, 4 “in between”, and 7 “agree” in the happiness question, 1 meant “none at all”, 4 “in between”, and 7 “a lot” in the distress question, and 1 meant “No”, 4 “neutral”, and 7 “Yes” in the immorality question.

Subjects who believed that Bruce experienced distress judged that Bruce was not happy. But, their distress ratings could not fully account for their low happiness ratings. And, differences in immorality ratings could explain the extra difference in happiness ratings. In other words, if subjects judged that Bruce’s lifestyle is immoral, then this had a negative effect on their happiness-judgments. The results were highly statistically significant.

The distress question was used to show that what happens is not just that some people attribute further mental states to the people in the vignettes and then base their happiness judgments on these fuller pictures of the imagined person’s mental life. As this experiment suggests, happiness judgments are also based on some sort of normative or moral evaluation of those about whose happiness level we are forming a view.

To sum up: these two experiments, the one described in my earlier post and the one described above, provide evidence, I think, for the thesis that the folk concept happiness has some normative or evaluative component. This is interesting since most research on happiness in psychology uses definitions of happiness that have no such component and that are wholly psychological or non-evaluative. This means that when a psychologist concludes that somebody is happy, perhaps the folk would not.

This raises the question of whether the kind of happiness that psychologists talk about is better, as good as, or less valuable than the happiness that the folk desire. Another interesting question is whether psychologists are using a concept of happiness that is better, as good as, or less good than the folk concept of happiness. Providing a philosophical account of happiness, I tentatively conclude, is thus a normative project: we have to take a stand as to whether we should favor some version of the folk's normative concept or the psychologist's non-normative, wholly psychological concept of happiness.

I’d be very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this new experiment and the conclusions I draw based on it.

Free will, cross-cultural style

Great post by Hagop on Eric's blog concerning intuitions about free will across cultures.

Edouard

Paper on Mental Illness and Moral Responsibility

Download the_real_final_paper_april_15thresponsibility_and_the_brain_sciences.doc

Hey Everybody,

Felipe De Brigard, Dave Ripley, and I have been running some studies on people's moral responsibility judgments for the mentally and neurologically impaired. We have found that our subjects have no problem holding the mentally and neurologically impaired responsible for their actions. Surprisingly, our subjects judged the neurologically impaired to be just as responsible for their actions (sometimes even more so) as the psychologically impaired. Our studies lead us to believe that Greene and Cohen (2004) might have overstated their case when they claimed that the law will need to make some theoretical revisions to account for the impending discoveries of neuroscience. We've had this paper kicking around for a bit and we could really use any comments you have to offer. Please check it out and tell us what you think.

Cheers,

Eric Mandelbaum

Call for Papers 2: Special Issue on Experimental Philosophy

Let me remind you that the European Review of Philosophy is editing a special issue on psychology and experimental philosophy (editors: Joshua Knobe, Tania Lombrozo and myself).

Our guest authors are D. Osherson (Princeton), Sean Kelly (Harvard), and John Darley and Geoffrey Goodwin (Princeton).

The deadline is September 1, 2008 and more information can be found there.

Edouard

Update: By mistake, I wrote that the deadline was in 2009. It is in fact 09/01/2008.

Reminder: Upcoming Society for Empirical Ethics Session

Just a quick reminder of the upcoming SEE session at the Central APA -- on Saturday from 12:15-2:15. The presenters will be Darcia Narvaez, John Mikhail, and Geoffrey Goodwin. Papers/presentations will be posted on my website (link to the left, and then click on "philosophy").

See you there!

Moral Psychology meets Moral Philosophy

I've been working out some thoughts with Liane Young on the relevance of moral psychology to moral philosophy.  Here's the current draft of our essay on the subject.  It is to be published in an issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice on empirical approaches to ethics, put together by Neil Levy.  I think there's still time for us to make edits, if anybody has suggestions.  In any event, I'm curious to get the perspective of philosophers on the ideas in here.  Looking forward to your thoughts...

Fiery

Download psych_of_dilemmas.pdf

The Collective Conscious

Consider the sentences:

1. Dmitri is experiencing great joy at his new job.

2. Sony is experiencing great joy at its increased sales.

If you're like me, your immediate intuition is that the first of these sentences makes a lot of sense while the second is completely ridiculous.  A corporation like Sony can't be experiencing great joy! Group agents like corporations just aren't the sort of entity that are capable of phenomenal consciousness.

In an exciting new paper, the philosophers Bryce Huebner, Michael Bruno and Hagop Sarkissian show that this sort of intuition is not nearly as universal as one might have supposed.  In fact, they show a dramatic cultural difference between the intuitions of Americans and the intuitions of Hong Kong residents.  Americans think the first sentence sounds a lot more natural than the second while Hong Kong residents think that the two sentences are fairly similar in the degree of naturalness.  (Even Hong Kong residents think that the first sentence is better than the second, but this effect is not nearly as strong in the Hong Kong sample as it is in the American sample.)

Drawing on these new results, Huebner and colleagues argue that there are important cultural differences in the way people think about individuals versus groups.  Americans see a yawning gulf between individuals and groups -- individuals can be conscious and groups cannot -- while Hong Kong residents think that group agents are actually fairly similar to individual people. 

Are We Dumb(founded) or Dubious?

My student, Bradley Thomas, and I have been wondering if there is a problematic confounding factor in the infamous trolley cases. If you are like us (and many of our students), one reason you answer that it’s wrong to push the fat man off the footbridge is not so much that you think it is morally inappropriate but that you think it is stupid. A fat man is not going to stop a train! So, while it’s highly believable that pushing the fat man will kill him, it’s unbelievable that doing so will actually save five people. In contrast, it is believable enough that you could throw a switch to make a train avoid five people so that doing so will in fact save them, though it will also kill one worker. 

Of course, you are told to believe what the scenario says, but that’s hard to do when what it says is so … silly. Some people may overtly reject the purported “facts” of the case. Others may try to accept them but be unable to “internalize” them in such a way that their moral intuitions properly respond to those facts. As Anthony Appiah points out in his recent book, these dilemmas ask us to imagine what should be done in emergency situations and, if we are able to imagine that, we may employ heuristics to make quick moral judgments, heuristics like: “Don’t risk killing an innocent person unless you feel quite confident it will save more innocent persons.”

So, we are trying to test (a) whether this “epistemic” confound may be exaggerating the large differences in responses to Switch and Footbridge cases, differences usually explained in terms of the effects on people’s intuitions of killing by personal contact and/or of killing a person as a means to an end rather than as a side-effect of that end (we are not trying to show that these effects are not significant), and (b) whether this confound has been discounted as an explanation for people’s divergent responses to the two cases, such that people may be less dumbfounded than some have claimed. Instead, they may be dubious.

For instance, if we’re not mistaken, Fiery Cushman and Liane Young (in their wonderful 2007 M&L paper) treated subjects who explained their divergent moral judgments in terms of rejecting stipulations of one of the scenarios as “morally dumbfounded”—that is, they coded such explanations as “Alternative explanation: added assumption,” rather than as “Sufficient” (i.e., explanations that recognize the “personal” nature of Footbridge vs. the “impersonal” nature of Switch). If we are correct, subjects’ explaining that they reject the stipulations of a case should similarly count as an adequate explanation of their judgments, at least if they seem to recognize that they are answering differently in part because the scenarios differ in their believability.

We have some preliminary results showing that the degree to which participants believe the purported outcomes of moral dilemmas is highly correlated with their moral judgments (e.g., the more they believe that smothering their child in the circumstances of the scenario will save their other three children, then more they agree that smothering their child is the right thing to do). The tests below are meant to further test this hypothesis. We think the results are potentially important both for what they reveal about people’s moral intuitions and the relation of such intuitions to their “epistemic” intuitions and also for what they may say about the methodology of experimental philosophy—i.e., how (and when) can we trust judgments about unbelievable philosophical thought experiments?

We hope you will provide feedback about our hypothesis and also about our scenarios, which we have found excruciatingly difficult to develop. We're really hoping you save us from headaches down the road by finding any flaws that we've overlooked!  For all four of our cases, in addition to asking the standard “How morally appropriate is it for [agent] to do X [the act that leads to one being killed]?”, we also ask four questions about believability that take this basic form:

How likely do you think it is that, if [agent] does NOT do X, the five workers will be killed and the one worker will survive?

How likely do you think it is that, if [agent] DOES do X, the one worker will be killed?

How likely do you think it is that, if [agent] DOES do X, the five workers will survive?

How likely do you think it is that the ONLY way for [agent] to save the five workers is to do X?

Here is our version of the impersonal Switch case, which we call "believable" to indicate that it is rather believable that flipping the switch will actually save the five (it has been modified from the traditional Switch cases in order to make it more parallel with the new cases we constructed to test our hypotheses):

Frank is the only passenger in the front car of a subway train on some elevated tracks; the conductor just shouted that the brakes have failed, and then passed out over the controls. Frank knows about subway trains and knows that the automatic braking system at the next station will stop the train, so Frank, the conductor, and the other passengers are not in danger. But he sees that the train is speeding toward five people working ahead on the tracks; they are on a high overpass so they cannot escape in time. Frank also sees that there is a side track leading off to the left and, if he can flip a switch on the train's control panel, it will turn the train onto the side track where there is one person working on the tracks. The only way for Frank to prevent the deaths of the five workers on the main track is to flip the switch in order to turn the train onto the side track. If Frank flips the switch, the one worker on the side track will be run over and killed. If Frank does nothing, the five workers on the main track will run over and killed.

To examine our question of whether believability influences people's judgments about this case, we have constructed an unbelievable impersonal dilemma called Statue to match the believable impersonal Switch case above. Like Switch, Statue is impersonal (no contact), killing the one is a side-effect of the means used to save the five, and performing the proposed action is likely to kill the one (just as flipping the switch will kill the one worker on the side track). However, in contrast to Switch, in Statue (like the Footbridge case) we have attempted to make it unbelievable that performing the proposed impersonal action will actually save the five workers. If believability, or epistemic intuitions that contradict the stipulations of the thought experiment, are part of the driving force behind the difference in people's judgments about the Switch vs. Footbridge cases, then we would expect that judgments about this Statue scenario to move in the direction of judgments about Footbridge (and that judgments of appropriateness will correlate with judgments of believability). Below is our version of Statue, or if you are curious to see what these will look like on our online surveys, you can see the Statue case by clicking here

John is on a footbridge over some elevated subway tracks. John can see that a subway train approaching the footbridge is out of control, with its conductor alive but passed out over the controls. John knows about subway trains and knows that the automatic braking system at the next station will stop the train so the conductor and passengers are not in danger. But he sees that the train is speeding toward five people working ahead on the tracks; the tracks are so high that they cannot escape in time. John also sees that the only way to stop the train is to drop a weight onto it heavy enough to break through the cockpit window and depress the emergency brake switch on the control panel beneath the passed-out conductor. The only available, sufficiently heavy weight on the footbridge is a large statue next to John. The only way for John to prevent the deaths of the five workers is to push the statue off the footbridge and through the cockpit window in order to depress the brake switch on the control panel beneath the conductor. If John pushes the statue off the footbridge, the conductor will be crushed and killed. If John does nothing, the five workers on the track will be run over and killed.

Similarly, we have tried to construct a believable personal dilemma called Conductor to compare with the unbelievable personal Footbridge case (this was a hard one to create!). Like Footbridge, Conductor is personal (involves contact), killing the one is a *means* to saving the five, and performing the proposed action is likely to kill the one (as pushing the fat man will kill him). However, in contrast to Footbridge, in Conductor we have tried to make it believable that performing the proposed personal action will actually save the five workers. If believability is part of the driving force behind the difference in people's judgments about the Switch vs. Footbridge cases, then we would expect judgments about this Conductor scenario to move in the direction of judgments about Switch (and that judgments of appropriateness will correlate with judgments of believability). Below is our Conductor scenario, followed by our version of Footbridge (again modified from the original to make it more parallel with our other cases):

Your comments are very much appreciated!

Thanks, Eddy and Bradley

 

Conductor

Steve is the only passenger in the front car of a subway train on some elevated tracks; the conductor is alive but has passed out over the controls. Steve knows about subway trains and knows that the automatic braking system at the next station will stop the train, so Steve, the conductor, and the other passengers are not in danger. But he sees that the train is speeding toward five people working ahead on the tracks; the tracks are so high that they cannot escape in time. Steve also sees that if he can pull down the emergency brake lever located under the control panel, the train will stop before it hits the five workers. The train’s cockpit is so narrow that the only way to get to the brake lever in time is to push the conductor off of the controls and out of the doorway of the speeding train. The only way for Steve to prevent the deaths of the five workers on the main track is to push the conductor out of the train in order to pull down the brake lever. If Steve pushes the conductor out of the train, the conductor will be killed by the impact. If Steve does nothing, the five workers will be run over and killed.

Footbridge

Bill is on a footbridge over some elevated subway tracks. Bill can see that a subway train approaching the footbridge is out of control, with its conductor alive but passed out in the cockpit. Bill knows about subway trains and knows that the automatic braking system at the next station will stop the train so the conductor and passengers are not in danger. But he sees that the train is speeding toward five people working ahead on the tracks; the tracks are so high that they cannot escape in time. Bill also sees that the only way to stop the train is to drop a weight onto it heavy enough to break through the cockpit window and depress the emergency brake switch on the control panel. The only available, sufficiently heavy weight on the footbridge is a very large subway worker who has fainted next to Bill. The only way for Bill to prevent the deaths of the five workers on the track is to push the large worker off the footbridge and through the cockpit window in order to depress the brake switch. If Bill pushes the large worker off the footbridge, the worker will be killed by the impact. If Bill does nothing, the five workers on the track will be run over and killed.

X-Phi of Science in Philosophy Compass

I see that Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz have a new contribution up at Philosophy Compass on "Experimental Philosophy of Science". Here's the abstract:

Experimental philosophy of science gathers empirical data on how key scientific concepts are understood by particular scientific communities. In this paper we briefly describe two recent studies in experimental philosophy of biology, one investigating the concept of the gene, the other the concept of innateness. The use of experimental methods reveals facts about these concepts that would not be accessible using the traditional method of intuitions about possible cases. It also contributes to the study of conceptual change in science, which we understand as the result of a form of conceptual ecology, in which concepts become adapted to specific epistemic niches.

I think very highly of Karola and Paul's work, and it represents an extremely important type of x-phi work that perhaps doesn't get as much attention as some of the other x-phi work that interfaces more with mind/metaphysics/epistemology. Their experimental designs are terrific, and if nothing else, they put completely to rest the oft-heard claim that x-phi is nothing more than checking the gut intuitions of the untutored folk. If you don't already know their work, the Phil Compass piece is a great place to check it out.

Moral Judgments about Implicit Race Bias

I'm a social psychology graduate student working at UNC Chapel-Hill with Dr. Keith Payne, who specializes in unconscious and unintended cognitive processes.  In particular, our lab is interested in implicit race bias, or racial biases that are either outside of awareness or beyond our control.  Because awareness and control are typically considered the two main criteria for the ascription of moral responsibility, such biases present a problem for moral appraisal: do we punish discrimination regardless of the mental states involved, or do we exculpate the agent because he or she lacks awareness and control?  There are no easy answers to this question, and psychologists working in this field are all over the map in terms of the ethical implications of these findings.  Moreover, social psychologists in this field are being brought into courtrooms for disparate treatment cases, suggesting that at least legal conceptions are going to start being influenced by the science.  Yet no one has empirically examined the effects of theories of implicit bias upon people's intuitions about moral responsibility.

We recently collaborated with Joshua Knobe on a project investigating how people attribute moral responsibility for discrimination described in terms of implicit race bias.  Three types of discrimination were presented, in the contexts of promotions, renting, and grading.  In all cases, we presented an agent who endorses egalitarianism.  Yet for some reason or other, the agent fails to live up to these explicit principles, and discriminates.  What changed across conditions were the extra details:

- In the "Unconscious Condition', we suggested that implicit race bias is unconscious.  That is, the agent was unaware of the bias, and it led to discriminatory behavior.  Note that lack of awareness precludes the possibility of control.

- In the 'Automatic Condition', we suggested that the implicit race bias is automatic and uncontrollable.  That is, the agent was aware of the bias, but unable to prevent it from influencing bhavior.

- In the 'Folk Condition', we didn't provide any theory of implicit race bias to explain the discriminatory behavior, implying that the agent is a hypocrite who says one thing and does another.

The unconscious and automatic conditions represent the two prominent theoretical views about implicit race bias.  The design was between-subjects, so that each participant saw a scenario for only the unconscious, automatic, or folk conditions (and for one of the three discrimination contexts, which were there for generality, and no effects were expected across context).  They were then asked four questions about moral responsibility (i.e. 'Is John morally responsible ...', 'Should John be punished...' etc; though conceptually questions of moral responsibility and punishment/blame do come apart, the composite of these items had high reliability so was kept together). 

In the first study, people attributed significantly less moral responsibility in the unconscious condition compared to the other two conditions.  There was no significant difference in responsibility attributions between the automatic and folk conditions.  In a second study, we replicated this basic pattern and also tested for potential mediators.  There were three we had in mind.  First, maybe the lack of awareness implied by unconscious bias also implies lack of intent -- so maybe the agent lacked intent, and that's why she could not be held responsible.  Second, maybe the unconscious bias did not represent the agent's true self -- i.e. the agent could not have possibly endorsed an unconscious bias, so it shouldn't be counted as self-representative or blameworthy.  Third, maybe participants felt less negative emotion toward the agent in the unconscious condition.  It turns out that negative emotion was the only mediator.  In fact, the pattern of means for intent was the exact opposite of the pattern for moral responsibility!  In other words, people attributed the highest intent to discriminate to the agent in the unconscious condition, even though that agent was assigned the lowest moral responsibility; and vice versa for the folk condition. 

In the paper, we draw out potential social and ethical implications as well.  Anyhow, the full details of the paper can be viewed here:

http://www.unc.edu/~dcameron/Moral_Responsibility_3.17.08.pdf

Thanks for letting me post, I'd love to hear any and all feedback you all may have.

-Daryl

Bloom and Knobe

Paul Bloom and our own Joshua Knobe have an interesting exchange on Bloggingheads.tv about morality and religiosity here.  It's the second time Joshua has been on Bloggingheads.tv in the past few months--which is very exciting.  So, check it out!

Utilitarianism and the Brain

Guy Kahane and Nicholas Shackel have a new paper out in Nature that criticizes recent neuroscientific work on moral judgment and utilitarian bias.  One of their stalking horses is a paper by Koenigs et al. that also appeared recently in Nature.  The original Koenigs et al. paper can be found here and their reply to the Kahane and Shackel piece can be found here. 

If you want to see a truncated version of the line taken by Kahane and Shackel, head over to Ethics Etc. for an ongoing discussion here.  While you're there, you might want to participate in the reading group on Appiah's latest book as well!

Survey Driven Romanticism?

Simon Cullen--a student at Melbourne University working on a thesis under the direction of Frank Jackson and Neil Thomason--just sent me a link to a very interesting project that he has been working on that is entitled "Survey Driven Romanticism."  On the surface, at least, it appears that he has taken the time to flesh out some of Antti Kauppinen's worries about x-phi in greater detail.  More importantly, Simon has run studies of his own to support the claims he puts forward!  As such, this paper is certainly one that we should all read and address.  Here is the abstract (the link to the paper is here):

Survey-Driven Romanticism: What's wrong with experimental philosophy

Many experimental philosophers assume that subjects' intuitions about the intrinsic, philosophically interesting, features of survey-based thought-experiments can be simply ``read off'' from subjects' survey responses. The experimental results presented here demonstrate that this assumption is false: responses to some of the most influential (and oft quoted) experimental philosophy surveys vary systematically according to a variety of philosophically irrelevant factors.  I present the results of an eight-month study involving over 5,000 subjects---by far the largest in experimental philosophy yet.

I conclude that experimental philosophers have not yet managed to reveal folk intuitions about the philosophically interesting features of their survey vignettes. Rather, conversational norms and the formal pragmatic features of the surveys themselves provide meaningful and highly effective cues which subjects' rely on when reasoning about survey vignettes.  Further, slight and prima facie philosophically irrelevant variations to the semantic content of survey vignettes can drastically effect subject responses.

Despite experimental philosophers' insistence that they are ``unified behind ... the application of methods of experimental psychology to the study of the nature of intuitions'', they have worked largely in isolation from current and well-established social and cognitive scientific research on survey methodology.  Until this is corrected their results are likely to be of little philosophical significance.

Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience

How do the folk conceive of subjective experience? Do they think about subjectively experienced states, such as pain, feeling anger, and seeing red, in the way philosophers do? If not, what is the common-sense conception of subjective experience? And what would be the implications of a difference between the philosophical and the common-sense conceptions of subjective experience?

Justin Sytsma and I have finished new paper   on consciousness where we discuss exactly these questions. We provide some striking evidence that in contrast to philosophers, ordinary people do not have a concept of phenomenal consciousness: Ordinary people do not recognize that mental states such as pain and seeing red have phenomenal properties.

But if that is true, then how do people conceptualize their own subjective experience? Justin and I consider various hypotheses, but based on our findings, we conclude that for ordinary people, being subjectively experience is (or at least involves) having an affective component. Subjectivity is linked to affectivity, or so we argue.

Furthermore, we contend that this casts some doubts on whether there is any hard problem of consciousness to be solved. The reason, in a nutshell, is that if seeing red, being in pain, smelling banana had phenomenal properties, then ordinary people would have recognized these properties and they would conceive of their own subjective experience in the same way as philosophers.

Comments are as usual welcome.

Download two_conceptions_of_experience_sytsma_machery.pdf

Edouard

Interdisc. Approach to Philosophical Issues Conference

Jason Shepard, a student at the University of South Alabama, has notified me of a student conference and call for papers.  The conference's theme will be "At the crossroads of philosophy and psychology".  Papers in philosophy, philosophical psychology, cognitive science, moral psychology/philosophy, action theory, A.I., and rationality are welcome.  The keynote speaker is Joshua Knobe.  The submission deadline is August 1st.  This should prove to be very interesting and fun for those interested in interdisciplinary studies of a philosophical-scientific nature.  Thanks Jason!

X-Phi Goes Mainstream (Again)!

Joshua Knobe is at it yet again!  Psychology Today has recently started a blog entitled Experiments in Philosophy that is designed to introduce the general public to the work we do and its relevance to the philosophical enterprise.  I think this is yet another exciting development for we X-philes.  As it stands, Joshua's first post is up.  I highly recommend that you drop by and check it out--especially if you haven't seen and heard the X-phi anthem written and sung by Joshua's wife (the very talented Alina Simone).

Polling as Pedagogy

I thought some of you might be interested in a pedagogical piece that Eddy and I co-authored that just came out in Teaching Philosophy.  In short, we give a brief introduction to experimental philosophy and we try to show that formally polling students is a very useful way of teaching philosophy regardless of whether some traditional philosophers happen to think that it is not a useful way of doing academic philosophy.  We also provide an appendix that contains a number of thought experiments that could be used in the classroom.  There's obviously nothing philosophically high powered going on the article, but you may nevertheless enjoy it!

Download polling_as_pedagogy.pdf

Moral cognition at the Pacific APA

If you are attending the Pacific APA - or in the area - drop in on us when we launch the new journal Neuroethics (first issue available here). Rather than just talking about neuroethics, we will be doing it with a symposium on moral cognition (4-6 pm, Saturday March 22). The speakers are Adina Roskies (Dartmouth), Matthew Liao (Oxford) and Jim Woodward ( Caltech; kindly stepping in for Jeanette Kennett); the general theme will be neuroscience and moral intuitions.

Doing and Allowing

People ordinarily distinguish between doing and allowing. They distinguish between 'breaking' and 'allowing to break,' between 'raising' and 'allowing to rise,' between 'killing' and 'allowing to die.'  A question now arises as to how people make this distinction. How do people know, e.g., whether a given act counts as actually breaking something or merely allowing it to break? 

Fiery Cushman, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and I have a new paper on this question.  As you may by know have guessed, our thesis is that people draw the distinction in part by looking to the moral properties of the act in question.

Probably the best way to give you a sense for the idea here is just to describe one of the studies we conducted.  In our first study, all subjects were given a story about a person who ends up in the hospital.  The person is being kept alive by life-support systems, but then the doctor turns off these systems specifically for the purpose of making sure the person dies.  With the life-support systems now absent, the person's life soon ends.  Subjects are then asked whether it would be more accurate to say that the doctor 'ended' the person's life or that he 'allowed it to end.' 

Now comes the tricky part.  Subjects were randomly assigned either to the 'morally bad' condition or to the 'morally ambiguous' condition. Subjects in the morally bad condition were told that the doctor removed the life-support system because he despised the patient and did not want to use valuable resources on him; subjects on the morally ambiguous condition were told that the doctor turned off the life-support systems because he honestly believed that the patient would be better off not having to go on suffering.  (This latter condition is morally ambiguous in that those subjects who are in favor of euthanasia should regard it as morally good while those opposed to euthanasia should regard it as morally bad.) 

As expected, subjects in the morally bad condition tended to say that the doctor 'ended' the patient's life, while those in the morally ambiguous showed a more complex pattern.  Specifically, subjects who said that in general they regard euthanasia as morally bad tended to say that the doctor 'ended' the patient's life, while those who said that in general they regard euthanasia as morally good tended to say that he 'allowed' the patient's life to end.  These results suggest that people's use of the doing/allowing distinction depends in some way on their moral judgments.

In our actual paper, we mostly just present these results without offering much of a explanation, but we are very curious about how exactly one might explain the effect found here.  It seems like it might be helpful to think in a more general way about what the distinction between doing and allowing is all about and then to figure out how that distinction might relate to moral considerations.  Any suggestions?