Category: Ethics and Morals

The Folk Concept of Luck

Posted on by Mario Attie-Picker

This text was first published at xphiblog.com on February 28, 2019.

Discussions of moral luck usually start by presenting a pair of agents who engage in the same behavior but bring about very different outcomes. Drunk driving is the usual example. One driver – the lucky driver – arrives home without harming anyone. The second driver – the unlucky driver – hits a passerby. The question is then posed: are they equally blameworthy? Much ink has been spilled on that question (and rightly so). But an interesting issue arises even before we get there, namely, what’s going on with our attributions of luck. It seems odd to call the second driver unlucky. An accident caused by drunk driving seems to be the very opposite of a case in which a bad outcome is simply due to luck. What drives this intuition?

Philosophical accounts of luck often point to features such as lack of control, modal fragility and low probabilities as central to luck attributions. We can fill in the details in the case above in such a way as to have all three features present. And yet, it still seems unintuitive to claim that the accident was due to (bad) luck.

In a new paper, I argue that this is because the folk concept of luck is sensitive to normative considerations. In particular, it is influenced by a normative evaluation of an agent’s action and its relation to the ensuing outcome. Roughly, luck attributions are sensitive to whether the valence of the action matches the valence of the outcome. The idea is that when the valences do not match, we are more inclined to attribute luck (explaining why it seems fitting to describe the first driver as lucky, for it’s a case of bad action/good outcome). And similarly, we are less likely to attribute luck when the valences do match (e.g., bad action/bad outcome, as with the “unlucky” driver).

I tested this hypothesis across five different studies. In one study, I manipulated both the valence of the action and the valence of the outcome, and measured luck attributions. Here is an example of one vignette.

Negligent Action

About to perform a complicated procedure, a surgeon forgets to wash his hands. As a result, the chances of a failed [successful] procedure rise [drop] to about 30%.

As a matter of fact, the procedure fails [succeeds].

Virtuous Action

About to perform a complicated procedure, a surgeon takes special precautions, reviewing each part of the procedure carefully. As a result, the chances of a successful [failed] procedure rise [drop] to about 30%.

As a matter of fact, the procedure succeeds [fails].

Participants indicated their agreement with the following statement, “It was due to luck that the procedure failed [succeeded]” using a 7-point Likert scale ranging from “disagree” to “agree”.

Here are the results:

The results followed the predicted pattern: luck attributions were highly sensitive to whether the valence of the outcome matched the valence of the action. (It’s worth saying that this effect remained significant after controlling for judgments about subjective probabilities, modal fragility, causality, and lack of control).

In a different study, the perceived valence of the action was not manipulated across conditions but rather depended on the moral views of the participants themselves. Participants read a story about a university president faced with the task of deciding whether or not to cancel an upcoming talk by a controversial speaker. The perceived valence of the president’s action, and hence the normative relation to the outcome (success or failure at creating a positive environment at the university), thus varied with individual differences in judgments about what the president should do.

Here are the results:

Luck attributions differed significantly among participants with different moral views responding to the same scenario. For example, when the president decided to let the speaker give the talk and the decision led to a good outcome, participants who disagreed with the decision judged the outcome as lucky. Those who judged the president’s action as morally right, however, did not attribute the success to luck.

It thus seems that normative considerations are an important element in our folk notion of luck. That is to say, describing the first driver as lucky already involves a normative evaluation of her action and the ensuing outcome. And our refusal to attribute luck to the second driver can be partly explained by the fact that we are not inclined to attribute luck when bad actions bring about bad outcomes.

Any thoughts you might have would be very much appreciated!

Literature

Attie-Picker, Mario (2021): “Is the Folk Concept of Luck Normative?,” Synthese 198, 1481–1515. (Link)

Hot Off The Press: “Priority of Needs?”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Members of the interdisciplinary research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures,” funded by the German Research Foundation, have summarized the results of more than six years of research in the volume “Priority of Needs? An Informed Theory of Need-Based Justice,” edited by Bernhard Kittel and Stefan Traub. The research group’s mission statement reads:

The objective of the research group “Need-Based Justice and Distribution Procedures” is to empirically contribute to establishing a positive and informed normative theory of need-based justice. This theory should provide answers to four questions: (i) How do individuals identify their needs and which distributions are considered sufficient for those needs? (ii) On the collective level, what is considered need-based justice and which processes lead to acceptance of those needs? (iii) Which collective dynamics unfold during this acceptance process in the context of (un-)stable political compromises? (iv) Which incentive-based effects of the collective level can be observed on the individual level, and is a need-based redistribution sustainable?

See below for the table of contents.

Part 1 – Identification of Needs

Part 2 – Structures and Processes of the Recognition of Needs

Part 3 – Welfare Consequences of Prioritizing Need-Based Distributions

Part 4 – Differentiation

Literature

Kittel, Bernhard, and Stefan Traub (eds.) (2024): Priority of Needs? An Informed Theory of Need-Based Justice, Cham: Springer. (Link)

Hot Off The Press: “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Volume 5 of the “Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy,” edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols, just hit the shelves! It comprises a total of 16 chapters on no less than 480 pages. See below for the table of contents.

  • Alexander Max Bauer and Jan Romann: “Equal Deeds, Different Needs”
  • John Bronsteen, Brian Leiter, Jonathan Masur, and Kevin Tobia: “The Folk Theory of Well-Being”
  • Shannon Brick: “Deference to Moral Testimony and (In)Authenticity”
  • Florian Cova: “Calibrating Measures of Folk Objectivism”
  • Justin Sytsma: “Resituating the Influence of Relevant Alternatives”
  • Samuel Murray, Elise Dykhuis, and Thomas Nadelhoffer: “Do People Understand Determinism? The Tracking Problem for Measuring Free Will Beliefs”
  • Natalja Deng, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, and James Norton: “Investing the Three Ts of Present-Bias – Telic Attitudes, Temporal Preferences and Temporal Ontology”
  • Blake McAllister, Ian Church, Paul Rezkalla, and Long Nguyen: “Empirical Challenges to the Evidential Problem of Evil”
  • Eric Mandelbaum, Jennifer Ware, and Steven Young: “The Sound of Slurs – Bad Sounds for Bad Words”
  • Rebecca Zhu, Mariel Goddu, and Alison Gopnik: “Providing Explanations Shifts Preschoolers’ Metaphor Preferences”
  • Adrian Ziólkowski and Tomasz Zyglewicz: “Truth-Conditional Variability of Color Ascriptions”
  • Joshua Alexander and Jonathan M. Weinberg: “Practices Make Perfect – On Minding Methodology When Mooting Metaphilosophy”
  • Nat Hansen, Kathryn Francis, and Hamish Greening: “Socratic Questionnaires”
  • N. Ángel Pinillos: “Bank Cases, Stakes and Normative Facts”
  • Jon Bebb and Helen Beebee: “Causal Selection and Egalitarianism”
  • Kevin Reuter: “Experimental Philosophy of Consciousness”

Literature

Knobe, Joshua, and Shaun Nichols (eds.) (2024): Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, volume 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Link)

Talk: “In Praise of Praise” (Pascale Willemsen)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, June 10, from 18:00–20:00 (UTC+2), Pascale Willemsen will be talking about “In Praise of Praise” at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Pascale writes:

Philosophers claim that an agent’s moral responsibility can come in two variations: A blameworthy agent deserves blame, and a praiseworthy agent deserves praise. It is also widely accepted that a central question in moral philosophy concerns the conditions under which an agent is or is appropriately held morally responsible for their behaviour. In contrast, a central topic in moral psychology concerns the conditions under which an agent is judged to be morally responsible for their behaviour and blamed for its negative consequences. While blame and praise are seen as two sides of the same coin, considerably more attention has been paid to blame. In general, moral responsibility researchers have mainly focused on understanding negatively-valenced moral phenomena. In contrast, the positive side of moral responsibility has only played a minor role in the research programmes of moral philosophers, psychologists, and experimental philosophers. As a result, we understand relatively little about what praise is, when it is ascribed, and how it is verbally expressed. This is surprising, as researchers strive to tell a story about human morality and moral responsibility as a whole, not merely half of it.

In this talk, I will do three things: First, I summarize the relatively scarce psychological literature which strongly suggests various asymmetries between blame and praise. Second, presenting a series of my own experiments, I demonstrate that blame and praise may differ in another important respect, namely in the way it is verbally expressed by negative and positive evaluative concepts. As a result of all this evidence, I conclude that praise is a unique moral judgment that deserves closer attention. Finally, taking a first stab at the linguistic dimension of praise, I show some pilot corpus studies which explore praise vocabulary.

Conference: “Experimental Philosophy – Beyond Armchair Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 32nd “Philosophy Conference” of the University of Valladolid’s Department of Philosophy, organized by José V. Hernández-Conde, will take place from May 16 to 17 in Valladolid, Spain. This year’s instalment is all about experimental philosophy.

May 16, 9:00–18:30 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “No Luck for Moral Luck”
  • María Jiménez-Buedo (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia): “What do we Measure in the Dictator Game? Constructs, Validity and the Threat of Methodological Artifacts”
  • Mikel Asteinza (University of the Basque Country): “Epistemic Determinants of Scientific Disclosure and Their Impact on the Legal Audience – The Case of De-Extinction”
  • Andrei Moldovan and Obdulia Torres (University of Salamanca): “Expertisia as a Contextual Property”
  • Fernando Aguiar (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Would You Hire a Person With an Intellectual Disability? An Experimental Study on Action and Compassion”
  • Francisco Calvo (University of Murcia): “Of Seahorses and Plants – An Experimental Journey out of Ignorance”
  • Fernando Sanantonio (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): “External Sanctions, Compliance and Avoidance in Vegetarianism as a Normative System”
  • Daniel Martín (University of Granada): “Attitudes Toward Moral Improvement Based on Virtual Assistance”

May 17, 9:15–14:00 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “The Geography of Wisdom”
  • Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada): “What is ‘Consenting’?”
  • Javier Anta (University of Salamanca): “An Experimental Approach to the Ordinary Meaning of ‘Information’”
  • Rodrigo Díaz (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Describing (Erroneously) Recalcitrant Emotions”
  • David Rodríguez-Arias (University of Granada): “Contemporary End-of-Life Bioethics – Empirical and Experimental Contributions”

For more information about the conference, visit https://keama.uva.es/xxxii-philosophy-conference/.

Workshop: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Today, the “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, starts. They write:

We are delighted to announce the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The worshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. The link to the Teams meetings is below.

February 14, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Renato Turco (University of Genoa): “An Experimental Approach to Empty Definite Descriptions”
  • Lucien Baumgartner (University of Zurich), Paul Rehren (Utrecht University), and Krzysztof Sękowski (University of Warsaw): “Measuring (Un)Intentional Conceptual Change in Philosophy – A Corpus Study”

March 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Isabelle Keßels (University of Düsseldorf), Paul Hasselkuß (University of Düsseldorf), and Daian Bica (University of Düsseldorf): “The Safety Dilemma Put to the Test”
  • José V. Hernández-Conde (University of Valladolid) and Agustín Vicente (University of the Basque Country; Ikerbasque): “A Comparative Analysis of the Knobe Effect – Assessing Moral, Aesthetic, and Alethic Reasoning in Autistic and Neurotypical Populations”

April 10, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Tingting Sui (Peking University), Sebastian Sunday (Peking University): “A Confucian Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles”
  • Ryan Doran (University of Barcelona; University of Cambridge): “True Beauty”

May 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • William Gopal (University of Glasgow): “Identifying & Rectifying the Instrumentalist Bias in Analytic Social Epistemology”
  • Giuseppe Ricciardi (Harvard University) and Kevin Reuter (University of Zurich): “Exploring the Agent-Relativity of Truth”

June 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Federico Burdman (Alberto Hurtado University), Gino Marttelo Carmona Díaz (University of the Andes), and María Fernanda Rangel Carrillo (University of the Andes): “Lay Perceptions of Control and Moral Responsibility in Addiction”
  • Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “A Cross-Cultural Study on the Ethics and Moral Psychology of HPV Vaccination”

Sessions can be joined using Microsoft Teams via https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NDdiNDRjNmQtMzI4Yi00MWM2LWFiYjMtYzE4YzE1ZTY2ODcz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c152cb07-614e-4abb-818a-f035cfa91a77%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22680c6cfa-4e43-4962-9569-4828023e7f78%22%7d.

Hot Off The Press: “Empirische Studien zu Fragen der Bedarfsgerechtigkeit”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Needs are something that fundamentally defines us as human beings. In “Empirische Studien zu Fragen der Bedarfsgerechtigkeit” (Empirical Studies on Questions of Need-Based Distributive Justice), I recap a series of vignette studies that examine the role that needs play in dealing with problems of distributive justice. While needs are often underrepresented in discussions of distributive justice, they are shown to have a fundamental importance in people’s thinking.

Among other things, the following becomes clear:

  1. Impartial observers make gradual assessments of the fairness of distributions.
  2. These assessments depend on how well an individual is supplied with a relevant good.
  3. If information on a need threshold is given, these assessments are made relative to this reference point. (Bauer et al. 2023a)
  4. Impartial decision-makers consider need, productivity, and accountability when making hypothetical distribution decisions.
  5. If an individual’s productivity is not sufficient to cover their needs, these higher needs are partially compensated for (at the expense of other individuals who are not so badly off)
  6. Willingness to compensate decreases if an individual is accountable for having produced less or for needing more. (Bauer et al. 2022)
  7. Both impartial observers and impartial decision-makers attribute different levels of importance to different kinds of needs.
  8. This reveals a hierarchy of needs in the following order: Survival, Decency, Belonging, Autonomy. (Bauer et al. 2023b)

Literature

Bauer, Alexander Max, Frauke Meyer, Jan Romann, Mark Siebel, and Stefan Traub (2022): “Need, Equity, and Accountability. Evidence on Third-Party Distribution Decisions from a Vignette Study,” Social Choice and Welfare 59, 769–814. (Link)

Bauer, Alexander Max, Adele Diederich, Stefan Traub, and Arne Robert Weiss (2023a): “When the Poorest Are Neglected. A Vignette Experiment on Need-Based Distributive Justice,” SSRN Working Paper 4503209. (Link)

Bauer, Alexander Max, Jan Romann, Mark Siebel, and Stefan Traub (2023b): “Winter is Coming. How Laypeople Think About Different Kinds of Needs,” PLoS ONE 18 (11), e0294572. (Link)

Bauer, Alexander Max (2024): Empirische Studien zu Fragen der Bedarfsgerechtigkeit, Oldenburg: University of Oldenburg Press. (Link)

Who Complies With Pandemic Health Recommendations?

Posted on by Rodrigo Díaz

This text was first published at xphiblog.com on August 8, 2021. It has been slightly updated.

Compliance with health recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic is a divisive topic. Some readily accept measures such as social distancing and mask-wearing, while others frontally reject them. What separates those who comply from those who don’t? Is it trust in science and official organizations? Concern about others vs. liberty? Fear? Aversion to germs?

In March 2020, the WHO declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. That month, I was supposed to go on a ski trip with some friends. As the dates were approaching, the ski trip’s group chat was a succession of moral arguments for cancelling the trip, and pragmatic arguments for carrying on with the plan. In the end, we didn’t go. But as a geek that likes to scrutinize human behavior, I started wondering: Were we convinced by the arguments? Or just confused and scared?

Soon after that, I saw on Twitter that Florian Cova had run a study investigating the relationship between conspiracist mentality and compliance with health recommendations. Brilliant! Instead of just speculating, I should get some data too. I ran a small study and found an effect of moral beliefs regarding care on participant’s efforts to comply with health recommendations, but no effect of anxiety. I showed the results to Florian, and we decided to join forces to get a wider picture of the individual differences associated with adopting health behaviors during the pandemic.

In a first study, we included a total of 17 individual differences measures, which can be classified into three categories: Epistemic (beliefs in pseudoscience / conspiracy theories / political truth, faith in intuition, narcissism), Moral (moral foundations, perspective-taking), and Affective (fear, disgust, empathy, reactance). All these seemed plausible candidates. Those who tend to mistrust science and official organizations are likely to disregard health recommendations. But so is the case for those who think that preserving liberty is morally imperative, or react negatively to attempts to restrict of freedom. Conversely, those who think that caring about others is a very important moral value, tend to take other’s perspective, or share others’ pain, are likely to follow health recommendations to avoid harming others. And those who are prone to fear or disgust will probably adopt health behaviors to avoid getting the virus. What did the results show?

None of the epistemic / conspiracist items significantly correlated with efforts to comply with health recommendations, nor did fear. Regression analyses showed that the best predictors of compliance were care values and disgust sensitivity. Participants who think caring about others is specially important or are easily disgusted reported more efforts to comply with health recommendations. These results replicated in a representative sample of the US population.

In a second set of studies (conducted in late 2020), we used French participants and an indirect measure of compliance with health recommendations: decisions to go voting in the municipal elections that were taking place at that time in France. Arguably, those who follow health recommendations would avoid to go voting (but, as the results suggest, the issue might be more complicated).

This time, regression analyses showed that pathogen disgust and reactance were the best predictors of efforts to follow health recommendations. Both variables also showed a significant effect on voting behavior, with reactance predicting decisions to go voting, and pathogen disgust predicting decisions to not vote. However, and in contrast to previous studies, care values showed no significant effects.

Because the results were somewhat heterogeneous across studies, we conducted (actually, Florian did) a mini-metanalysis to ensure the robustness of our (partial) correlation effects on reported compliance with health recommendations. Results showed a significant effect of reactance, disgust, and care values, hence the title of the paper.1

I still don’t know what made me and my friends not go skiing in March 2020, but it seems that individual differences in moral beliefs, disgust sensitivity, and psychological reactance are more important than conspiracist mentality or fear in driving (lack of) compliance with health recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic. This might be surprising to some, unsurprising to others. Maybe we should run a study on this divide next!

Endnotes

  1. Díaz, Rodrigo, and Florian Cova (2022): “Reactance, Morality, and Disgust. The Relationship Between Affective Dispositions and Compliance With Official Health Recommendations During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Cognition and Emotion 36 (1), 120–136. (Link) ↩︎