Bringing moral responsibility down to earth

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 105, Issue 7, 2008, Pages 371-388

  Roskies, Adina L ^a   Nichols, Shaun ^b  

^a DARTMOUTH COLLEGE   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049218434     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2008105737     Document Type: Review

References (49)

1. Roy Sorensen, Thought Experiments (New York: Oxford, 1992)
2. Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (New York: Oxford, 1998)
3. As John Fischer has emphasized in "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility" Ethics, CX (1999): 93-139, it is possible that determinism is consistent with responsibility but not with free will. Thus, it is often important to distinguish between moral-responsibility compatibilism and free will compatibilism, and we will keep the views distinct here
4. Kane, "Responsibility, Luck, and Chance: Reflections on Free Will and Indeterminism" this JOURNAL, XCVI, 5 (May 1999): 217-40, on p. 217
5. Pereboom, Living without Free Will (New York: Cambridge, 2001), p. xvi
6. For example, David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748)
7. Nahmias, S. Morris, T. Nadelhoffer, and J. Turner, "Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Responsibility," Philosophical Psychology, XVIII, 5 (2005): 561-84
8. Nichols and Knobe, "Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions," Noûs, XLI, 4 (2007): 663-85
9. We hope to explore whether these results extend to other populations. (We hope even more that others will explore whether our results extend to other populations!) However, it is important to note that we are primarily looking at whether subjects from the same population give different answers in the different conditions
10. The mean response in Actual was 3.58, and the mean response in Alternate was 5.06 (4 is the midline). The difference between the conditions was significant (t (74) = 3.611, p = .001)
11. Interestingly, these responses parallel Peter van Inwagen's claim that he thinks that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism but that if he came to believe determinism was true, he would be a compatibilist (see An Essay on Free Will (New York: Oxford, 1983))
12. Fisher and Mark Ravizza label this view "metaphysical flipflopping" in Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (New York: Cambridge, 1998)
13. The mean response in Actual was 5.35, and the mean response in Alternate was 3.67. The difference between the conditions was significant (t (65) = -4.426, p < .001). Note that the question was positively framed, while the other two were framed negatively, so we in fact would expect this sort of inversion in the agreement values. These values are consistent with what would be expected if judgments of moral responsibility and blame-worthiness were correlated
14. While the difference is significant (t (74) = 2.362, p < .05), in both conditions, the mean response was above the midline. In the Actual condition, the mean response was 4.3, and in the Alternate condition, the mean response was 5.3. Overall, these results suggest that there was stronger agreement to the statement that people (in a determinist universe) lacked freedom of choice than that they lacked moral responsibility. Interestingly, we found that this difference was statistically significant in the Actual condition (t (39) = -2.456, p < .05), but not in the Alternate condition (t (35) = -.843, p = .405, n.s.)
15. Smilansky, Free Will and Illusion (New York: Oxford, 2000), p. 189
16. For a discussion of why such a conclusion is not warranted on the basis of neuroscientific research, see Adina L. Roskies, "Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, X (2006): 419-23
17. See, for example, Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)
18. C. Goldberg, "A Question of the Will," The Boston Globe (October 15, 2002), p. C1
19. R.J. Rychlak and J.F. Rychlak, "Free Will Is a Verifiable Assumption: A Reply to Garrett and Viney," New Ideas in Psychology, VIII (1990): 43-51
20. and T. Wolfe, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," Forbes, CLVIII (1990): 210. There are a variety of deterministic accounts of decision and action. Most work in neuroethics does not clearly distinguish between neurological determinism and metaphysical determinism. For some purposes it matters whether the deterministic thesis is neurological, but for our purposes it does not. For ease of exposition we talk about determinism generically
21. For arguments to a similar conclusion, see T. Nadelhoffer and A. Feltz, "Folk Intuitions, Slippery Slopes, and Necessary Fictions: An Essay on Saul Smilansky's Illusionism," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXXI (2007): 202-13
22. This is not to say that neuroscientific advances pose no threat to the social order; only that this particular focus for worry is overblown
23. Greene and Cohen, "For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, CCCLIX (2004) : 1775-85, see p. 1781
24. See, for example, J.A. Bargh "Automatic and Conscious Processing of Social Information, " in R.S.J. Wyer and T.K. Srull, eds., Handbook of Social Cognition, Volume III (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1984), pp. 1-44
25. See also S. Chaiken, "Heuristic versus Systematic Information Processing and the Use of Source versus Message Cues in Persuasion," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, XXXIX (1980): 752-66
26. and S. Chaiken, A. Liberman, and A. Eagly, "Heuristic and Systematic Information Processing within and beyond the Persuasion Context," in J.S. Uleman and J.A. Bargh, eds., Unintended Thought (New York: Guilford,1989), pp. 212-52
27. and R. Petty and J. Cacioppo, "The Effects of Involvement on Responses to Argument Quantity and Quality: Central and Peripheral Routes to Persuasion," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, XLVI (1984): 69-81
28. R. Petty and J. Cacioppo, "Issue Involvement Can Increase or Decrease Persuasion by Enhancing Message-Relevant Cognitive Responses," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, XXXVII (1979): 1915-26
29. Z. Kunda, Social Cognition (Cambridge: MIT, 1999)
30. B. Doosje, R. Spears, and W. Koomen, "When Bad Isn't All Bad: Strategic Use of Sample Information in Generalization and Stereotyping," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, LXIX (1995): 642-55
31. R. Sanitoso, Kunda, and G. Fong, "Motivated Recruitment of Autobiographical Memories," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, LVII (1990): 229-41
32. L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: University Press, 1957)
33. We thank Richard Holton for suggesting the cognitive dissonance explanation to us
34. Jackson, Conditionals (New York: Oxford, 1991)
35. Sorensen, "Dogmatism, Junk Knowledge, and Conditionals," Philosophical Quarterly, XXXVIII (1988): 433-54. A nonmotivational interpretation of the results may also be closely related to the nonrobust conditional story. Just this pattern holds in cases in which one's credence in the conditional is less strong than one's credence in the consequent in some contexts. Forced to give up something in those contexts, one will give up the conditional. On this view, the explanation would not be motivational, but rather cognitive. We thank Andy Egan for pointing this out
36. J.D. Greene, R.B. Sommerville, L.E. Nystrom, J.M. Darley, and J.D. Cohen, "An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment," Science, CCXCII, (2001): 2105-08
37. J. Moll, R. de Oliveriera-Souza, P.J. Eslinger, I.E. Bramati, J. Mourao-Miranda, P.A. Andreiuolo et al., "The Neural Correlates of Moral Sensitivity: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation of Basic and Moral Emotions," Journal of Neuroscience, XXII (2002): 2730-36
38. and J. Schaich Borg, C. Hynes, J. Van Horn, J.S.T. Grafton, and W. Sinnott-Armstrong, "Consequences, Action and Intention as Factors in Moral Judgments: An fMRI Investigation," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, XVIII (2006): 803-17
39. S. Schnall, J. Haidt, G. Clore, and A. Jordan, "Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment," Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (forthcoming)
40. T. Wheatley and J. Haidt, "Hypnotically Induced Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe," Psychological Science, XVI (2005): 780-84
41. M. Schaller, "In-group Favoritism and Statistical Reasoning in Social Inference," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, LXIII (1992): 61-74
42. Braddon-Mitchell, "Qualia and Analytic Conditionals," this JOURNAL, C, 3 (March 2003): 111-35
43. Braddon-Mitchell goes on to refine this view taking account of the importance of centered possible worlds; this is a refinement that does not matter much for our purposes, since our judgments about moral responsibility are not made on the basis of first-person experiences
44. Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics
45. David Chalmers has a similar analysis in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford, 1996)
46. Other two-dimensionalist accounts vary on a number of dimensions; for a state-of-the-art anthology see M. Garcia-Carpintero and J. Macia, eds., Two-Dimensional Semantics (New York: Oxford, 2006)
47. Of course, our data do not show anything approaching complete unanimity in intuitions, and Derk Pereboom has suggested (personal communication) that this raises important questions about the status of the 2-D explanation of our findings. On the 2-D account, how do we evaluate the minority of responses in the Actual condition that are incompatibilist? Are such judgments mistaken? This implicates delicate issues about how to interpret individual differences. Ideally, one would like to know whether the variation tracks stable features of the individual, or whether the variation is just noise. In the case of some philosophically-relevant intuitions, the individual differences do seem to be stable. See Nichols and J. Ulatowski, "Intuitions and Individual Differences: The Knobe Effect Revisited," Mind and Language, XXII (2007): 346-65. But in the present case, we do not have enough information to know whether the individual differences in intuitions about moral responsibility are stable or random, and so we are unable to begin to evaluate whether the minority respondents should be regarded as mistaken in their responses
48. We do see a varied pattern of judgments about natural kinds across worlds (see, for example, Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity (Cambridge: Harvard, 1972)
49. and Hilary Putnam's "The Meaning of 'Meaning'," in Mind, Language and Reality (New York: Cambridge, 1975), p. 215-71). However, there is no obvious reason to expect these judgments to be driven by emotional responses to the possible worlds scenarios. This suggests that the emotion-based model is not sufficient for explaining the pattern of judgments for all our modal intuitions. There may be other factors that also lead to differences in cross-world judgments