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 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.

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.

Naked

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krista K. Thomason
Keyword(s):  
Moral Emotion ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Virtuous Life ◽  
Moral Philosophers

Moral philosophers have long argued that shame can be a morally valuable emotion that helps people realize when they fail to be the kinds of people they aspire to be. According to these arguments, people feel shame when they fail to live up to the norms, standards, and ideals that are valued as part of a virtuous life. But lurking in the shadows is the dark side of shame. People might feel shame when they fail to live up to their values, but they also feel shame about sex, nudity, being ugly, fat, stupid, or low-class. What is worse, people often respond to shame with violence and self-destruction. This book argues for a unified account of shame that embraces shame’s dark side. Rather than try to explain away the troubling cases as irrational or misguided, it presents an account of shame that makes sense of both its good and bad side. Shame is the experience of a tension between two aspects of one’s self: one’s self-conception and one’s identity. People are liable to feelings of shame because they are not always who they take themselves to be. Shame is a valuable moral emotion, and even though it has a dark side, people would not be better off without it.

Merciful Demand

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Hause
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Social System ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Lay People ◽  
The Social

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, increasingly sophisticated ethical thought made its way out of the theology texts and into pastoral guides and sermons, making it possible for a greater number of ethically informed lay people to share pastoral responsibility. One exercise of this responsibility was fraternal correction, through which a person, motivated by charity, rebukes a neighbor for his or her wrongdoing. This essay argues that the practice of fraternal correction is in fact a sort of blaming, since it includes a judgment of blameworthiness and opprobrium for the offender’s bad choice, moral address directed to the offender, the demand for a response, and holding the offender accountable. However, in contrast to other forms of blame, the source of the offender’s accountability to the corrector in fraternal correction is the social system created by the exercise of mercy.

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