Nichols, Shaun & Knobe, Joshua - Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuition

10/17/2008

Nous, vol 41 number 4 2007

This paper explores how affect plays a role in evaluating moral responsibility. Here the debate is framed in a way to shed some light on an age-old debate between compatibilism and incompatibilism in moral theory. Compatibilism is the theory that moral agency is compatible with a deterministic universe. Incompatibilism is the opposite: moral agency doesn't wholly apply if we live in a deterministic universe. Philosophers have relied on different bits of psychological and anecdotal evidence for claiming that people are either largely compatibilists or largely incompatibilists.

The paper seeks to show that in some contexts people come out as incompatibilists, yet in others they are strongly compatibilist. The difference comes out instead when affective responses are elicited in a description of a hypothetical where subjects have to assign moral responsibility. At times when the description is largely abstract and a deterministic world is posited, people reply with incompatibilist-type responses, largely alleviating moral responsibility. When a more concrete situation is described, using names and giving an identifying story to the moral hypothetical, people assign moral agency (or moral blame) and become compatibilists. (pg664-671) This effect becomes less pronounced as concrete hypotheticals become more terse and resemble short abstract hypotheticals. (pg670) Also of note is that people are more apt to give harsher punishments once the transgressor has been identified, rather than prior to that identification. (pg665)

Authors propose 3 distinct theories that could account for this phenomenon. (pg671-5) They are as follows:

Performance Error Model: affective responses distort people's judgments, making them unable to apply their theory of moral responsibility. Thus people are largely incompatibilists but readily assign moral responsibility when they have an affective response to a hypothetical. This has an affinity with people willing to hold people more responsible when they are experiencing even unrelated negative emotions.

Affective Competence Model: employing affective responses about moral situations is the core method by which moral judgments are reached, thus the abstract hypotheticals are problematic, not the concrete ones. Hence people are fundamentally compatibilist.

Concrete Competence Model: it is concreteness, not affect, that is the primary difference here; abstract hypotheticals fail to adequately signal the subject (or a special 'moral module' inside the subject) for a moral judgment, while concrete hypotheticals do.

Authors consider that hybrid answers are also possible, but they advocate one in particular: 'Affect serves both as part of the fundamental competence underlying responsibility judgments and as a factor that can sometimes lead to performance errors.' (pg674) Authors then try to show some other evidence that might eliminate one of the models, and possibly support their own hybrid theory.

The evidence offered (pg675-7) now dealt with two concrete hypotheticals, one 'high-affect' about rape and the other 'low-affect' about tax evasion. This experiement attempted to control for concreteness. The results were that people were compatibilists about rape but incompatibilists about tax evasion. The Affective Competence model might have a hard time accounting for the difference that is also revealed between a deterministic condition and a indeterministic-free-will condition.(pg676-7)

Lastly, authors examine how their findings might change the way philosophers view people's intuitions about (in)compatibilism. (pg677-680)