Thomas Nadelhoffer, et al. (from the Experimental Philosophy Blog) invite you to take a walk on the other side of experimental philosophy by being part of a survey that will compare/contrast the intuitions of philosophers and non-philosophers on a variety of topics. Follow this link for the fun....
The newly-created European Review of Philosophy and Psychology is calling for papers for a special issue on experimental philosophy. The editors welcome papers that report new experimental results, papers that engage in philosophical or theoretical reflection on existing results, or papers that address metaphilosophical questions about the very idea of experimental philosophy.
Papers can either support or oppose the project of using experimental data to address philosophical issues. Both highly empirical and highly philosophical work are very welcome.
The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2008.
Psychologist Wray Herbert has written an article for Newsweek about happiness. The title is “Can You Be Too Happy?” How could you be too happy? Too happy for what? Sounds crazy. Let’s take a look!
It is often supposed that people are not morally responsible for their behavior when that behavior is the product of non-culpable ignorance, but the issue becomes considerably more complex when the ignorance in question is concerned only with moral truths. Suppose that an agent knows all of the relevant non-moral facts but simply fails to know the moral truths that would allow her to figure out that a particular action is wrong. Is she morally responsible for her action?
Unfortunately for those who think that this question admits of an easy answer, our own David Shoemaker has just conducted a dazzling experimental study that raises some very interesting and difficult new philosophical issues here.
First, he presented subjects with a case modeled on Susan Wolf's story of JoJo:
JoJo is the favorite son of Jo the First, an evil and sadistic dictator of a small, undeveloped country, entirely cut off from the outside world. Because of his father’s special feelings for the boy, JoJo is given a special education and is allowed to accompany his father and observe his daily routine. In light of this treatment, little JoJo, who worships his father (as most boys do), takes his father as a role model and develops values just like his dad’s. As an adult, JoJo does the same sorts of things his father did, including sending people to prison or to death or to torture chambers on the basis of whim. He does these things because he sincerely believes they are morally right, and he is aware of no reason to think otherwise. One day, a peasant sneezes as JoJo walks by, so JoJo heads over to the peasant and punches him in the face, just like his father would have done. He feels no guilt afterwards.
Other subjects were presented with a case exactly like this one except that it described JoJo as having all of the relevant moral knowledge. Just as one might expect, subjects thought that JoJo was less morally blameworthy when they were told that he suffered from moral ignorance than they were when they were told that he had the relevant moral knowledge. So far, no surprises.
But now comes the surprising part. In another condition, Shoemaker presented subjects with a story in which JoJo's action is morally praiseworthy:
JoJo is the favorite son of Jo the First, an evil and sadistic dictator of a small, undeveloped country, entirely cut off from the outside world. Because of his father’s special feelings for the boy, JoJo is given a special education and is allowed to accompany his father and observe his daily routine. In light of this treatment, little JoJo, who worships his father (as most boys do), takes his father as a role model and develops values just like his dad’s. As an adult, he does the same sorts of things his father did, including sending people to prison or to death or to torture chambers on the basis of whim. He does these things because he sincerely believes they are morally right, and he is aware of no reason to think otherwise. One day, a peasant sneezes as JoJo walks by, so JoJo heads over to the peasant to punch him in the face, just like his father would have done. As he’s pulling back his fist, though, he suddenly feels compassion and discovers that he can’t bring himself to punch the peasant, even though he still believes it’s the right thing to do. He thus backs away and lets the peasant go free, even though he believes that doing so is immoral, and he feels quite guilty afterwards.
Here again, the intuitions of subjects who received this story could be compared with intuitions of subjects who received a story that was almost exactly the same except that JoJo had all of the relevant knowledge. But this time, there was no difference in moral judgments. Subjects thought that JoJo was no less praiseworthy when he didn't know he was doing the right thing as when he did know.
In other words, there seems to be an asymmetry such that moral ignorance makes people think an agent is less blameworthy but does not make people think the agent is less praiseworthy. I actually find myself having the very same intuitions, but it's hard to see exactly why this asymmetry is arising. Is there some more general principle from which all of the intuitions we see here can be derived?
Check out this interview on MSNBC with Psychiatrist Dr. Donald E. Rosen, conducted by MSNBC health editor Jane Weaver. I’m breaking it down FJM-style.
In James Rachels’ famous article, “Active and Passive Euthanasia,” he argues that, if the only relevant difference between active and passive euthanasia is that the former involves killing and the latter involves letting die, then that difference is not a morally relevant difference if there’s no morally relevant difference between killing and letting die. And indeed, he argues, there is no morally relevant difference between killing and letting die, a conclusion drawn from the Bathtub Case (which, along with Judith Thomson’s Violinist Analogy, is one of the most famous thought experiments in moral philosophy). Now there’s indeed a lesson to be learned here, but I don’t believe it’s the one Rachels had in mind. Instead, I think there’s a really interesting lesson about the asymmetry of our patterns of blame and praise to be had.
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and I are running a series of experimental studies on the doing/allowing distinction, and we'd love to have your input on some of the results.
In essence, we want to show that people's moral judgments can sometimes determine whether they classify a given case as 'doing' or 'allowing,' and we then want to gain a better understanding of how this effect arises. So we put together two cases that are extremely similar in most respects but which differ in their moral status.
In both cases, a patient is suffering from a cancer that would normally kill him, but he is attached up to a machine that prevents the cancer from having its normal effect. Then the doctor comes in and shuts off the machine. The patient immediately dies.
In the 'morally good' case, subjects were told that the patient wants to die and the doctor is acting in accordance with his wishes. In the 'morally bad' case, subjects were told that the patient does not want to die but the doctor hates him and therefore detaches the machine anyway. (If you'd like, you can read the original questionnaires.)
The results showed a striking asymmetry. Subjects said the doctor killed the patient in the morally bad case but not in the morally good case.
We also asked subjects a question about causation. Here again, we found an asymmetry. Subjects said that the doctor caused the death in the morally bad case but not in the morally good case.
Moreover, further statistical analyses showed that people's causation judgments predicted their judgments about killing even controlling for their judgments about whether the action was morally right or morally wrong.
These results suggest a hypothesis about the way in which moral judgment feeds into the doing/allowing distinction. Perhaps the connection is an indirect one. Moral judgment might play a role in the concept of causation, and the concept of causation might in turn play a role in the doing/allowing distinction itself.
Does that seem like a plausible view?
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