Side-effect Effect Without Side Effect

Hello everyone,

My name is Hichem, and I am new to this amazing blog. I mean, I have been reading it for a while, but never had a good reason to be added to the contributors list. Now I have one. Florian Cova and I have been performing an experimental study on the so-called 'Knobe Effect' and have found an interesting result: the Knobe effect is not restricted to intentionality judgments of ends, but is also found in intentionality judgments of means. We have indeed found that the same kind of asymmetry that was first discovered by Knobe in the case of ends is also to be found in cases of means. In other words: people are more inclined to judge a means to an end as performed intentionally if they consider it as morally wrong than if they consider it as morally right; a highly counter-intuitive result.

In our paper, we argue that this poses an important problem for the study of people's concept of intentional action: when we think we are studying people's concept of intentional action, are we really studying the folk-psychological concept of intentional action that philosophers have been concerned with, or are we instead dealing with something totally different? Put differently, when we engage in the experimental study of people's concept(s) of intention, are we really (and directly) probing the relevant concept(s), i.e. the concept(s) that is (are) part of the experimental philosopher's theoretical suitcase, or are we just engaging in the construction of phenomena that are far from the real-world realm (if any) of folk-concepts?

Here is the draft of the paper: Téléchargement KnobeEffectMeans

Comments are very welcome!

Comments

[Paul Torek]

Thanks Hichem, that was a nice bit of research.

I wonder if philosophers really do agree that all means are intended. I think this is a misleading appearance created by the large ethical debates about bad means and bad consequences. Some ethicists claim that both bad means and bad consequences are equally morally weighty, while others claim that bad means are more important than bad consequences for determining right action. The latter appeal to a difference of intention, while the former generally contend that intention is of little or no importance.

Both sides agree that bad means are intended. But little attention is paid to good means. It is taken for granted, I think, that ethical people will prefer good means to their ends, where possible. One does not inquire, in ethics, whether good means are intended; one simply hopes or presumes so.

I'll certainly grant that some philosophers have stated that all means to all ends are intended. But perhaps they were simply overgeneralizing based on a consideration of cases involving bad or neutral means.

[Joshua Knobe]

This is a very striking result you've got! Some philosophers might quibble about whether all of the cases you describe are genuine cases of an agent adopting a means to an end, but I think there's no denying that some of them are. So it seems like you two have really shown that the asymmetry is not specific to side effects after all.

I actually think this points to something important about the nature of the original asymmetry. Assuming you two are right, it seems like it would be pointless to try to explain that asymmetry using a theory that applies only to side effects in particular. Rather, it seems that the asymmetries we see in side effect cases are really just symptoms of a far broader phenomenon.