Impartial observers make gradual assessments of the fairness of distributions.
These assessments depend on how well an individual is supplied with a relevant good.
If information on a need threshold is given, these assessments are made relative to this reference point. (Bauer et al. 2023a [later published as Bauer et al. 2025])
Impartial decision-makers consider need, productivity, and accountability when making hypothetical distribution decisions.
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)
Willingness to compensate decreases if an individual is accountable for having produced less or for needing more. (Bauer et al. 2022)
Both impartial observers and impartial decision-makers attribute different levels of importance to different kinds of needs.
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)
Bauer, Alexander Max (2025): Empirical Studies on Questions of Need-Based Distributive Justice, Paderborn: mentis. (Link)
Bauer, Alexander Max, Adele Diederich, Stefan Traub, and Arne Robert Weiss (2025): “Thinking About Need. A Vignette Experiment on Need-Based Distributive Justice,” The Journal of Economic Inequality 23 (3), 667–693. (Link)
Barbara A. Spellman, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, Janice Nadler, and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan: “Psychology and Jurisprudence Across the Curriculum”
John Mikhail: “Holmes, Legal Realism, and Experimental Jurisprudence”
Frederick Schauer: “The Empirical Component of Analytic Jurisprudence”
Felipe Jiménez: “The Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
Jonathan Lewis: “Competing Conceptual Inferences and the Limits of Experimental Jurisprudence”
Joseph Avery, Alissa del Riego, and Patricia Sánchez Abril: “The Contours of Bias in Experimental Jurisprudence”
Christoph Bublitz: “Experimental Jurisprudence and Doctrinal Reasoning – A View from German Criminal Law”
Bert I. Huang: “Law and Morality”
Brian Sheppard: “Legal Constraint”
Part 2 – Introductions
Guilherme da Franca Couto Fernandes de Almeida, Noel Struchiner, and Ivar Hannikainen: “Rules”
James A. Macleod: “Surveys and Experiments in Statutory Interpretation”
Thomas R. Lee and Stephen C. Mouritsen: “Corpus Linguistics and Armchair Jurisprudence”
Meirav Furth-Matzkin: “Using Experiments to Inform the Regulation of Consumer Contracts”
Doron Dorfman: “Experimental Jurisprudence of Health and Disability Law”
Jessica Bregant, Jennifer K. Robbennolt, and Verity Winship: “Studying Public Perceptions of Settlement”
Benedikt Pirker, Izabela Skoczeń, and Veronika Fikfak: “Experimental Jurisprudence in International Law”
Heidi H. Liu: “The Law and Psychology of Gender Stereotyping”
Christian Mott: “The Experimental Jurisprudence of Persistence through Time”
Lukas Holste and Holger Spamann: “Experimental Investigations of Judicial Decision-Making”
Christoph Engel and Rima-Maria Rahal: “Eye-Tracking as a Method for Legal Research”
Jessica Bregant: “Intuitive Jurisprudence – What Experimental Jurisprudence Can Learn from Developmental Science”
Part 3 – Applications
Corey H. Allen, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Jason Shepard, and Eyal Aharoni: “Moral Judgments about Retributive Vigilantism”
Karolina M. Prochownik, Romy D. Feiertag, Joachim Horvath, and Alex Wiegmann: “How Much Harm Does It Take? An Experimental Study on Legal Expertise, the Severity Effect, and Intentionality Ascriptions”
Gabriel Lima and Meeyoung Cha: “Human Perceptions of AI-Caused Harm”
Christopher Brett Jaeger: “Reasonableness from an Experimental Jurisprudence Perspective”
Lucien Baumgartner and Markus Kneer: “The Meaning of ‘Reasonable’ – Evidence from a Corpus-Linguistic Study”
Roseanna Sommers: “Commonsense Consent and Action Representation – What is ‘Essential’ to Consent?”
Neele Engelmann and Lara Kirfel: “Who Caused It? Different Effects of Statistical and Prescriptive Abnormality on Causal Selection in Chains”
Ori Friedman: “Ownership for and Against Control”
Andrew Higgins and Inbar Levy: “Examining the Foundations of the Law of Judicial Bias – Expert versus Lay Perspectives on Judicial Recusal”
Jacqueline M. Chen and Teneille R. Brown: “The Promise and the Pitfalls of Mock Jury Studies – Testing the Psychology of Character Assessments”
Piotr Bystranowski, Ivar Hannikainen, and Kevin Tobia: “Legal Interpretation as Coordination”
Janet Randall and Lawrence Solan: “Legal Ambiguities – What Can Psycholinguistics Tell Us?”
Eric Martínez and Christoph Winter: “Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Rights for Future Generations”
Austin A. Baker and J. Remy Green: “The Right to Transgender Identity”
Enrique Cáceres, Christopher Stephens, Azalea Reyes-Aguilar, Daniel Atilano, Manuel García, Rosa Lidia López-Bejarano, Susana González, Carmen Patricia López-Olvera, Octavio Salvador-Ginez, and Margarita Palacios: “The Legal Conductome – The Complexity Behind Decisions”
Neil C. Thompson, Brian Flanagan, Edana Richardson, Brian McKenzie, and Xueyun Luo: “Trial by Internet – A Randomized Field Experiment on Wikipedia’s Influence on Judges’ Legal Reasoning”
Literature
Tobia, Kevin (ed.) (2025): The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. (Link)
In a previous post, I wrote about a course (which I taught together with Stephan Kornmesser in the summer term of 2024) for master’s students who had no previous contact with X-Phi at all. After learning some methodological and statistical basics and conducting their own small replication of Knobe (2003), they had the opportunity to develop their own questions and conduct their very own studies in small groups. Below, Bastian Göbbels and Marina Hinkel present some results from their study on the perception of the moral obligation to help others.
The Perception of the Moral Obligation to Help Others
Bastian Göbbels and Marina Hinkel
The United Nations calculated a donation amount for development aid in the 1970s that wealthy countries could contribute to prevent the global consequences of absolute poverty – 70 cents per 100 earned dollars. In 2013, only Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, and Sweden reached this donation target. At that time, Germany was at 0.38–0.43 cents (cf. Singer 2013, 344). The bottom line is that we could contain extreme global poverty and its consequences relatively easily, but the reality is different.
Peter Singer raises the question of whether we have an obligation to help those in need and to whom we have moral obligations (by “we,” Singer means individuals in wealthy industrialized countries – including himself). Singer argues that we should, for example, prevent a certain level of absolute poverty because absolute poverty is bad, because we could prevent a level of absolute poverty without having to make comparable sacrifices, and if we can prevent something bad without having to make a comparable sacrifice, we should do so (cf. Singer 2013, 356f.). Singer reinforces the last premise by pointing out that it only requires us to prevent bad things and not to promote good things (this corresponds to the consequentialism of utilitarianism; cf. Singer 2017, 36).
Singer illustrates the principle of the obligation to help with a thought experiment about a child in a pond that is in danger of drowning. Here is how Singer himself describes the “drowning child”:
To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.
I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do. (Singer 1997, par. 1f.)
The principle should be applied equally to all cases, regardless of whether I am the only person potentially helping, e.g., by saving the child in the pond, or one of many, e.g., by donating (cf. Singer 2017, 37). Although Singer does not regard failure to help as intentional killing but as a moral challenge (cf. Singer 2013, 354), he emphasizes elsewhere that absolute poverty means a death sentence and that the diseases responsible for this are preventable (cf. Singer 2013, 341f.).
Under the premises of universalization, impartiality, and equality, the spatial aspect – distance or proximity to the person in need – should be obsolete, according to Singer. In light of globalization, with today’s improved communication and transport conditions, distance can no longer be an excuse for lack of assistance (cf. Singer 2017, 37f.). Singer concedes: “The fact that a person is physically close to us […] may increase the likelihood that we will help them, but this does not prove that we should help them rather than any other person who happens to be at a greater distance” (Singer 2017, 37).
Singer argues that there is a certain level of extreme poverty that we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance in figures. On the one hand, he uses the amount calculated by the United Nations, which would be sufficient for basic development aid: 70 cents per 100 dollars earned. According to the World Bank in 2008, this would correspond to 1.25 dollars per day for a person’s basic needs (note currency-dependent purchasing power; cf. Singer 2013, 341). In 2008, the wealthy industrialized countries donated 19–43 cents for every 100 dollars earned (cf. Singer 2013, 344).
Based on Singer’s above-outlined thoughts, we wanted to investigate how spatial and social distance or proximity, as well as personal cost, influence the perception of moral obligation. To do this, we developed a vignette in which a child needs help from our subject. Between subjects, we varied (a) whether the child needs a new kidney directly from the subject or money for the same medical purpose, (b) whether our subject is said to know the child or not, and (c) whether the child is from the same neighbourhood, the same federal state, or a far-away country from the Global South. This resulted in a total of twelve different scenarios.
As an example, here is a translation of the vignette where a child from the neighbourhood, which the subject is said to know, needs money:
Imagine the following situation: You are informed that a child you know has life-threatening problems with his only kidney and, therefore, needs a donor organ. The child lives in your neighbourhood. You could donate one-third of your monthly income for the next two years without being at risk of losing your livelihood. With your help, the child would be saved.
After reading the vignette, subjects were asked to answer two yes-or-no questions: “Would you donate your money [kidney]?” and “Regardless of whether you would donate your money [kidney] yourself, do you think that someone in such a situation should donate their money [kidney]?” In the following, we will only look at the former question.
The online survey was programmed with LimeSurvey, and 630 subjects from Bilendi successfully participated (i.e., they did not fail an attention check and completed the survey).
A surprising finding is that more participants said they would donate a kidney than money (χ² ≈ 5.620, p < 0.05); see Figure 1. This increased willingness could be due to the fact that donating a kidney is perceived as more immediate and life-saving, while donating money is often perceived as less urgent.
Figure 1: Kidney vs. money
At the same time, we found that the willingness to donate does not change between the neighbourhood and the federal state (χ² ≈ 0.030, p > 0.1) but between the federal state and the far-away country (χ² ≈ 7.608, p < 0.01); see Figure 2.
Figure 2: Neighborhood vs. federal state and federal state vs. far-away country
Lastly, we didn’t find a significant difference when it comes to knowing the child or not (χ² ≈ 3.414, p > 0.05); see Figure 3.
Figure 3: Known vs. unknown
Our results are partly consistent with Peter Singer’s assumptions. Nevertheless, they show that people’s willingness to help – at least in our hypothetical scenarios – seems to decrease with distance. Also, the type of aid (kidney vs. money) seems to play a role, while social proximity does not. Of course, these results need to be taken with a grain of salt, and further, more elaborate research is necessary. Interestingly enough, there is a discrepancy between given answers and actual behavior, as illustrated by the low numbers of organ donations in reality. While respondents signal a high willingness to help in hypothetical scenarios, practical implementation falls short of these expectations.
Knobe, Joshua (2003): “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,” Analysis 63 (3), 190–194. (Link)
Singer, Peter (1997): “The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle,” New Internationalist 289. (Link)
Singer, Peter (2013): Praktische Ethik, translated by Oscar Bischoff, Jean-Claude Wolf, Dietrich Klose, and Susanne Lenz, 3rd edition, Stuttgart: Reclam. (Link)
Singer, Peter (2017): Hunger, Wohlstand und Moral, translated by Elsbeth Ranke, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. (Link)
The “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, continues. They write:
We are looking forward to the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The workshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. Except for the opening keynote session, all sessions will have two presentations. Please email to register and receive the links (by the day before the session you hope to attend would be ideal).
October 9, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)
Shaun Nichols (Cornell University): “The PSR and the Folk Metaphysics of Explanation”
November 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Monica Ding (King’s College London): “Non-Factive Understanding – Evidence from English, Cantonese, and Mandarin”
María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “Digital Interventions to Boost Vaccination Intention – A Report”
December 11, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Elis Jones (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research): “The Problem of Baselining – Philosophy, History, and Coral Reef Science”
April H. Bailey (University of Edinburgh) and Nicholas DiMaggio (University of Chicago Booth School of Business): “Of Minds and Men”
January 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Ajinkya Deshmukh (The University of Manchester) and Frederique Janssen-Lauret (The University of Manchester): “Reincarnation and Anti-Essentialism – An Argument Against the Essentiality of Material Origins”
Ethan Landes (University of Kent) and Justin Sytsma (Victoria University of Wellington): “LLM Simulated Data – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”
February 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė (University of Cambridge), Jasmina Stevanov (University of Cambridge), Ryan P. Doran (University of Cambridge), Katherine A. Symons (University of Cambridge), and Simone Schnall (University of Cambridge): “Transformed by Beauty – Exploring the Influence of Aesthetic Appreciation on Abstract Thinking”
Poppy Mankowitz (University of Bristol): “Experimenting With ‘Good’”
March 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)
Kathryn Francis (University of Leeds), Maria Ioannidou (University of Bradford), and Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh): “Does Dietary Identity Influence Moral Anthropocentrism?”
Jonathan Lewis (University of Manchester), James Toomey (University of Iowa), Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada), and Brian D. Earp (National University of Singapore): “Normative Authority, Epistemic Access, and the True Self”
In our “Faces of X-Phi” series, experimental philosophers from all around the globe answer nine questions about the past, present, and future of themselves and the field. Who would you like to see here in the future? Just leave a suggestion in the comments! Today, we present Ivar Rodríguez Hannikainen.
The Past
(1) How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
I started out studying music as an undergrad. I loved playing guitar but then quickly became disillusioned with the prospect of a career in music. Then I took a couple of philosophy classes and found myself really enjoying them. But the kind of philosophy I was attracted to then was pretty different from what I most enjoy now: It involved diagnosing the ills of present-day capitalism and calling for a radical ontological/metaphysical shift to uproot the cause of all social and political evils.
(2) And how did you end up doing experimental philosophy?
I had been doing theoretical metaethics during my MA in Madrid, writing about whether moral judgments are inherently motivating or not. Then, in my first week as a PhD student at the University of Sheffield, I was extremely lucky that Stephen Laurence had organized a conference with a line-up of excellent philosophers, psychologists, and economists. I asked Fiery Cushman a few questions after his talk, and that developed into the opportunity to visit the Moral Psychology Research Lab at Harvard. I had no experience whatsoever running experiments, but Fiery was the best mentor you could possibly ask for. Then, back in Sheffield, Steve would get me thinking about how the empirical work we were doing brought to bear on questions in philosophy. So, it was a combination of luck and Steve and Fiery’s diligence and mentorship.
(3) Which teachers or authors have influenced you the most on your philosophy journey – and how?
Besides Steve and Fiery, Blanca Rodríguez López and Noel Struchiner had a huge influence on me. Blanca turned me on to empirically-informed ethics when I was an MA student in Madrid and I wasn’t sure whether there was a place for me in philosophy. Years later, Noel proposed many of the ideas about how moral psychology underpins the law that have become a focus of my research and helped to establish what we now call experimentaljurisprudence.
The Present
(4) Why do you consider experimental philosophy in its present form important?
For two reasons.
The first has to do with communication and understanding. We all know the disappointing feeling of sitting through a talk (or being halfway through a paper) thinking, “I have no idea what this is about,” and being unable to engage. Then there is its mirror image: the frustration at the end of your own talk as you realize that, despite your best efforts, you did not make yourself understood. It’s sad because we all devote so much time and energy to carrying out this work, and a big reason to do so is so we can share it with our peers. In my opinion, experimental philosophy helps overcome this problem (as do many other disciplines) by establishing a regimented language. This language allows people to convey hours upon hours of intellectual labor in a 20-minute talk pretty effectively. It’s kind of miraculous and very rewarding to participate in that kind of exchange.
The second reason is the democratizing aspect of experimental philosophy. There are many influential publications authored by scholars from underrepresented countries and lower-ranking institutions – and I suspect this is because there is less weight placed on the name tag and the institution, and more on the ideas and the work themselves. Though, of course, things could always be better in this regard.
(5) Do you have any critical points to make about experimental philosophy in its current state?
My criticisms are along the lines of this, this, and this. These are criticisms I direct at my own research, and I think many experimental philosophers are already acutely aware of these issues. But maybe it’s worth saying anyway.
Experimental philosophy grew out of a concern about the limitations of the introspective (N = 1) method of elaborating on one’s own philosophical intuitions. As experimental philosophers, most of us probably rehash this concern over and over again when we introduce students to experimental philosophy or answer questions about what X-Phi is. That’s all well and good, but what are the limitations of that study you or I are working on right now in 2024? For the field to continue to develop, we should remain vigilant in this sense.
Here are just three examples of how people are doing this already:
There is the concern that our experiments may not accurately capture how people use concepts spontaneously, which has led to an uptick in natural language processing research (see the work of Lucien Baumgartner or Piotr Bystranowski).
There is the concern that what we have learned about folk morality, for example, based on people’s self-reports, may not have much to do with their actual behavior. Work by Kathryn Francis and Eric Schwitzgebel, among others, has contributed greatly to this question.
And, of course, the concern that existing studies, most of which nowadays are conducted in English on Prolific, may not represent people’s intuitions and philosophical concepts in other languages or in non-Western cultures. As everyone knows, the cross-cultural work of Steve Stich and Edouard Machery (together with dozens of collaborators around the world) has been extremely fruitful in this regard.
(6) Which philosophical tradition, group, or individual do you think is most underrated by present-day philosophy?
Possibly every philosophical tradition that developed outside the mainstream European and English-speaking countries. There has to be so much neglected philosophy throughout history simply because it was written in a minority language. The Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy draw attention to a related problem that affects contemporary scholars. It also impacts up-and-coming students of philosophy who may be discouraged from going into academia by the thought that they won’t be able to convey their ideas as eloquently as they’d like.
The Future
(7) How do you think philosophy as a whole will develop in the future?
That is a hard question, so my answer is probably wrong, but I can offer some wild speculation: Philosophy will shift from being thought of as a discipline with a proprietary set of topics to being thought of as an approach or as a set of questions that can arise about many other existing academic disciplines and non-academic pursuits.
If we think of philosophy in the first way, it is tempting to give in to the idea that science is intruding in philosophy and philosophy is receding and surrendering its intellectual terrain. But when thinking of philosophy as an approach to existing disciplines or even specific phenomena, there is no reason to think that we will need less philosophy in the future: within artificial intelligence, a philosophy of artificial intelligence or a theory of personhood; within sustainability studies, an environmental or moral philosophy, and so on.
(8) What do you wish for the future of experimental philosophy?
Most of all, I would like to avoid The Bleak Future. The bleak future I’m thinking of is one where philosophy has been swept into the downward spiral of the humanities and plays an ever-smaller role in public affairs. The few remaining philosophers watch from the sidelines as teams of computer scientists and engineers – with the help of a few natural and social scientists – shape the future, generate awesome knowledge, and improve society.
So, my wish for the future is for experimental philosophers to help establish the value of philosophy within academia and beyond. I’m hopeful that this can be done; we have good exemplars already!
(9) Do you have any interesting upcoming projects?
Together with colleagues in the Psychology Department in Granada, Neele Engelmann and I are studying how people apply rules using the letter vs. spirit framework, asking whether participants’ decisions can be modeled using the same tools that cognitive psychologists use to explain behavior on simple visual interference tasks like the Stroop or Flanker test.
I’m also excited about the research a group of us at the University of Granada is doing on how law and morality mutually influence each other by triangulating legal corpora, experiments, and time-series data. So far, we have focused specifically on euthanasia, but the long-term goal is to pursue this question in a more general way.
A third, early-stage project is inspired by research on action understanding as inverse planning. We know that when people do something bad, we quite naturally want to infer whether they did so intentionally (“Given that they did x, did they have bad intentions?”), perhaps as a step in deciding whether they are to blame. Applying the “inverse planning” idea, we are examining whether these intentionality inferences are themselves carried out by spontaneously inverting the conditional probability and asking oneself, “Supposing they did have bad intentions, would they do x?” as a form of Bayesian reasoning.
Antonio Gaitán, Fernando Aguiar, and Hugo Viciana: “The Experimental Turn in Moral and Political Philosophy”
Part 1 – Methods and Foundations
Ivar R. Hannikainen, Brian Flanagan, and Karolina Prochownik: “The Natural Law Thesis Under Empirical Scrutiny”
Philipp Schoenegger and Ben Grodeck: “Concrete Over Abstract – Experimental Evidence of Reflective Equilibrium in Population Ethics”
Dana Kay Nelkin, Craig R. M. McKenzie, Samuel C. Rickless, and Arseny Ryazanov: “Trolley Problems Reimagined – Sensitivity to Ratio, Risk, and Comparisons”
Lieuwe Zijlstra: “The Psychology of Metaethics – Evidence For and Against Folk Moral Objectivism”
Thomas Pölzler: “The Explanatory Redundancy Challenge to Moral Properties”
Cuizhu Wang: “Belief Distributions and the Measure of Social Norms”
Mariìa Jimeìnez Buedo: “Coming Full Circle – Incentives, Reactivity, and the Experimental Turn”
Part 2 – Normative Ethics and Legal and Political Philosophy
Stefan Schubert and Lucius Caviola: “Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians”
Aurélien Allard and Florian Cova: “What Experiments Can Teach Us About Justice and Impartiality – Vindicating Experimental Political Philosophy”
Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg and Yuval Feldman: “A Behavioral Ethics Perspective on the Theory of Criminal Law and Punishment”
Douglas Husak: “Behavioral Ethics and the Extent of Responsibility”
François Jaquet: “Against Moorean Defences of Speciesism”
Part 3: Applied Issues
Blanca Rodrìguez: “Experimental Bioethics and the Case for Human Enhancement”
Norbert Paulo, Leonie Alina Möck, and Lando Kirchmair: “The Use and Abuse of Moral Preferences in the Ethics of Self-Driving Cars”
Urna Chakrabarty, Romy Feiertag, Anne-Marie McCallion, Brain McNiff, Jesse Prinz, Montaque Reynolds, Sukhvinder Shahi, Maya von Ziegesar, and Angella Yamamoto: “Adaptive Preferences – An Empirical Investigation of Feminist Perspectives”
Anastasia Chan, Marinus Ferreira, and Mark Alfano: “Reactionary Attitudes – Strawson, Twitter, and the Black Lives Matter Movement”
Literature
Viciana, Hugo, Antonio Gaitán, and Fernando Aguiar (eds.) (2023): Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy, New York: Routledge. (Link)
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)
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?
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”
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:
Impartial observers make gradual assessments of the fairness of distributions.
These assessments depend on how well an individual is supplied with a relevant good.
If information on a need threshold is given, these assessments are made relative to this reference point. (Bauer et al. 2023a)
Impartial decision-makers consider need, productivity, and accountability when making hypothetical distribution decisions.
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)
Willingness to compensate decreases if an individual is accountable for having produced less or for needing more. (Bauer et al. 2022)
Both impartial observers and impartial decision-makers attribute different levels of importance to different kinds of needs.
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)
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