In recent years experimental philosophy has emerged as an exciting new approach to the study of people’s philosophical intuitions. Experimental philosophers apply the methods of the social and cognitive sciences to the study of philosophical cognition. Previously, philosophers only used to work with a priori justifications. These are statements that can be deduced by pure reasoning and are independent from experience. Consider this proposition: “It rained for 24 hours straight, therefore it must have also rained at 7:44 am”. This is something you know a priori as you can deduce it by logical reasoning. Experimental Philosophers on the other hand understood that they should go out and conduct studies in which they systematically vary certain factors and then show how varying those factors will influence people’s applications of certain concepts.
One of the first findings of experimental philosophy was the effect that moral judgements had on people’s understanding of a certain situation. Joshua Knobe discovered that people’s way understanding the world seemed to be suffused through with moral considerations.
For example, Knobe found that moral judgements influenced people’s intuitions about the concept of intentional actions. This is the concept that distinguishes between things that people do intentionally, like reading a book, and things that people do unintentionally, like, say biting their own tongue. So, the question is: How does this distinction work? How do people normally decide whether an action was intentional or unintentional?
When first thinking about this, it might seem straightforward. It must have to do something with the mental state of the person doing the action, whether he knew he was doing it and whether he wanted to do it in the first place. Knobe thought that there was more to this. He felt that maybe people’s moral judgements were playing a role in their ascriptions of intentionality. So, it’s not enough just to know what they wanted to do, or what they knew – you also have to make a judgement about whether what they are doing is something that is morally good or morally bad.
In order to test his hypothesis, Knobe ran a simple study where he assigned participants into one of two groups. Each group was separated and was then presented with a situation. Participants in the first group got presented with the following situation (“harm scenario”):
“The vice-president of the company went to the chairman of the board and said, “We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, and it will also harm the environment.” The chairman of the board answered, “I don’t care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was harmed.”
And the associated question was: Did the chairman of the company harm the environment intentionally?
82% of the first group said that the chairman of the board harmed the environment intentionally. Again, one might think it has to do something with the mental state of the chairman – the fact that the chairman knew that he was going to harm the environment and had a choice but proceeded with the action anyway.
Let’s look at what happened to the second group. They were presented the exact same situation with one minor change. Instead of harming the environment, the new project was going to help the environment. So, group number two was presented with the following (“help scenario”):
“The vice-president of the company went to the chairman of the board and said, “We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, and it will also help the environment.” The chairman of the board answered, “I don’t care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” They started the new program. Sure enough, the environment was helped.”
And now the question was: Did the chairman help the environment intentionally?
Here the participants do not give the same response as group one. 77% of the second group stated that they felt that the chairman had helped the environment unintentionally.
Now you can notice the discrepancy – even though the mental state of the chairman was exactly the same in both scenarios the participants gave different responses in their ascriptions of intentionality of the chairman’s action. The only thing that had changed between the two scenarios was the moral behaviour of the chairman, or at least the moral judgement of the behaviour by the participants. In one case, the chairman is doing something bad and in the other case he is doing something good. Therefore, it seems that somehow moral judgements can affect the participants intuition about whether an action was intentional or not.
This phenomenon was confirmed over a variety of experiments and was labelled as the “Knobe effect”.
But what are some possible explanations for the Knobe effect?
Eduard Machery proposes a so called “trade-off hypothesis”. He thinks that most people interpret the harm scenario chairman case as one where the bad side effect is traded for some benefit, and we normally think such trades are done intentionally. Because there is a trade-off – a trade of a desired end along with a foreseen and bad consequence, and because we think of costs as being intentionally incurred, people judge the bad side effect to be brought about intentionally. Cases that involve good side effects are therefore not seen as intentional as there are no associated costs.
Machery tests the trade-off hypothesis with a pair of his own scenarios:
“Joe goes into a convenience store to buy a large drink. The cashier tells him that in doing so he gets a free cup. Joe doesn’t care about the free cup, he just wants their largest drink.”
Here, 55% of people responded that Joe did not obtain the free cup intentionally.
In the analogous case of the harm scenario, Joe wants to buy a large drink, but the price has gone up by a dollar. He doesn’t care about the dollar, as he just wants the largest drink. Here, 95% of the participants said that he paid the extra dollar intentionally.
Hence, in cases where there is a foreseen cost, people judge that it is brought about intentionally. But when there is an unintended, foreseen benefit, people tend to say that the side effect is not brought about intentionally.
The flaws of this theory are that the cases that Machery uses are problematic because it is not clear that they involve side effects. In the first case, the free cup Joe gets is not a side effect of buying a drink. Getting the free cup is not a separate event. Furthermore, in the second case, spending an extra dollar is not a side effect of getting a large drink. Joe spends the extra dollar as a means to the desired result, and thereby it is not a side effect.
Another possible explanation of the Knobe effect is the “Biasing Explanation” developed by Thomas Nadelhoffer. Nadelhoffer thinks that the perceived blameworthiness of the chairman fuels the asymmetry of the participants answers. In both cases, we naturally form negative impressions of the chairman, as he does not care about something that he should be caring about. For this reason, people do not want to praise the chairman for bringing about a good side effect, but they do want to blame him for bringing about a bad side effect.
Nadelhoff claims that negative affect generated in the chairman chases can explain the Knobe effect. He argues that the negative affect can bias one’s interpretations of the mental states of another person. He studied the judgments of couples that have fought. Because of the negative affect that is generated in these fights, the parties of the fight think that everything the other person does is intentional – even if it is not.
Likewise, because we think that the chairman has done something wrong by harming the environment, which triggers a negative reaction, our judgment about intentionality is biased. Because people see the chairman in a negative light, they are more likely to think that he brings about the harmful side effect intentionally.
There are many other possible explanations for the Knobe effect and more research has also been conducted about the effect that moral judgment has on our decision-making process, however I will be writing about those findings in a separate article. For now I would like the reader to be aware of the fact, that our decision making processes are not always as rational as they seem.