Experimental Philosophy

What does the experimental evidence actually say about the stability of moral intuitions?

Suppose you are sitting at your desk, reflecting on a moral question. Now suppose that as you are reflecting on this question, you happen to be looking around at a somewhat disgusting scene. Perhaps there is a half-eaten apple on the desk, or a bad smell in the room, or maybe you just didn't have an opportunity to wash your hands. 

I sometimes encounter the claim that experimental studies have shown that people's moral intuitions can be pushed around in surprising ways by subtle situational factors like these. It is then sometimes suggested that philosophers need to think more about the deeper philosophical implications of this kind of 'instability' in our moral intuitions.

 

This claim strikes me as a serious misrepresentation of the present state of the empirical literature. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that existing studies provide evidence that these factors do not influence people's moral intuitions. At the very least, it would be hard to deny that a whole bunch of recent studies suggest that people's moral intuitions are surprisingly stable. 

Actually, women are MORE likely to share their (mostly-male) professors' intuitions...

...at least for the 9 questions I studied for my 2013 paper, and for the 3 of those that Buckwaler and Stitch included in their widely-discussed paper on the subject. Plus: why has philosophy made so much less progress toward gender equality than the STEM disciplines have over the past two decades? I address these issues in my new article in Hypatia.

Chomsky and Moral Philosophy

Some experimental philosophers might be interested in "Chomsky and Moral Philosophy," a new paper I recently posted on SSRN.   It will appear in the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (J. McGilvray, ed), which is due out later this year.  Here is the abstract:

Every great philosopher has important things to say about moral philosophy. Chomsky is no exception. Chomsky’s remarks on this topic, however, are not systematic. Instead, they consist mainly of brief and occasional asides. Although often provocative, they tend to come across as digressions from his central focus on linguistics and related disciplines, such as epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Perhaps as a result, moral philosophers have paid relatively little attention to Chomsky over the past sixty years.

This neglect is unfortunate. Chomsky’s insights into the nature and origin of human morality are fundamental and penetrating. They address deep philosophical problems that have shaped the aims of moral philosophy for centuries. They also reinforce many of the lessons Chomsky has taught about the nature and origins of human language. Elaborating upon these themes, this chapter begins by recounting two of Chomsky’s most extensive discussions of moral philosophy, each of which draws attention to the fact that, like linguistic knowledge, moral knowledge is an example of Plato’s problem: a complex mental competence characterized by a profound poverty of the stimulus. The chapter then places these remarks in a broader context by providing a brief discussion of mentalist, modular, and nativist theories of moral cognition from Plato to the present. Finally, the chapter responds to one prominent criticism of Chomsky’s naturalistic approach to moral philosophy, that of the late philosopher, Bernard Williams. I argue that Williams’ “Wittgensteinian” skepticism about moral rules is no more convincing than a similar skepticism about grammatical rules in the context of linguistic theory.

Knowledge of being manipulated does not affect moral responsibility. What?!

This past semester I was working with Fiery Cushman and an RA (Becca Ramos) on some studies on manipulation and moral responsibility and we ended up with some findings that I'm completely puzzled by, so I thought I'd see if you all have any ideas about them. (In case you want to read more on the background x-phi work on manipulation, you can find some of that: here, here, here, and here). 

One of the things I wanted to test was the intuitive idea that a critical aspect of being manipulated was not knowing that you were being manipulated. Intuitively, it seems like one is more responsible for doing an immoral action when you are aware that the environment has been set up so that you'll do that action. To test this basic idea, we designed a relatively simple study.

In one condition, the manipulated agent didn't know they were being manipulated:

In the 1950s, the government of a small Eastern European country plotted to secretly start a war, using industrial workers, and get revenge on a neighboring country. For the first part of their plan, the government intentionally destroyed farm machinery and set fire to several food stores on purpose. As a result, there was a serious lack of food in the country. Soon the people living in the city couldn't get enough food to feed themselves. The whole city shut down, crime skyrocketed and a small but violent uprising broke out.

The government knew their plan was working perfectly. Right at that time, a group of industrial workers heard on the government news channel that a neighboring village had a surplus of food. After hearing the news, the group of industrial workers raided the small village on the country's border, stealing food from the farmers and killing innocent people. The government had known this would happen all along and felt great about their successful plan.

In the other condition, the agent did know that they were being manipulated (differences in italics):

In the 1950s, the government of a small Eastern European country plotted to secretly start a war, using industrial workers, and get revenge on a neighboring village. For the first part of their plan, the government intentionally destroyed farm machinery and set fire to several food stores on purpose. As a result, there was a serious lack of food in the country. Soon the people living in the city couldn't get enough food to feed themselves. The whole city shut down, crime skyrocketed and a small but violent uprising broke out. The government knew their plan was working perfectly.

Not long after, a couple of the industrial workers were informed by some government employees about the government’s plan to use the workers to attack the neighboring village.

Right at that time, a group of industrial workers heard on the government news channel that a neighboring village had a surplus of food. After hearing the news, the group of industrial workers raided the small village on the country's border, stealing food from the farmers and killing innocent people. The government had known this would happen all along and felt great about their successful plan.

We also included a condition in which the agent was not being manipulated (the government had no intention for the workers to attack the village). We used five different scenarios in total. Each participant read a single vignette and then was asked whether they agreed or disagreed with a statement of the form:

• The workers should be blamed for the damage to the neighboring village. 

Here's the pattern of results we got:

 

A Response to Critiques of Cushman's and My Work on Philosophers' Susceptibility to Order Effects

The order in which moral dilemmas are presented matters to people's judgments and can substantially influence later judgments about abstract moral principles. This is true even among professional ethicists with PhD's in philosophy. In 2012 and 2015, Fiery Cushman and I published empirical evidence supporting these claims. We invite a metaphilosophical conclusion: If even professional philosophers' expert judgments are easily swayed by order of presentation, then such judgments might not be stable enough to serve as secure grounds for philosophical theorizing.

Synthese has recently published two critiques of the literature on order effects in philosophy, which address Fiery's and my work (HT Wesley Buckwalter). Both critiques make valuable points. However both also admit of some clear replies.

To fix ideas, consider two versions of the famous Trolley Problem:

Push: A runaway boxcar is headed toward five people it will kill if nothing is done. Jane can stop the boxcar by pushing a hiker with a heavy backpack in front of the boxcar, killing him but saving the five.

Switch: A runaway boxcar is headed toward five people it will kill if nothing is done. Vicki can stop the boxcar by flipping a switch to divert it to a sidetrack where it will kill one person instead of the five.

Fiery and I presented Push-type and Switch-type scenarios (fleshed with a bit more detail) to professional philosophers and two comparison groups of non-philosophers. We found that when professional philosophers saw a Push-type scenario before a Switch-type scenario, 73% rated the two scenarios equivalently on a 7-point scale. Then later in the questionnaire when asked about the Doctrine of the Double Effect -- a moral principle often interpreted implying that Push-type cases are morally worse than Switch-type cases -- only a minority, 46%, endorsed that principle. In contrast, among philosophers who saw Switch before Push only 54% rated the two scenarios equivalently, and then later a majority, 62%, endorsed the Doctrine of the Double Effect. Endorsement of the principle thus seemed to shift, post-hoc, to rationalize philosophers' order-manipulated judgments about the scenarios.

We found similar effects for Action-Omission, Moral Luck, and "Asian disease" type cases (though not consistently for every measure across the board). Philosophers with PhDs and self-reported competence or specialization in ethics showed no smaller effects than other philosophers or than comparison groups of non-philosophers -- and in fact trended slightly (non-significantly) toward showing larger order effects.

In general, we found pretty substantial effect sizes, suggesting substantial instability of judgment even in philosophical respondents' areas of expertise. Hence the metaphilosophical worry.

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Critique by Zachary Horne and Jonathan Livengood.

Horne and Livengood make three main points about the literature on order effects in philosophy:

(A.) First, they helpfully distinguish between what they call "updating effects" and "genuine ordering effects". Genuine ordering effects, in their terminology, are effects measured only after all the stimuli have been presented. "Updating effects" are measures taken along the way, and might well reflect participants' learning. There is of course nothing irrational in judging Scenario B differently as a result of seeing Scenario A because one learned something by seeing Scenario A. Most philosophical research on order effects, they note, takes the measures along the way -- and thus might be measuring learning rather than true order effects.

(B.) Second, they point out that perceptual judgments also show order effects. Thus, if we are to reject any type of evidence that shows order effects, then we must reject perceptual evidence too, which would lead to radical skepticism.

(C.) Third, they point out that order can sometimes reasonably make a difference to the evaluation of evidence. For example, a smile followed by a frown, on the same person's face, is a different type of evidence than a frown followed by a smile.

On (A): I find the labels tendentious (since if we know there isn't learning-type updating going on, what we might want to call "genuine order effects" can plausibly be measured mid-stream), however it probably is correct that most studies do not sufficiently rule out the possibility of learning or updating in the course of the experiment, if they have novice participants and take the measurements after each scenario rather than after both scenarios. However, since our participants were experts, we think it unlikely that a significant number learned anything in the process of our brief experiment that would rationally justify shifting their judgment about the equivalency or non-equivalency of Push and Switch. And as Horne and Livengood note, our measure of endorsement of the Doctrine of the Double Effect is a measurement of a "genuine ordering effect" even by their own lights.

On (B): Yes, of course it would be silly to reject all means of learning that are subject to any order effects! The epistemic sting, as they note, depends not on the mere existence of an order effect in one case, but on how large and how prevalent the order effects are. This is an open empirical question. But the limited empirical evidence that exists suggests that order effects are substantial and prevalent in moral dilemma cases. So far, we have found order effects in all of the scenario types we've tried, with about a 10-20% shift in opinion on the moral equivalency of our scenario pairs and in preference for the risky option in the "Asian disease" cases.

On (C): It's interesting to consider cases in which earlier evidence rightly colors our reaction to later evidence, but trolley problems presented to disciplinary experts seems a different kind of case.

Finally, Horne and Livengood suggest that exposure to a pair of dilemmas in our study is unlikely to have a long-lasting impact on professional philosophers' beliefs. I agree. They continue, "But if there is no long-lasting impact, then we think the effect is unlikely to matter to actual philosophical practice outside of the laboratory" (p. 17). I don't think this follows. Fiery's and my view is not that philosophers' opinions are permanently influenced by the order in which the scenarios are presented on any single occasion, but rather that their opinions are unstable -- possibly influenced one direction on one occasion, in another direction on another occasion. This instability is what drives the metaphilosophical worry.

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Critique by Regina Rini:

Rini looks only at our 2012 study. (Our 2015 study wasn't published until after her paper was in press.) She finds it plausible that if professional philosophers were already familiar with these cases they would not exhibit order effects of the sort Fiery and I find. She suggests that perhaps respondents were not previously familiar with the cases -- or at least not familiar in the right sort of way. She calls this the "familiarity problem" and offers four possible explanations:

(1.) The respondents were not really experts. She wonders if our participants, recruited through the internet, really had the degrees they claimed to have.

(2.) The respondents didn't carefully attend to our scenarios. Maybe they breezed through them so quickly that they failed to notice relevant features.

(3.) The respondents might not have familiar responses to these types of scenarios. Perhaps they have so far refrained from forming judgments on such cases and principles.

(4.) The respondents might not have diachronically stable familiar responses. This is the explanation Fiery and I favor. However, Rini helpfully points out that as long as philosophers are aware that their responses are not diachronically stable, the metaphilosophical threat is reduced: Presumably philosophers who are aware that their responses are not stable would be reluctant to ground their theorizing on those responses.

On (1): I am not aware of a general problem in the survey literature of respondents' frequently misreporting their educational status -- though certainly a bit of misreporting is possible. One specific piece of evidence against this possibility in our own study is that we recruited philosophers mostly by asking department chairs to forward a recruitment email to faculty and graduate students in their departments. Most of our "philosopher" participants took the survey within just a few days of these emails.

On (2): The median response time on the first scenario was 40 seconds, on the second scenario was 34 seconds. While these are not huge response times, if you stop to count out 34 seconds now, you'll probably notice that it's a reasonable amount of time for a thoughtful response to a brief scenario.

On (3) and (4): These are potentially quite serious issues, and in fact our follow-up study in 2015 was designed specifically to address them, after we saw an early version of Rini's critique. In our 2015 study we specifically asked participants if they were previously familiar with the scenarios. We also asked whether they regarded themselves as "having had a stable opinion" about the issues before participating in the experiment, and whether they regarded themselves as experts on those very issues. We also added a "reflection" condition to help address concern (2). In the reflection condition we asked participants to reflect carefully before responding and enforced a minimum 15-second delay between when participants reported having finished reading the scenario and when their response options appeared.

We did not find that self-reported familiarity or stability reduced the size of order effects in two different types of scenario pairs (trolley problems and risky-choice "Asian disease"-type problems), nor did we find reduced order effects in the reflection condition compared to a normal control condition without special instructions to reflect.

For example, percentage rating the Push and Switch scenarios equivalently:

[click to enlarge]

Thus, I am inclined to think that Rini's fourth suggestion is the most plausible -- that participants do not have diachronically stable familiar responses, despite high levels of expertise. But since those who report having stable responses were no less subject to order effects than were those who reported not having stable responses, self-knowledge of stability appears to be largely absent. Despite Rini's interesting suggestion that instability is metaphilosophically non-threatening if people are aware of it, Fiery's and my results suggest that we should not hasten to that comfort.

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Both Horne and Livengood and Rini emphasize that we only have very limited evidence about order effects on professional philosophers' judgments. I agree! Fiery's and my two studies are hardly decisive. Convergent evidence from several different labs would be necessary before drawing any confident conclusions, especially if those conclusions are at variance with what one feels one knows from personal experience. Rini also makes positive suggestions for follow-up experimental work that might be done, which I am inclined to support. Both critiques raise important methodological concerns that ought to help shape and direct future work on this topic.

[Cross-posted at the Splintered Mind. For discussion/comments, please go there.]

CFA: Does Neuroscience Have Normative Implications?

Elisabeth Hildt and I are organizing a symposium focusing on whether and how neuropsychology might provide insight into normative ethics. We are thrilled about our lineup of invited speakers (including the Experimental Philosophy blog's own Eddy Nahmias!), and are excited about the submissions we hope to receive. The nuts and bolts are in this post; the full CFA is available at the link posted below.

Deadline for Submissions: February 1, 2016

Symposium Venue: Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, April 15-16, 2016

Invited Speakers: Kurt Gray (University of North Carolina), James Giordano (Georgetown University), and Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University)

TL;DR: Submit a 200-400 word abstract, compete for a $500 travel award, indicate whether you’d like your work included in an edited volume, give a 20-30 minute presentation.

Full CFA: http://ethics.iit.edu/neuroethicsymposium

Contact: [email protected]

 

Intuitive Resistance is the Mind-Killer

In a recent McSweeney’s article, Kyle York proposes some interesting takes on familiar ethical dilemmas with the potential to help reveal something truly fundamental about moral judgment. For instance, pull or no pull: 

“There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards four workers. You have the ability to pull off your head and turn it into a Chinese lantern. Your head floats into the sky until it takes the place of the sun. You look down upon the planet. It is as small as the eye of a moth. The moth flies away.”

Clearly a particular way of doing philosophy and moral psychology is being mocked. Philosophers and psychologists often rely on unrealistic thought experiments and experimental stimuli when conducting their research. To be fair, they do tend to avoid the surreal, but this does raise an interesting question. How worried should we be that deep down, we don’t actually believe the things we are asked to imagine as we make philosophically and psychologically relevant judgments about them?

Unifying Morality's Effect on Non-moral Cognition

At this point, it is pretty clear is that people’s moral judgments affect a surprisingly large number of their judgments that do not seem to be straightforwardly moral (e.g., belief, causation, doing vs. allowing, freedom, happiness, innateness, intentional action, knowledge, love, and so on) 

The sheer number of different judgments affected by morality provides some reason against continuing to search for separate explanations for each effect. Rather, it looks as though we should be searching for ways in which the various effects of morality may be unified. Of course, the sort of explanation that could unify these various effects would have to be so abstract that it could be playing a role in each of these diverse kinds of judgments.

In a new paper, we propose that the key to understanding how these effects can be unified is to begin thinking about the role of alternative possibilities. The basic idea is that our way of understanding many aspects of the world involves not only thinking about the things that actually happened but also considering other alternative ways that things could have happened but didn’t. Along these lines, our proposal has two key components:

(1) Morality affects which alternative possibilities are relevant.

(2) Each of the ordinary judgments affected by morality involve the representation of alternative possibilities in some way or another.

To test this unifying framework, we took the original materials from four previous studies which showed that agents who acted immorally (vs. neutrally) were more thought to have acted freely, caused the outcome that occurred, did something rather than allowed it to happen, and acted more intentionally. Using the original materials, we both replicated the four original effects, and also found that changes in the morality of the agent’s action impacted participants’ judgments of the relevance of alternative possibilities. Critically though, we also found that participants’ judgments of the relevance of alternatives mediated the effect of morality on judgments of freedom, causation, doing vs. allowing, and intentional action.

 

We then sought to further confirm this general framework by manipulating rather than measuring changes in the relevance of alternatives.

 

Can We Have Free Will and Lack It Too?

This summer I read Shaun Nichols's excellent new book, Bound: Essays on Free Will & Responsibility (2015, OUP). It includes systematic discussion of the relevant experimental philosophy, as well other empirical research, and how this relates to the problem of free will and related topics (including responsibility and punishment).

I wrote a short (400-word) book note on Bound for the AJP (draft here), which prompted my further thinking and motivated a blog post. You can read a more detailed and comprehensive summary by Manuel Vargas in NDPR that raises some nice worries for Shaun. Here I'd like to summarize just one key component of Bound and raise a distinct worry for it (despite agreeing with many other claims made in the book).

This key component is Nichols's discretionary view. It states roughly that, assuming our actions probably are determined by the past and laws of nature, there are contexts in which it's true that we have free will but also contexts in which it's false. Can we really have our cake and lack it too?

 

Knobe in the NYT

Our own Joshua Knobe has an interesting piece on theory of mind and corporations that just appeared in The New York Times entitled, "Do Corporations Have Minds?" He reports some interesting findings that address a very important moral, legal, and political issue (especially given some of the awful U.S. Supreme Court decisions from the past few years about these and related issues).  So, go check it out!