Peter Caven (Sheffield), Moral Dilemmas and Tragic Remorse

Many experimental designs of moral psychologists involve testing folk responses to hypothetical cases of moral dilemmas, such as trolley problems, through surveying participants on whether they judge a potential action in a given situation to be right or wrong. My aim is to investigate a different type of response to moral dilemmas: the experience of conflict and negative affect, despite having done what one perceives as right.

Much recent literature on moral dilemmas focuses on the feelings humans typically experience in such situations, and the moral relevance of these feelings. Most influentially, Bernard Williams highlighted the sense of conflict during the decision making procedure, and something like regret or remorse after having acted. He claimed that these feelings are typically experienced by moral agents, and that we judge it appropriate to experience them in situations of moral dilemma, even if we believe we’ve acted rightly. On the basis of this supposed fact of human moral psychology, he developed a challenge to systematic moral theory.

There has been much discussion on the phenomenology and ethical relevance of such ‘tragic remorse’, as Stephen De Wijze has named it. However, philosophers have often allowed their own intuitions and experiences alone inform their arguments in this area. This leaves open the question of how widespread an experience moral conflict and tragic remorse is, and whether people do in fact typically judge them as morally appropriate responses to situations of moral dilemma.

I aim to design a study which will test the following hypothesis: Conflict and tragic remorse are widely shared experiences associated with decision making in situations of moral dilemma, and people generally judge them as morally appropriate responses.

I intend to gather data through a survey, which will present participants with several thought experiments where they find themselves in various situations of moral dilemma, with two possible courses of action which they could take. Participants will be asked what they judge to be the right action overall and whether it nonetheless involves wrongdoing. Further, they will be asked, on a scale from one to ten, the extent to which they would feel bad about their action even if they acted in the way they considered to be overall right and whether it would be appropriate to experience this response. I will attempt to gather data from as large and diverse a sample as possible, in order to evaluate the significance of variables such as sex, age and cultural background to the responses.

The conclusions generated from this data will help either establish or disprove psychological descriptive claims made by philosophers such as Williams concerning how people typically experience moral dilemmas, and what type of experience is generally deemed morally appropriate. It is upon these claims that their ethical arguments are ultimately grounded. Shedding light on them through an empirical approach will thus allow real progress to be made in the on-going ethical debate on moral dilemmas, and also on moral motivation and deliberation more generally.

Florian Cova (Presenting) (Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva) & Maxime Louis Bertoux (Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière, CRICM - UPMC / INSERM, Groupe Hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière), Judgments about moral responsibility and determinism in patients with behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia: Still compatibilist

Are people natural compatibilists or incompatibilists? A first set of studies run by Eddy Nahmias and his colleagues suggested that people might in fact be natural compatibilist: they would have the intuition that agent in deterministic world are free and responsible for their behaviour. Three studies replicated these results using various descriptions of determinism.

Nevertheless, a second set of study, ran by Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe suggested that things might be much more complicated. Indeed, they found that people’s answer changed dramatically depending on apparently irrelevant factors. Thus, people gave compatibilist answers to a concrete particular case but formed incompatibilist judgments when faced with an abstract question. To account for this difference, Nichols and Knobe advanced what they call the “performance error model”, according to which people have an incompatibilist theory of freedom and moral responsibility but can be emotionally biased towards compatibilist answers. Thus, in concrete case, people give incompatibilist answers because they are motivated to blame by the emotional reaction inducted by the crime. In accordance with thus hypothesis, they were able to show that people gave less compatibilist answers to concrete scenarios that are less emotionally loaded.

But is Nichols and Knobe’s “performance error model” right? Many objections have been raised against it. First, it cannot account for some cases, in which people give compatibilist answers to emotionally neutral scenario. Second, Nichols and Knobe have been accused to use vignettes that do not properly describe determinism.

In this paper, we want to contribute to this debate about Nichols and Knobe’s “performance error model” by testing one of its implications. If compatibilist answers really are the result of an affective bias (or even of unbiased emotional reactions), then we should expect people with poor emotional reactions to give less compatibilist answers.

To test this prediction, we ran a study using materials drawn for Nahmias et al. and Nichols and Knobe’s studies on patients suffering from frontemporal dementia (a frontal syndrome). Patients suffering from frontotemporal dementia indeed have impoverished emotional reactions. We compared their answers to these scenarios with answers from two control groups: healthy subjects and patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

As a result, we found no difference between our three groups of subjects. In fact, patients suffering from frontotemporal dementia gave highly compatibilist answers to our questionnaires. Thus, we argue that these results spell trouble for Nichols and Knobe’s “performance error model” and point several shortcomings in their study that could explain their pattern of results.

Guy Fletcher (Oxford), Which states can disagree?

My aim is to discover if the folk concept DISAGREEMENT encompasses more than conflicting beliefs. I would like to determine which kinds of states non-philosophers think of as being capable of disagreement. My hypothesis is that many kinds of states other than beliefs will be adjudged to be capable of disagreement. More specifically, I think that subjects will be likely to judge that there can be disagreement even in non-cognitive states – such as intentions, plans, desires, and preferences. My first thought about how to test this is to describe scenarios in which one agent (e.g.) prefers A over B, desires that A, plans to A, or intends to A and in which another agent prefers B over A, desires that not-A, plans to not-A, or intends to not-A and to ask subjects whether they think that the agents in the scenario disagree.

One difficulty will be in determining whether those subjects who claim that the agents disagree are assuming that these agents (in addition to having differing intentions etc.) must also have different beliefs and that it is these that they are thinking of in judging that the agents disagree. Another issue to deal with is the possibility of the subjects’ responses being guided by a background assumption such as that the agents voice their respective preferences / intentions / plans / desires to one another. Finally, it will be necessary to determine whether those subjects who claim that the agents disagree implicitly hold the view that preferences / intentions / plans / desires are belief-states.

Ivar Hannikainen (Presenting) (Sheffield) & Fiery Cushman (Harvard), Agent and patient simulation in moral judgment

A typical moral situation – e.g., an act of theft or a charitable donation – involves two people: the person who does something morally right or wrong (the agent), and the person to whom something morally right or wrong is done (the patient). We hypothesized that when you witness a moral situation, you can make a judgment about it by adopting either perspective, roughly, by focusing on the agent’s action or on the patient’s experience. We set out to track these two kinds of mental simulation through psychology. In what follows we report some preliminary findings.

In a first experiment, we investigated the contribution of agent and patient simulation to the well-known trolley problem. We presented participants with a set of either personal dilemmas (like the footbridge dilemma, where the agent forcefully harms the proximal victim in order to save the distal victims) or impersonal dilemmas (like the switch dilemma, where the agent harms the victim without physical contact and as a side effect of saving the distal victims). After every moral dilemma, participants reported how much they had adopted each perspective. As predicted, participants thought more about the agent’s perspective (p=.05) in personal scenarios than impersonal scenarios. We found also that agent perspective-taking correlated with deontological moral judgment more for personal compared with impersonal cases (β = .63, p = .05). There was no such effect of victim perspective-taking on moral judgment.

Does this relationship hold in cases where the agent must choose whether to help a proximal patient or a group of distal patients? In a second study, we contrasted perspective-taking between dilemmas of personal help and harm. We found that participants adopted the agent perspective more on harm scenarios than on help scenarios (β = .91, p = .018) and the proximal patient perspective less on harm scenarios compared to help scenarios (β = 1.01, p = .005). Whereas focus on either patient’s perspective was associated with saving them or acting in their favor (proximal β = -.42, p = .01; distal β = .47, p=.005) and this pattern held across both help and harm, the effect of agent perspectivetaking on moral judgment was asymmetrical (p = .04). Specifically, agent perspective-taking was associated with deontological judgment in harm cases (β = -.49, p = .006) but did not affect moral judgment in help cases.

Together these findings highlight the role of agent simulation in driving deontological moral judgment: it is not the heavy man on the footbridge we are thinking about when we judge it morally wrong for Frank to use him as a trolley-stopper, it’s Frank.

Matthew Kieran, Aaron Meskin, and Margaret Moore (presenting) (University of Leeds), ’Bad Taste’ in Empirical Aesthetics: Mere Exposure, Value and Expertise

In this paper we present the results of an experiment testing judgments of preference for “bad” paintings, carried out in January – March 2011. The experiment was designed to test an objection raised to a series of studies by the psychologist James Cutting (2003; 2006) establishing the significance of mere exposure effects for artistic preference. Cutting briefly exposed undergraduate psychology students to canonical and lesser-known Impressionist paintings over the period of an academic semester. The lesser-known paintings were presented four times more often than the canonical paintings, with the result that preference for the lesser-known paintings was increased among the experimental group, in comparison with the preference demonstrated by a control group. In short, mere exposure significantly altered preferences for paintings. This led Cutting to conclude that artistic canons are largely promoted and maintained by mere exposure (2003: 335). This suggests a strong degree of scepticism about the role aesthetic value plays in determining aesthetic judgements thereby potentially undermining standard normative assumptions regarding aesthetic expertise, artistic canons and the test of time (Hume). It also speaks to debates about the unreliability of aesthetic judgment (Kieran 2010; 2011), testimony (Meskin 2004; 2006)) and the objectivity of taste.

A natural objection to Cutting’s deflationary conclusion is that all the paintings used in his experiment were of fairly high artistic quality. Even the lesser-known works were works by masters such as Degas, Monet and Renoir. One might then explain the increase in preference that followed increased exposure by appealing to exposure to the good-making features of the lesser-known paintings. Rather than preference following exposure in an arbitrary manner, preference might only be increased as subjects gain practice in detecting what is good in the paintings Subjects may have become better appreciators of works through increased exposure. It is this hypothesis that we sought to test.

In order to do so, we designed an experiment to investigate whether mere exposure effects arise where subjects are exposed to bad art (using the works of the American painter Thomas Kinkade). If it turns out that preferences increased where it is difficult to argue subjects are gaining practice identifying what is good in a painting, we thereby strengthen Cutting’s conclusion. Alternatively if subject preferences remain unaltered or decreased this suggests empirical support for standard philosophical normative assumptions. [At the time of writing, we are analysing the resultant data to be presented at the workshop].

While the results are of interest to psychologists and philosophers of art, the methodological issues that arose are of broader significance for experimental and empirical philosophy. It proved difficult to design a questionnaire respecting the crucial distinction between a subjective report of a feeling of liking and an evaluative judgment of quality. Cutting’s experiment asked subjects to agree or disagree with the statement “I like this”; but the phenomenon of the popularity of kitsch shows that people can like things that they would not claim to be good. Our presentation will also raise this methodological difficulty, the degree to which it might be overcome and the putative significance of empirical aesthetics for normative aesthetics.

Joshua Knobe (Yale), In Search of the True Self

The notion of a 'true self' appears both in sophisticated philosophical theories and in ordinary thought. But how are we to determine which parts of a person's mind fall within this 'true self'? Suppose that a person finds herself in an internal conflict, with her reasoning pulling her in one direction and her emotions in another. Should we say that her reasoning constitutes her true self and that her emotions are getting in the way? Or, taking things in the opposite direction, should we say that her emotions constitute her true self and that her reasoning is getting in the way? I report a series of new studies designed to explore people's intuitions about cases like this one.

Pendaran Roberts (presenting) & Kelly Schmidtke (Nottingham), Color disagreement and the metaphysics of color: An empirical response to a recent argument

The actual existence of disagreement in the color experiences of normal observers has been used to argue against intrinsically mind and circumstance independent, realist theories of color in favor of more eccentric views like relationalism (Cohen, 2004; 2006; 2009) and eliminativism (Galileo; 1623; Boghossian and Velleman, 1989; Chalmers, 2006). According to relationalism, an object is a particular color only if it stands in a certain relation to a viewer, and a viewing circumstance. According the eliminativism, there are actually no colors. The purpose of this article is to defend realist views that hold the colors to be intrinsically mind and circumstance independent from what I call ‘Allen’s argument’ (Allen, 2010). Allen’s argument is that the best explanation of there being vastly more disagreement about colors than about shapes is that realism is false and either relationalism or eliminativism is true. This argument clearly rests on the empirical premise that there is vastly more disagreement about colors than about shapes. Thus, in this article we conduct two experiments designed to corroborate whether there really is vastly more disagreement about colors than about shapes. Our results are not favorable to Allen’s argument.

Kelly Schmidtke (Nottingham), Research Training Methods

The primary goal of this workshop is to enable you to use experiments to empirically support philosophical positions. The workshop will guide you through five general steps to answer an experimental question: (1) reviewing the literature, (2) designing the experiment, (3) implementing the experiment, (4) analyzing the data and (5) presenting the experiment. As part of the workshop, you will have the opportunity to participate in several condensed example experiments from the present literature and experience how to answer an experimental question using the five steps provided. The workshop will end with a group discussion in which you can express comments and questions, raise concerns, and/or in which we can discuss specific issues concerning experiments which you would like to run. Attending this workshop will benefit you if you are interested in using experiments to empirically support your philosophical positions.

Paulo Sousa (Queen's University Belfast), The Evaluative Nature of the Folk Concepts of Weakness and Strength of Will

The talk addresses some aspects of the structure of the folk concepts of weakness and strength of will—whether these concepts are evaluative concepts rather than purely descriptive ones, and, if so, which type of evaluation they incorporate. The results of three new studies will be presented, suggesting not only that these concepts are evaluative but also that their evaluative nature is in significant respects similar to that of appraisability concepts such as blame and credit. The import and limit of pursuing a blame/credit analogy when characterizing the folk concepts of weakness and strength of will shall also be discussed and clarified.