Experimental Philosophy

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?

The Pervasive Impact of Moral Judgment

It is now widely agreed that people's moral judgments can affect their intutions about whether or not a behavior was performed intentionally, but considerable disagreement remains about what exactly this effect might be telling us.  Some researchers have suggested that the effect observed for intuitions about intentional action is pointing us toward some more general truth about the fundamental relationship between folk psychology and moral judgment, while others argue that the effect just happens to arise because of some quirky feature of the concept of intentional action in particular. 

In hopes of making progress on this question,  Dean Pettit and I conducted a series of new studies.  In essence, we checked to see whether the effect observed for attributions of intentional action would also arise for other concepts.  The answer is that it does.  In fact, the very same patterns observed for the concept intentionally also arise for the concepts desire, deciding, intending, in favor of, opposed to, and advocating. 

For example, suppose that a person decides to implement a policy.  He is trying to attain a particular goal, but he knows that the policy will also bring about a certain side-effect.  Did he decide to bring about the side-effect?  The typical answer: he did decide if the side-effect was a bad one, but he did not decide if the side-effect was a good one. 

Or suppose that a person makes a speech in favor of a policy.  He says that we should adopt the policy because it will help us to attain a particular goal, but he also mentions that it will bring about a side-effect.  Did he advocate bringing about the side-effect?  Once again,  people's intuitions depend on the status of the side-effect itself.  If the side-effect is bad, he advocated it;  if good, he did not. 

At this point, Dean and I are thinking that it might not be helpful to continue trying to understand this effect in terms of something very specific about the concept of intentional action in particular.  What is needed, it seems, is a deeper and more general theory about the relationship between moral judgment and the rest of cognition. 

[For further details, you can download the full paper.]

Mixing Memory Post

Here.  I think that the findings and methods used by Dijksterhuisa et al. might be of interest and importance to experimental philosophers.

Collective Agency: From Intuitions to Mechanisms

Dear X-philies,

My colleague Benoit Dubreuil and I recently finished a paper that you might be interested in. We discuss the question of  collective agency and show how, in the first sections how some  x-phi  experiments (e.g. Knobe and Prinz) plays an important role in this debate. Comments welcome !

Hardy-Vallée,B & Dubreuil, B.  Collective Agency: From Intuitions to Mechanisms(pdf)

Abstract:

The debate on the nature of collective agency has been at the center of the philosophy of the social sciences for the last century. In recent years, philosophy of language has been the dominant approach to a debate that has often been reduced to the question of the legitimacy of interpreting collective agency on the basis of folk-psychological categories like belief and desire. In this article, we argue that the debate between individualists and collectivists is currently stagnating, but can be revived by a more empirically sensitive approach to agency. Understanding agents, collective or individual, requires an understanding of the mechanisms that bring about and maintain agency. Collective agents, we suggest, are legitimate constructs in social ontology, but their agency is special. Although they implement control mechanisms similar to that of individual agents, they do not have a conscious first-person point of view. Therefore, like individualists, we recognize the ontological salience of individual agency, and like collectivists, we recognize the soundness of collective agents. However, we reject the folk-psychological account of agency (shared by individualists and collectivists) and favor a mechanistic one.

The "Deep Self" Model

Hi all,

Like many others,  I've contracted a bad case of "Knobe Effect" fever!  I've written a paper on a model, which I call the Deep Self Model, that attempts to explain a variety of asymmetries in intentionality and responsibility judgments using a unified framework.

Quoting from the abstract, "The model proposes that people make an intuitive distinction between two parts of an agent’s psychology, a Deep Self that contains the agent’s stable and central psychological attitudes and a Superficial Self that contains attitudes that are less central and more fleeting".  An intriguing aspect of the model is that the distinction between an agent's Deep Self and Superficial Self is one already made by, or is implicit in the work of, a number of philosophers including Harry Frankfurt, Gary Watson and others.  Thus I hope the Deep Self Model will help anchor the recent asymmetry findings from the experimental literature in an already familiar and well accepted philosophical framework.

I would much welcome any comments and feedback.

-Chandra

Download sripada_the_deep_self_model_and_asymmetries_in_folk_judgments_about_intentionality_and_responsibility.doc

Ulatowski on Act Individuation

Imagine  a person who is pumping water and thereby poisoning the inhabitants of a nearby house.  Now consider the act of pumping water and the act of poisoning the inhabitants.  Are these two different actions, or are we just confronted here with two different descriptions of the very same action?

This highly abstract metaphysical issue was the topic of heated philosophical debate a number of decades ago.  Famously, Anscombe and Davidson argued that there was only one action under two different descriptions, while Goldman argued that there truly were two different actions. 

More recently, however, the issue has returned, this time in the form of experimental studies by Joe Ulatowski, and he has obtained some very surprising results. 

Apparently, people's intuitions about act individuation depend on the moral properties of the acts involved.  Thus, there seems to be an asymmetry such that people tend to adopt the Anscombe/Davidson view about morally bad actions while adopting the Goldman view about morally good actions. 

In Ulatowski's study, each subject was randomly assigned to one of two conditions.  Subjects in the 'poison condition' received the following vignette:

Smith’s job is to pump water into the cistern which supplies the water of a house.

 

One day Smith operates the pump and replenishes the house’s water-supply. The occupants of the house are healthy and have no health problems. Jones tells Smith that someone has found a way of systematically contaminating the water’s source with a deadly cumulative poison whose effects are unnoticeable until they can no longer be cured.

 

Smith says, “I don’t care about contaminating the water’s source; I just want to earn my pay.”

 

The occupants of the house drink the water. Sure enough, they are poisoned and die.

These subjects were then asked: 'Was Smith’s operating the pump the same thing as his poisoning the house’s inhabitants or were they distinct?'

Meanwhile, subjects in the 'savior condition' were given a slightly different vignette:

Smith’s job is to pump water into the cistern which supplies the water of a house.

 

One day Smith operates the pump and replenishes the house’s water-supply. The occupants of the house are sick and have severe infections. Jones tells Smith that someone has found a way of systematically purifying the water’s source with a cumulative antibiotic whose effects are unnoticeable until they cure someone who has a severe infection.

 

Smith says, “I don’t care about purifying the water’s source; I just want to earn my pay.”

 

The occupants of the house drink the water. Sure enough, they are saved and live.

These subjects were asked: 'Was Smith’s operating the pump the same thing as his saving the house’s inhabitants or were they distinct?'

The results showed a huge asymmetry.  A full 61% of subjects selected 'the same thing' in the poison condition, while only 13% selected this option in the savior condition. 

Ulatowski uses these results to argue that moral judgments are actually affecting people's intutions about the metaphysical problem of act individuation.  But if he is right here, it seems that we are still left with a further question.  That question is about why moral judgment would have that sort of impact. 

I must confess that I am completely baffled as to how to answer this question, and I was wondering if any of you might have any suggestions. 

[Ulatowski's paper is available for download at Ulatowski.doc]

Different moral values lead to differential Knobe effects

Hi Everyone-

For those following the "Knobe vs. Machery Deathmatch" post, just wanted to post a paper that I have been working on (in collaboration with Pete Ditto and David Pizarro), which I believe bears upon the issue. We examined how individual differences in moral values produce different intentionality judgments, which we believe speaks against the notion of the trade-off hypothesis as a complete explanation to the Knobe effect.

Of course, comments on the paper are always welcome.

Download 2ndyear_paper.pdf

Knobe vs. Machery Deathmatch

I've recently done some experiments exploring Edouard Machery's "trade-off hypothesis" explanation for the Knobe-effect (in very much the same terrain as Mark Phelan and Hagop Sarkissian's paper linked below).

I began thinking about the issue on a trip to Indiana in February, when I wondered about how to distinguish the the trade-off hypothesis from the (sometime) Knobe view that it is the badness of the side-effect that drives the difference.  My strategy was to reproduce the Knobe-effect asymmetry in cases that cannot plausibly be construed as trade-offs, undermining the trade-off explanation of the asymmetry. 

I'd be very interested in thoughts, comments or criticisms any of you might have.

Download Deathmatchfinal.doc

Order Effect and the Knobe Effect

Edward Cokely and I have found something interesting about the Knobe Effect. It seems as if when people are given both the good and bad versions of the chairman cases an order effect is created with responses to the “harm” scenario. In fact, the effect is so pronounced that when people are given the harm case first they say that the chairman performs the action intentionally; yet, when the harm case is presented after the “help” case, people tend to say that the chairman did not intentionally harm the environment.

We were intrigued by this result, and wondered what might account for it. In follow up studies, we found that the participant's sex does. In short, the responses given by women account for the order effect. To speculate, we favor the hypothesis that women and men represent the task differently. Soon we hope to start studies that explore these possibly different representations.

Again, any and all comments will be greatly appreciated!

You can see short papers on both the original order effect here and the follow up study on sex differences here.

Paper on the Trade-off Hypothesis

Hagop and I have just finished a new paper on the concept of intentional action.  A large portion of the paper is devoted to challenging Edouard's Trade-off Hypothesis, though we also offer some more general considerations about the current debate concerning the concept of intentional action.  If you are interested in cutting to the chase and examining our new evidence against the trade-off view, you should look directly at section 2.3 (though 2.1 provides some relevant background to this section).  We would, of course, be excited to receive comments on any and all parts of the paper.  Hopefully, this will help to spur new interest in the topic, ahead of a panel on these issues at the Central APA in two weeks. 

The Paper: Download trading_for_tradeoff.doc