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Morendil comments on How to annoy misanthropes and bleeding-hearts - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
That seems rather similar to the Knobe effect.
Excellent link! Short, clear, interesting, 100% relevant.
Stupid Knobe effect. Obviously the subjects' responses were an attempt to pass judgement on the CEO. In one case, he deserves no praise, but in the other he does deserve blame [or so a typical subject would presumably think]. The fact that they were forced to express their judgement of moral character through the word 'intentional', which sometimes is a 'non-moral' quality of an action, doesn't tell us anything interesting.
Your explanation is obviously correct; what's interesting about it is that it exists, and that's why it's 100% relevant.
I thought of this too. Also a factor: publicly giving credit to someone makes you feel obligated to them.
Does it?
I would have said that the risks are that if you praise something, you might get told it isn't good enough, and if you blame someone, you might get entangled in the consequences of punishing them.
Yes, that too, now that you mention it. Especially when it comes to praising CEOs :)
Hmm, are you interpreting the results as "boo CEOs" then?
How would you modify the experiment to return information closer to what was sought?
I'm only interpreting the result as "boo this fictional CEO".
Well, what Knobe is looking for is a situation where subjects make their 'is' judgements partly on the basis of their 'ought' judgements. Abstractly, we want a 'moral proposition' X and a 'factual proposition' Y such that when a subject learns X, they tend to give higher credence to Y than when they learn ¬X. Knobe takes X = "The side-effects are harmful to the environment" and Y = "The effect on the environment was intended by the CEO".
(My objection to Knobe's interpretation of his experiment can thus be summarised: "The subjects are using Y to express a moral fact, not a 'factual fact'." After all, if you asked them to explain themselves, in one case they'd say "It wasn't intentional because (i) he didn't care about the effect on the environment, only his bottom line." In the other they'd say "it was intentional because (ii) he knew about the effect and did it anyway." But surely the subjects agree on (i) and (ii) in both cases - the only thing that's changing is the meaning of the word 'intentional', so that the subjects can pass moral judgement on the CEO.)
To answer your question: I'm not sure that genuine examples of this phenomenon exist, except when the 'factual' propositions concern the future. If Y is about a past event, then I think any subject who seems to be exhibiting the Knobe effect will quickly clarify and/or correct themselves if you point it out. (Rather like if you somehow tricked someone into saying an ungrammatical sentence and then told them the error.)
I suspect the subjects are judging the morality of the CEO's actions by how likely they think he will take good and/or bad actions in the future.
Yes, a very relevant link.
Phil, could you add a link to the Knobe effect in your post to encourage discussion of that as well?
I think it's interesting, and relevant somehow; but different enough that it could be confusing.
Moral psychology in general is pretty fascinating. This book provides an overview of dozens of experiments like those that discovered the Knobe effect.
Agree - I think I first ran across it in your podcast, actually, and looked it up when this post triggered the memory of it. (Might have been the John Doris interview.)
The interesting question raised here, ISTM, is how these experiments and insights fit together - what they seem to tell us, in net, about who we are.
I'm still wondering what to think of the Knobe effect in the context of the OP's observations on debates about free will - is there just an analogy in surface features (people judge X differently according to their perception of X as "good" or "bad") or is there some deeper link between the way people respond to the notion of "intentional" and to the notion of "free will".