explaining (away) the Knobe effect

Consider Joshua Knobe and the so-called "Knobe effect." Knobe is the high-priest of x-phi (or "experimental philosophy") who, in 2003, somehow induced the editors of Analysis to sully themselves by publishing the results of an empirical study in their respected philosophy journal.* The study purported to show something about the ordinary moral judgment of ordinary people that might be suprising. In Knobe's telling, his study seemed to show that "there seems to be an asymmetry whereby people are considerably more willing to blame the agent for bad side effects than to praise the agent for good side effects."** But I think Knobe mis-interpreted his own results, and, in this post, I want to explain why.

First, I'm going to quote from a friend's description of the experiment:

Knobe presented his questions to 78 people spending time in a Manhattan public park. Each subject was randomly assigned to either the 'harm condition' or the 'help condition'. Subjects in the harm condition read the following vignette

The vice-president of a company went to the chairman of the board and said, 'We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us increase profits, but 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.

These subjects were then asked to determine how much blame the chairman deserved for what he did (on a scale from 0 to 6) and to say whether they thought the chairman intentionally harmed the environment. In the harm condition, most subjects (82%) said that the agent brought about the side effect (harming the environment) intentionally.

Subjects in the help condition received a vignette that was almost exactly the same, except that the word 'harm' was replaced by 'help':

The vice-president of a 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.

These subjects were then asked to determine how much praise the chairman deserved (on a scale from 0 to 6) and whether they thought the chairman intentionally helped the environment. As predicted, the two conditions elicited two radically different patterns of responses. In the harm condition, most subjects (82%) said that the agent brought about the side effect intentionally, whereas in the help condition, most subjects (77%) said that the agent did not bring about the side effect intentionally!

In drawing the conclusion he does, Knobe implicitly depends on the assumption that the helping and harming cases are, in fact, morally symmetrical. The interest of his "asymmetrical" result depends critically on its being the case that subjects are not simply being appropriately sensitive to real moral differences between the helping and harming conditions. If we were convinced that the subjects's overall pattern of judgment was morally appropriate or essentially rational, why would it be interesting to call it an "asymmetrical" pattern? The interest in Knobe's conclusion is in the (implicit) suggestion that ordinary moral intuition is deeply irrational and inconsistent-- in particular, that it is inappropriately sensitive to features which couldn't possibly amount to a real moral difference.

What I want to suggest, however, is that the two situations--the helping and harming conditions--in fact are not morally symmetrical from the viewpoint of the praise- or blame- worthiness of the chairman of the board. And because they are not, the experiment simply fails to show the sort of irrational or iconsistent "asymmetry" that Knobe supposes. Knobe, in other words, is not licensed to draw the inference he does.

This may seem like a very strong conclusion on my part. After all, the two conditions were deliberately constructed so that the only difference between them is that one helps and one harms the environment. Where we are assuming equal amounts of help or harm, and where we are assuming that the valuable thing in question (the environment) makes equal moral demands to be helped or harmed (per unit of help or harm, respectively), where is the room for a real moral difference? (Incidentally, I don't question either of these two assumptions. They seem both plausible and a part of the original though-experiment.)

Despite this deliberate attempt to create moral symmetry between the two conditions, however, a moral asymmetry nevertheless crept in. The chairman in the first hypo is revealed as a person who is willing to destroy something of value, and the chairman in the second hypo is revealed as a person who is indifferent to something of value. The moral difference between the characters revealed in the respective hypos is the difference between Nazi Germany and Switzerland; it is the difference between an agent who is unmistakably (given his actual actions) willing to harm versus an agent who is (given his actual actions) possibly merely indifferent to either help or harm. This is a Real Moral Difference in the agent's culpable mental state, or mens rea. (Mens rea -- it ain't just fer' criminal law.)

In general, I think it's important not to get distracted by the form of words in the hypos. The asymmetry I'm suggesting is not about the amounts of help or harm to the environment, or about any inequality in the strengths of the demands to help or not harm. Attend instead to the complete picture evoked by the words in each case, and especially, to the sort of agent revealed in that picture. Do that, I think, and you'll see that there is an asymmetry in kind of agent pictured, and that it's not about help or harm per se. The asymmetry is about the sort of mens rea we attribute to the agent, and those mens reas are not symmetrical in any sense.

So Knobe's subjects, in fact, are arguably simply being sensitive to the real moral differences in the respective situations. If so, then there is not much mystery, and we need not think that this is a case of "asymmetry" in willingness to ascribe praise or blame dependent on whether the side-effects are good or bad. At least, thinking this would require sustaining a further non-trivial moral argument that the ordinary way of connecting praise- or blame- worthiness to mens rea is improper.

Incidentally, none of what I'm suggesting will make sense if you insist on understanding praise- and blame- worthiness exclusively in terms of causing harm or causing help. In that case, you would be unable to make sense of the difference in mens rea I'm suggesting, since, by hypothesis, there is no difference in the amount of harm or help. But, as far as I can tell, that's simply a very good reason to abandon the consequentialist account of praise- and blame- worthiness as an account which can't properly encompass the relevant moral sense of things we actually have.

One final thought. The results of an "x-phi" experiment could only reveal interesting philosophical results if the results are correctly interpreted. But the question of correct interpretation is itself a conceptual question, at least in part. So, it would seem that you really can't escape the armchair in philosophy.

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*- Experimental philosophy, or x-phi, bugs me. Understood as part of a tradition of clever empirical psychology or sociology, I have no objection. Understood as part of an essentially philosophical tradition, I view it, in my gentler moods, as a vicious betrayal. Where's the conceptual insight? Where's the concern for (in Aristotle's excellent formulation) being qua being? Or (in my preferred formulation) for thought qua thought? Where's the armchair attempt to tell how possibly some x might be the case? X-phi trades in all of that classically philosophical stuff for a mere empirical science. It's 'philosophy' for weaklings who don't know the difference between philosophy and psychology, or who anyway don't care to keep the distinction clean, even in thought. Treated as philosophy, it's a rank confusion.

** - Knobe offered a second sub-conclusion to the effect that people are more willing to ascribe intention in the case of bad effects than in the case of good effects. This result is less interesting to me. If I were going to hazard a comment here, however, it would be to suggest that in the particular context of the experiment -- particularly, in a context in which the subject is being called upon to form some kind of moral opinion about a person in a hypo -- the ordinary, non-philosophical person may well have treated the concept of "intention" as an essentially moral concept, and not as (as the researcher supposed) a concept to do with a certain kind of (essentially morally nuetral) mental state. Anyway, it seems plausible to me to suppose that many of the subjects may have thought that they were supposed to use the word 'intentionally' especially to mark out the degree of praise- or blame- worthiness of the hypothetical chairman, and not to mark out the intentionality of action strictly speaking. After all, subjects were being called upon to make some moral judgment, and many may have assumed that the question about "intentionality" was simply meant to be a further question about how praise- or blame- worthy they thought the hypothetical agent was. In other words, many of the subjects may have understood the researcher to mean, by "intentionality," "especially praise- or blame- worthy." And because most thought (for reasons explained above) that the harming chairman was especially blameworthy but that the helping chairman was not especially praiseworthy, they would have diverged in their ascription of intentionality, if they did understand 'intentional' in this way.

the sort of value that equality is

What is equality essentially about, what is its scope, and how does it generally interact with the values of responsibility and freedom? Discover a truly excellent answer to these pressing questions in this very short (19 page) and readable paper on SSRN. The abstract is as follows:

This short (19-page) paper reflects on the sort of value which equality essentially is by examining why we think it might matter that people be equal with respect to anything at all. The paper defends a basic account of equality which sees equality as fundamentally about achieving a certain sort of non-subordinative, non-dominating community, and it opposes an account of equality which sees equality as fundamentally about the eradication of difference, of some (any) sort. It is argued that the former interpretation makes far better sense of a range of relevant intuitive data which it is the primary business of a philosophical account of equality to make sensible. The paper further argues that, in understanding equality as a value essentially and fundamentally about community, one does not thereby limit equality's scope (qua moral value) merely to de facto communities of a particular sort. As a value about community, equality makes demands with respect to all possible communities, but this demand is transcendent and not dependent on any empirical facts; equality would make the demands it did even if there were nothing existent that could be called 'community,' just so long as there could be community. (In fact, equality just is the reason to achieve community of the non-subordinative, non-dominating sort wherever such a community is imaginable.) Finally, the luck-egalitarian project is interpreted as being in part concerned to preserve a principled scope for the values of freedom and responsibility in an account of equality, and although the luck-egalitarian version of equality is rejected, this paper urges that this part of the luck-egalitarian project not be forgotten. Reflecting on the nature of equality reveals interesting ways in which its claims are exhausted (i.e., limited in a principled way) by the values of freedom and responsibility.