Robin Scaife and I have a new paper on intentional side-effects forthcoming in Journal of Moral Philosophy. You can download a draft here.
The paper argues against the consensus view that experiments have shown a normative dimension to the folk concept of intentional action (or at least to its application).
Our preferred hypothesis is that the outcome of an action is classified as intentional only if the agent is taken to have assigned it some relative importance when deciding what to do.
We argue that the existing experiments support this hypothesis and we present data from two experiments of our own that we claim can only be explained by our hypothesis.
Our hypothesis is broader than Machery’s cost–benefit analysis account, since cost in relation to benefit is only one among various ways in which relative importance can be assigned to a side-effect. We argue that our hypothesis explains the data Mallon presents against Machery as well as Machery’s data (and Knobe’s data, Nadelhoffer’s data, our data, and more).
Over the course of the paper, we develop a methodological critique of the preceding literature. We are particularly concerned with the effect that changing one word in a vignette (e.g. changing ‘harm’ for ‘help’ in Knobe’s original experiment) has on the way the reader takes other sentences in the vignette (e.g. ‘I don’t care at all about the environment!’).
We also introduce qualitative analysis of the comments provided by respondents and reflect on the relation between these and the respondents’ actual practice in applying the concept ‘intentional’. From this, we sketch a picture of the relation between experimental philosophy and more traditional conceptual analysis.
Enjoy.
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