How causal structure, causal strength, and foreseeability affect moral judgments

Engelmann, Neele; Waldmann, Michael R.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105167

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…In scenarios where deceiving the addressee is seen as forbidden (or as merely permissible) by the majority of participants, lying is seen as morally worse than misleading, as Timmermann and Viebahn's (2021) theory predicts. This also lines up with other findings in moral psychology where causing harm indirectly is seen as morally preferable to doing so more indirectly (Royzman & Baron, 2002;Ziano et al, 2021), sometimes because indirect causal relations give rise to the inference that harm is less likely to occur (Engelmann & Waldmann, 2022). In cases where most people agreed that deceiving the addressee is obligatory, however, lying was only seen as morally better than misleading in one of three scenarios (hiding).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Murderer at the door! To lie or to mislead?

Engelmann¹

2023

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Is lying morally worse than misleading? The traditional view in philosophy is that it is, although convincing arguments have also been offered for the view that lying and misleading are morally equal (Saul, 2012a). I here report the results of addressing this question empirically. Specifically, I tested ordinary English speakers’ intuitions on the question whether the moral status of lying versus misleading depends on whether it is overall forbidden, permissible, or obligatory to deceive someone. Timmermann & Viebahn (2021) recently proposed that lies are, on average, stronger causes of false beliefs than misleading statements. When morality demands that we deceive someone (such as Kant’s murderer at the door, asking for the location of his innocent victims), lying may thus even be morally better than misleading, since lying is the stronger cause of a desirable outcome here. I could confirm that people take lies to be the more reliable means of deception than misleading statements, possibly because they take speakers to be more committed to the deceptive content of their utterance when they lie. When deception was forbidden, lying was accordingly judged as morally worse than misleading, as Timmermann and Viebahn’s (2021) account predicts. In cases of obligatory deception, lying was indeed sometimes seen as morally better than misleading (in a scenario modelled closely on the murderer at the door case), but not in two other tested scenarios. I discuss possible reasons and outline avenues for further research. Since lying and misleading are concepts that are deeply embedded in everyday life and discourse, I argue that philosophers should take ordinary speakers’ moral intuitions on this matter seriously.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Murderer at the door! To lie or to mislead?

Engelmann¹

2023

Preprint

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“…Thus, dynamic situations are more likely to elicit minimal revisions on causal networks and adherences to the screening-off rule than static situations 28 . However, although causal strength effect on causal inference in moral judgments has been veri ed 27 , its speci c role is still ignored.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, deterministic causal relations, which implied that a cause would inevitably affect its effects, were not appropriate to examine the screening-off rule. In the Causal Bayes Nets framework, this strength is conceptualized as probabilistic dependence 27 , which is more appropriate for examining the screening-off rule.…”

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confidence: 99%

WITHDRAWN: Causal Strength Account for Violations of the Screening-off Rule in Causal Reasoning

Liu

Duan

et al. 2022

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As a core of Causal Bayes networks, Screening-off rule is usually violated by people. Two experiments were conducted to investigate causal strength’s role in the violations of screening-off rule. Experiment 1 tested whether participants would follow the screening-off rule by examining the probability judgment of target nodes which would be influenced by the state of non-target nodes in common cause and chain models. Experiment 2 examined whether the probability judgment of target nodes would be influenced by causal strength judgment of their common cause in the common cause model (or of the middle node in the chain model). Both experiments used binary variables. Results showed that participants’ causal inferences increased with their perceived causal strength which grew with the presence proportion of other causal-related variables. Findings suggested that the causal strength explanation could offer the best prediction for people’s causal inferences, indicating people were sensitive to explicit causal strength of events and made causal inferences according to the strength. Thus, people’s causal inferences may not violate the screening-off rule.

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“…The study of causation involves many cases and complex structures, and it affects many areas of philosophy. So, experimental philosophers of causation are now exploring many of these issue like compositionality (Bauer andRomann 2022, Livengood andSytsma 2020), some applied issues for causal judgment like the exclusion problem in philosophy of mind (Blanchard et al 2021), and some concepts that are thought to affect causal cognition like sensitivity (Blanchard et al 2018, and they are expanding this work to better understand the relationship between causal judgment and moral judgment (Engelmann and Waldmann 2022). Experimental philosophers are also using new methods like corpus analysis (Sytsma et al 2019), implicit causality measurements (Niemi et al 2020), and memory techniques (Henne et al 2017) to investigate these issues.…”

Section: New Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental Metaphysics: Causation

Henne

2022

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In this chapter, I review some issues in the metaphysics of causation that have been widely-discussed by experimental philosophers. After I review the work investigating the effects of normality on causal judgment, I discuss the work on action-omission differences, temporal differences (late-preemption), and double-prevention scenarios. I review some explanations for the patterns of causal judgments that experimental philosophers observe in all of these cases. I then identify some new issues for the experimental philosophy of causation and experimental metaphysics more generally.

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How causal structure, causal strength, and foreseeability affect moral judgments

Cited by 10 publications

References 49 publications

Murderer at the door! To lie or to mislead?

Murderer at the door! To lie or to mislead?

WITHDRAWN: Causal Strength Account for Violations of the Screening-off Rule in Causal Reasoning

Experimental Metaphysics: Causation

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