Causal Judgment and Moral Judgment

It is now widely believed that people's moral judgments can affect their causal judgments, but a great deal of confusion remains about precisely why this effect arises.

For a simple example, consider the following case:

The receptionist in the philosophy department keeps her desk stocked with pens. The administrative assistants are allowed to take the pens, but faculty members are supposed to buy their own.

The administrative assistants typically do take the pens. Unfortunately, so do the faculty members. The receptionist has repeatedly emailed them reminders that only administrative assistants are allowed to take the pens.

On Monday morning, one of the administrative assistants encounters Professor Smith walking past the receptionist's desk. Both take pens. Later that day, the receptionist needs to take an important message… but she has a problem. There are no pens left on her desk.

Faced with this case, most subjects say that the professor did cause the problem but that the administrative assistant did not cause the problem. Yet it seems that the only major difference between these two agents lies in the moral status of what they are doing. How could this moral difference be making a difference in people's causal judgments?

Christopher Hitchcock and I have a new suggestion about what might be going on here. Our hypothesis draws on the idea that people's causal judgments are based on counterfactual reasoning. On this approach, people evaluate the two causal claims presented here by considering two counterfactual scenarios:

• If the professor had not taken a pen,...
• If the administrative assistant had not taken a pen,...

The thought then is that people's moral judgments affect the degree to which they regard each of these counterfactuals as relevant. When they consider the counterfactual about the professor, it strikes them as a highly relevant one, which would certainly be worth considering. By contrast, when they consider the counterfactual about the administrative assistant, it strikes them as entirely irrelevant. (Why would anyone even want to know what would have happened under these circumstances?)

So the overall idea is that causal judgments draw on counterfactual reasoning but that people's intuitions about the relevance of counterfactuals are affected by moral judgments... and moral judgments therefore end up indirectly affecting people's causal judgments.

[For more details, see our new paper (or this very brief discussion).]

Comments

[Sven Nyholm]

Hi Josh,

I wonder what happens if you change the example so that one pen was taken by the assistant whereas the other pen was taken, not by Prof Smith, but by the dog of the secretary. The secretary is still unable to write down the important message. Are people going to say that the dog caused the problem by taken the other pen, rather than saying that the assistant did this? Somehow I suspect that they would. But, the dog is not morally responsible for what happened, and so there is no moral consideration here to make people consider only one counterfactual.

But, in this case, if something like the counterfactual reasoning idea is true in some form, what causes people to only consider the counterfactual with the dog might be that it is somehow unusual that a dog would be in somebody's office taking their pens, while an assistant's doing this would be nothing out of the ordinary.

I am not sure exactly where I am going with this, but it seems to me that we could probably generate these kinds of asymmetries in causal judgments just by making some part of the story more salient or noteworthy than some other part. In the immoral professor case, what's more noteworthy and more salient is that somebody disregarded the secretary's request that only assistants take pens, whereas in the dog case what's more noteworthy or salient is that a dog was present and took her pen.

[Sam Liao]

I quite like Sven's example, but I think it shows a different hypothesis than the one he's trying to show. From my own judgment of his case, it seems that another thing that might matter for moral responsibility judgments is the person (or dog)'s place on the social hierarchy. It might be that we attribute more responsibility to those who are higher on the social ladder. That seems another thing worth testing at least.

[Jonathan Weinberg]

Sven and Sam, y'all may want to look at some of the psychological work on counterfactual thinking, which has developed theories of a number of different ways in which a part of a situation can trigger "but what if..." thinking. See, e.g., Ruth Byrne's _The Rational Imagination_, which is very accessible.

[Sven Nyholm]

Thanks for the reference, Jonathan!

[Joshua Knobe]

Thanks for these helpful comments!

As Jonathan points out, there has been a lot of great research on the factors that trigger counterfactual thinking. The key piece of evidence for the hypothesis Chris and I are putting forward is that many of these same factors also have an impact on causal judgments.

Take Sven's example. In this case, the factor that triggers counterfactual thinking is not the moral badness of a certain event but rather its unusualness. Yet we still end up seeing precisely the same effect on people's ultimate causal judgments. Cases like this one provide evidence that the availability of counterfactuals really does lie at the heart of people's ordinary intuitions about causal selection.

(Of course, Sam may be right about what is going on in Sven's specific example, but there are other cases in which it does seem that a hypothesis like Sven's actually would be correct.)

[Jussi Suikkanen]

I wonder if people are really making a *causal* judgment in this case. It would seem odd to think that people would think that *problems* are the rights sorts of beasts to be in causal relations in the first place. To me it seems like problems are probably in quite a wrong sort of ontological category.

To be more charitable to the folk-judgments, I wonder if this is again one of those reason/cause ambiguities. People say that x caused the problem but what they really have in mind is for what reason there is a problem. And that seems like inherently normative question for which the moral status of the agents is relevant.

[Sven Nyholm]

Hi Jussi,

it seems to me that we could interpret "the problem" as referring to the secretary's being unable to write down the important message. And, the secretary's not being in a position to write down some message seems to be a beast of the right sort to enter into causal relation. So, there is, or so it seems, an interpretation of what we mean by "the problem" here that makes it okay, as far as interpretational charity goes, to attribute causality judgments to the folk.

(Something's being a problem may not be the right sort of property for causal thinking, but the thing that is the problem could, I am assuming, certainly be.)

[Jussi Suikkanen]

Sven,

I agree that that interpretation is possible. The question is did the subjects have that in mind when they were filling in the questionnaire or were they looking for explanatory reasons or rationalisations. I wonder if they had in mind the latter instead of causal relations.

[Jill Cumby]

Thanks for the interesting paper!

A question did arise while I was reading it. You claim that the purpose of people's concept of actual causation is to allow for effective interventions. I wonder what you would think about causal explanations that identify causes which do not allow for intervention? I'm thinking about cases like, "Why did Bob get hit by lighting?" where the response might identify bad luck or chance as the cause (supposing there is no norm which Bob is breaking which would make it more likely that he get hit by lightning then anyone else). It does not seem one could intervene in these 'causes' but nevertheless they do seem to be identified in explanations.

[Joshua Knobe]

Jussi and Sven,

This is definitely an interesting avenue for further investigation, and I would love to explore it experimentally. I wonder, though, whether people ever actually do use the word 'cause' to express reason explanations. Thus, suppose my reason for going into philosophy is that I think it is a fascinating field. It would sound bizarre in such a case to say 'His belief caused him to go into philosophy' or 'The fascinatingness of philosophy caused him to go into the field.' So I am tempted to say that the use of the word 'cause' in this study might indicate that we are not giving a reason explanation. Does that sound right to you?

Jill,

This is a very good point, which gets at the core of interventionist approaches to causation. The usual answer is that people use certain criteria because those criteria *generally* allow us to find effective interventions but that we continue to use those criteria even in cases where no intervention is possible.

[Jussi Suikkanen]

Joshua,

well, discussions like the following seem natural:
'What made you do it?'
'I did it because I wanted to ...'.

All this seems very close to causal language even if I would want to read it as talk about reasons.

Furthermore claims like 'the professor caused the receptionist to be unable to write the important letter' sound pretty unnatural to me. More natural would be 'the receptionist is unable to write the letter because the professor took the pen' or 'there's a problem because of what the professor did'. And again, that because doesn't need to be the because of causal explanations.

[Joshua Knobe]

Jussi,

What you say here sounds exactly right, but I wonder why this is happening. Why do you think it is that it sounds wrong to say 'The professor caused the receptionist to be unable...'?

[Jussi Suikkanen]

I wish I knew. I'm not a native English speaker... But, when I think about it, there are not that many constructions in which 'to cause' is used as a verb and which sound natural. Some of them are in scientific talk but maybe we don't use these constructions in ordinary language that much given that we have always more specific verbs about how the causing happened. To use merely the verb 'to cause' would then violate the maxim governing conversation according to which one must be informative.

[Avram Hiller]

Josh – thanks for the interesting post. I didn’t read your paper, so apologies if you’ve responded to these issues there. Two thoughts:

1) You were careful to craft the original example so that the professors’ taking the pens was normal, thus controlling for that factor; then, in Sven’s example, something abnormal happens, and so the judgment can be explained that way (as you do explain it in your comment above). But what about the following scenario: the professors overhear someone say that it is OK for them to take the pens, but this was actually taken out of context so they had no way of knowing that. They regularly take the pens (thus fitting that control in the experiment), and also, they are not morally culpable for taking them. The administrative assistant regularly emails them to tell them not to, but for some reason - again, not their fault - they don’t get the messages (perhaps a spam filter stops them). But it still seems like one should say that the professor taking the pen caused the problem. If this is right, then it is likely because there is another factor at play: The fact that we assume that the administrative assistant planned for a certain number of pens being taken without counting how many the professors would take. The reason why we say that the professor caused the problem is because it was aberrant relative to the assumed plan. I think this is at play in your original example, too, and Sven’s as well. There’s more to say about that, but I’ll leave it there for now.

2) This example got off the ground without anything experimental or empirical going on. This supports my theory that the reason why experimental philosophy is so compelling has nothing to do with experiments; it simply has to do with Josh’s and others’ incredible ingenuity in crafting these examples. Whether they run them by test subjects seems to me to be absolutely beside the point. It seems like what’s going on in this thread is exactly analogous to what experimental philosophers disdain: Gettier and post-Gettier style analysis of a concept through thought experiments. I take Josh to be the Gettier for the 21st century – only much more productive. I hope you take that as a compliment!

[April Ann McAllister]

I didn't get a chance to respond to this entry when i initially read it,but thought it to be very compelling in contemplation.... so now that i have a second:

It seems to me the system should have changed long before the encounter of a “very important message.” Attempts were clearly made, REPEATED email reminders etc. I don’t see why it appears so natural to conclude the professor did cause the problem, when the professor had no control over the pen distribution, the emails, the desk, knowing whether or not pens were properly stocked or when they needed to be, and why. It seems fine to have a starting point of reflection with the professor, because the effect wouldn’t have been so if not for his decisions and actions. But to label the professor as the cause of the problem almost feels lethargic. An effect seems much different than a problem, so while the professor could have caused an effect through a problem, this seems very different than him causing a problem. For those whom wish to affirm that the inability to write a very important message is the ‘problem’ I would like to suggest the understanding that a problem is something that has a solution. There isn’t much ground in putting together the moment of needing a pen, and not having one…. So the causal judgments begin formulating a problem. If the professor writes the problem, (causes it) the solution is one that can ultimately be reduced(we have “more” problems to work out). If the receptionist writes the problem (causes it) the solution is reduced to its simplest form, and is then applicable, something like you could insert the solution into the problem and have no more questions at all. This is because the receptionist has the capability to do the things already done in a different new way, but only through the most reduced solution, or best applied problem. It seems moral judgment gives the necessary “order” of operations(the way in which the solution is carried on), while counterfactuals produce infinite variables the problem might need in importing a solution.