scholarly journals Intuitive Expertise and Irrelevant Options

2020 ◽  
pp. 275-310
Author(s):  
Joachim Horvath ◽  
Karina Meyer ◽  
Alex Wiegmann
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Lay People ◽  
Peter Unger ◽  
Expertise Defense ◽  
Intuitive Expertise ◽  
Moral Philosophers

In the ‘push-dilemma,’ a train is about to run over several people and can only be stopped by pushing a heavy person onto the tracks. Most lay people and moral philosophers consider the ‘push-option,’ i.e., pushing the heavy person, as morally wrong. Peter Unger (1992, 1996) suggested that adding irrelevant options to the push-dilemma would overturn this intuition. This chapter tests Unger’s claim in an experiment with both lay people and expert moral philosophers. This allowed an investigation of the ‘expertise defense,’ which various philosophers have suggested as an answer to ‘experimental restrictionists,’ who argue that experimental philosophy undermines the trustworthiness of intuitions about hypothetical cases. Overall, the chapter finds that adding irrelevant options increases the ratings for the push-option. Moreover, the intuitions of expert moral philosophers are no less susceptible to the presence of irrelevant options than lay people’s intuitions. The chapter discusses how these findings bear on the expertise defense.

scholarly journals Intuitive Expertise and Irrelevant Options

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Wiegmann ◽  
Joachim Horvath ◽  
Karina Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Lay People ◽  
Expertise Defense ◽  
Intuitive Expertise ◽  
Moral Philosophers

In the so-called push dilemma, an out-of-control speed-train is about to run over five people and can only be stopped by pushing a heavy person onto the tracks. Most lay people and moral philosophers consider it morally wrong to kill the heavy person. Unger (1992, 1996), however, argued that adding irrelevant options to the push dilemma would overturn this intuition. In this paper, we empirically test Unger’s claim with both lay people and expert moral philosophers. Including philosophical experts allowed us to investigate the so-called expertise defense, according to which the intuitions of philosophical experts are superior to the intuitions of lay people. Overall, we found that adding irrelevant options indeed increased the ratings for the “push option”. Moreover, we found that the intuitions of expert moral philosophers were no less susceptible to the presence of irrelevant options than lay people’s intuitions. We discuss how these findings bear on the expertise defense.

scholarly journals Direct and derivative moral responsibility: An overlooked distinction in experimental philosophy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pascale Willemsen
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Conceptual Distinction ◽  
Moral Philosophers

Moral philosophers draw an important distinction between two kinds of moral responsibility. An agent can be directly morally responsible, or they can be derivatively morally responsible. Direct moral responsibility, so many believe, presupposes that the agent could have behaved differently. However, in some situations, we hold agents responsible even though they could not have behaved differently, such as when they recklessly cause an accident or do not take adequate precautions to avoid harmful consequences. Moral philosophers typically argue that what we ascribe in these cases is derivative moral responsibility. In this paper, I apply this conceptual distinction to the experimental debate about so-called folk-compatibilism. I argue that experimental philosophers have failed to consider this distinction when designing experiments and interpreting their results. I demonstrate that while compatibilism requires judgments of direct moral responsibility, participants in some of the most influential studies ascribed derivative moral responsibility. For this reason, these studies do not speak in favour of compatibilism at all.

What Beliefs Do Lay People Have on the Psychological Consequences of a Disaster?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesus Sanz ◽  
Judit Garcia-Jimenez ◽  
Carmen De Miguel ◽  
Ines Rodriguez ◽  
Amaya Rodriguez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
Lay People

People versus Policies: Decision-makers have divergent preferences for decisions about individuals and equivalent policies that affect individuals

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Mauricio Munguia Gomez ◽  
Emma Levine
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
College Admissions ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Preference Reversal ◽  
Lay People ◽  
Admissions Officers ◽  
New Type ◽  
Selection Policies

Across nine main studies (N = 7,024) and nine supplemental studies (N = 3,279), we find that people make systematically different choices when choosing between individuals and choosing between equivalent policies that affect individuals. In college admissions and workplace hiring contexts, we randomly assigned participants to select one of two individuals or choose one of two selection policies. People were significantly more likely to choose a policy that would favor a disadvantaged candidate over a candidate with objectively higher achievements than they were to favor a specific disadvantaged candidate over a specific candidate with objectively higher achievements. We document these divergent choices among admissions officers, working professionals, and lay people, using both within-subject and between-subject designs, and across a range of stimuli and decision contexts. We find evidence that these choices diverge because thinking about policies causes people to rely more on their values and less on the objective attributes of the options presented, which overall, leads more people to favor disadvantaged candidates in selection contexts. This research documents a new type of preference reversal in important, real-world decision contexts, and has practical and theoretical implications for understanding why our choices so frequently violate our espoused policies.

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