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Alicorn comments on Celebrate Trivial Impetuses - Less Wrong
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This sounds like a cool paper and I'd love to read it - can you track down the citation, please? ;)
It looks like this might be the one: Knobe, Joshua. 2003. "Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language", Analysis 63: 190-194. [PDF]
Thanks.
Basically it seems that people are more likely to call harmful side-effects intentional, compared to beneficial ones.
I'm not sure this really is a bias; the harmful/beneficial cases are not exact counterparts: in the harmful case one could assume that the actor needs to mentally do something -- namely, 'overcoming the moral problem' or 'silence his/her conscience', which makes the harmful case indeed a bit more 'intentional'.
How many spurious accounts are you going to register to upvote me?
Usually, I do things like this for 3 karma points but since you look nice, I'll give it to you for free.
It wasn't actually Knobe but John Doris, who also works in the so-called experimental philosophy paradigm. The exact reference is:
“From My Lai to Abu Ghraib: The Moral Psychology of Atrocity.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXXI: 25-55
Here is the relevant quotation:
"(i) Passersby who had just found a dime were twenty-two times more likely to help a woman who had dropped some papers than passersby who did not find a dime (88% vs. 4%).27 (ii) Passersby not in a hurry were six times more likely to help an unfortunate who appeared to be in significant distress than were passersby in a hurry (63% vs. 10%).28 (iii) Passersby were five times more likely to help an apparently injured man who had dropped some books when ambient noise was at normal levels than they were when a power lawnmower was running nearby (80% vs. 15%).29 (iv) In Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment,” subjects role-playing in a simulated prison rapidly descended to Lord of the Flies barbarism.30 (v) In Milgram’s “obedience experiments,” subjects participating in a study purported to test the effects of punishment on learning would repeatedly punish a screaming “learner” with realistic (but simulated) electric shocks at the polite request of an experimenter."
(I can't use stylistic stuff like linking and quoting... Is there a guide to show how you quote?)
Click "help", to the bottom right of the reply box.
There's a lot of x-phi stuff by Knobe and friends available online - mostly about all the same sorts of topics at the moment. There's also a book called "Experimental Philosophy" edited by Knobe and Nichols... not quite a textbook, more a collection of papers with insufficient attention to detail on methodology... nonetheless, it's a pretty good book for those interested in the field.
Doris doesn't seem to host his stuff online, but here is a good starting place for interest in the field (hosted by Knobe).