Apparent Paradoxes in Moral Reasoning; Or how you forced him to do it, even though he wasn’t forced to do it.

Apparent Paradoxes in Moral Reasoning; Or how you forced him to do it, even though he wasn’t forced to do it. Jonathan Phillips (jonathan.phillips@yale.edu) Department of Philosophy, Yale University New Haven, CT 06511 USA Liane Young (liane.young@bc.edu) Department of Psychology, Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA 02467 USA Abstract that the sailor really wasn’t forced to do so, despite the fact that the situational constraint (the threat of capsizing) was the same (Phillips & Knobe 2009). Thus, moral judgments appear to alter judgments of situational constraint and force. While this effect may be interesting, the influence of moral judgments on force has turned out to be more complex. In many moral situations, multiple agents may be responsible for a single bad outcome. For example, if the sailor was ordered by the captain of the ship to throw the passengers overboard, then both the captain and the sailor may be partially responsible for the death of the passengers. The combination of the fact that moral judgments influence judgments of situational constraint, and the fact that multiple agents can be morally responsible for a single outcome has the following consequence: shifting the primary focus from one moral agent to another within a single scenario leads observers to make contradicting judgments of situational constraint (Young & Phillips 2011). When observers focus not on the ship captain but on the sailor as the morally blameworthy agent, they judge that the sailor freely threw the passengers overboard, and that he was not truly forced by the ship captain. However, if observers redirect their focus to the captain, then they are more likely to agree that the captain did force the sailor to throw the passengers overboard. We refer to this contradictory response pattern (i.e. X forced Y, but Y was not forced by X) as the paradox of moral focus. Our current aims are (1) to illustrate this same paradoxical pattern of responses in two new scenarios that may actually occur in ordinary, everyday life, and (2) to develop a model of the cognitive mechanisms that underlie this effect. Notably, this research may be independently important for the recent debate on the nature of the influence of moral cognition on non-moral cognition (Guglielmo, Monroe, & Malle, in press; Machery, 2008; Mallon, 2008). This debate hinges on whether this influence reflects a legitimate role for morality in concepts such as force (Knobe, 2010; Pettit & Knobe, 2009; Phelan & Sarkissian, 2008; Wright & Bengson, 2009), or whether this influence merely reflects motivated moral reasoning (Alicke, 2008; Nadelhoffer, in press). Our contribution aims to help move this debate The importance of situational constraint for moral evaluations is widely accepted in philosophy, psychology, and the law. However, recent work suggests that this relationship is actually bidirectional: moral evaluations can also influence our judgments of situational constraint. For example, if an agent is thought to have acted immorally rather than morally, that agent is often judged to have acted with greater freedom and under less situational constraint. Moreover, when considering interpersonal situations, we judge that an agent who forces another to act immorally (versus morally) uses more force. These two features can result in contradictory response patterns in which participants judge both that (1) a forcer forced a forcee to act and (2) the forcee was not forced by the forcer to act. Here, we characterize potential psychological mechanisms, in particular, “moral focus” and counterfactual reasoning that account for this paradoxical pattern of judgments. Keywords: force; morality; counterfactual thinking; focus When evaluating moral agents, we consider whether the agent acted freely or under situational constraint (Darley & Shultz, 1990; Nichols & Knobe, 2007; Woolfolk, Doris, & Darley, 2006). Both ordinary folk and legal scholars consider this a crucial factor for moral judgment (Hart, 1968). Emerging research, however, suggests that moral judgments in turn influence our evaluations of situational constraint (Phillips & Knobe 2009). That is, given a fixed level of situational constraint, people often judge that an agent is not forced to perform a morally impermissible action, though she is forced to perform a morally permissible action. Consider an example originally proposed by Aristotle, featuring a sailor in the midst of a raging storm (Nicomachean Ethics 1110a10-11). The sailor, knowing that he must make his ship lighter to avoid capsizing, throws his expensive cargo overboard. When presented with this case, participants judge that the sailor was forced to throw his cargo overboard. However, changing the moral valence of the sailor’s action changes judgments of force. If the sailor threw his wife overboard instead, participants judged