Inconsistent Moral Mind: Asymmetries in Folk Moral Evaluation
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The main aim that I pursue in my paper can be briefly described as an attempt to understand how people perceive moral agents, how they ascribe moral concepts to them, and on what basis they blame a punish them. When evaluating agent’s act, the evaluating process can have several stages: we assess whether the agent had control over his actions, whether he acted freely, whether he acted intentionally and then on the basis of these information we determine agent’s blameworthiness and the sufficient punishment agent really deserves. On every stage of this moral evaluation, we want to make sure that our verdict is based on morally relevant factors like agent’s mental states, etc. However, various strands of research show that people are to a large extent susceptible to various cognitive biases. When they fall prey to them, it leads to several interesting asymmetries in moral judgment – they evaluate two situations that are identical in relevant respects differently. In fact, various asymmetries were documented on every stage of this evaluation process. The main aim of this paper is to put into context these branches of research in the area of morality that discovered asymmetrical ascriptions of moral concepts. I will focus on several studies and present at least three types of asymmetries: First, I will focus on asymmetry in ascribing intentionality to a moral agent caused by different moral valence either of a side-effect or situation itself, discovered by Joshua Knobe. Second asymmetry arises from interaction of two different factors in our moral judgments when confronted with cases of moral luck: (i) the assessment of causal responsibility for harm, (ii) the assessment of intent to harm. Also, I will present an interesting phenomenon called “blame-blocking”. And finally, I will analyze the last asymmetry found in research of culpable causation which explores influence of the perceived blameworthiness of an action on judgments of its causal impact on a harmful outcome. |
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