Intuitive Expertise and Irrelevant Options

Abstract

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.

Explaining Moral Behavior

“…To illustrate this point consider a study that examines moral intuitions in different groups. Wiegmann, Horvath, and Meyer (under review) show that laypeople’s and philosopher’s moral intuitions around the trolley problem vary as a function of the number of available alternative options presented to them. Assuming that moral judgments are somehow special would in turn imply that these researchers would have to develop, from scratch, a theory of this based on unique preference reversal behavior specifically found in moral contexts.…”

Truetemp Cooled Down: The Stability of Truetemp Intuitions

“…None of Swain et al's (2008) predictions concerning order effects with Truetemp cases could be consistently and robustly replicated in our three experiments, and it is thus at best unclear whether Truetemp intuitions are in fact unstable. So, if proponents of the negative program in experimental philosophy still want to use order effects to challenge the reliability of philosophical case judgments, they would be well advised to look elsewhere instead (e.g., Liao et al, 2012;Cushman, 2012, 2015;Machery et al, 2018;Wiegmann et al, 2012Wiegmann et al, , 2020. In any case, given the more robust empirical evidence that we presented in this paper, the metaphilosophical flurry created by Swain et al (2008) andWright's (2010) influential studies looks like mere alarmism in hindsight.…”

“…Third, we believe that the weight of the evidence suggests that Truetemp intuitions are in general not significantly influenced by their textual context, although we concede that Experiment 2 might indicate that they are influenced in a few situations. Of course, other manipulations of philosophical intuitions, including by order of presentation, might turn out to be more robust (e.g., the framing of the Gettier case in Machery et al, 2018; the order effects with moral cases in Wiegmann et al, 2012Wiegmann et al, , 2020, although recent work suggests that many philosophical intuitions are not much influenced, if at all, by slight manipulations (e.g., Cova et al, 2021;Kneer et al, 2021;Horvath & Wiegmann, 2022).…”

“…What's more, these implications are bound to be very limited at best if the effect manifests itself only under very specific experimental situations that have little to do with our everyday philosophical practice. In contrast, effects that can be robustly detected under a variety of experimental conditions, such as order effects with trolley-style moral scenarios (see, e.g., Wiegmann et al 2012Wiegmann et al , 2020, should indeed be a matter of concern for the metaphilosophy of the method of cases. So, we resolutely reject any kind of general skepticism about the metaphilosophical relevance of experimental findings.…”

The experimental philosophy of law: New ways, old questions, and how not to get lost

“…The expertise defence (i.e., the claim that intuitions of professional philosophers about philosophical cases are not susceptible to irrelevant factors) has not been supported by experimental research (e.g., Feltz & Cokely, 2009; Horvath & Wiegmann, 2016, 2021; Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2012; Wiegmann et al., 2020). However, there has been limited empirical research on the reliability of expert judgments outside the field of philosophy.…”