Demoralizing causation

Introduction There have recently been a number of strong claims that normative considerations, broadly construed, influence many philosophically important folk concepts and perhaps are even a constitutive component of various cognitive processes. writes that " [m]oral considerations actually figure in the fundamental competencies people use to make sense of the world, " while Pettit and Knobe (2009, 602) claim: There is now good reason to believe there are no concepts anywhere in folk psychology that enable one to describe an agent's attitudes in a way that is entirely independent of moral considerations. The impact of moral judgments, we suspect, is utterly pervasive. 1 " Normative " here refers broadly to many different types of norms, most notably moral or statistical norms, but also social norms. For ease of exposition, we will throughout subsume these various types of norms under the heading of " normative considerations. " 2 Roughly, some considerations are constitutive of a particular psychological process if and only if they are required inputs for this process, and if as a consequence they are always involved in it. We are here concerned with versions of these claims that focus on causal judgments and the folk concept of causation. For example, Knobe (2009) argues that: The use of [statistical and moral] considerations is simply built into the fundamental mechanisms that subserve people's counterfactual reasoning. Any aspect of human cognition that makes use of counterfactuals will be affected in some way by the structure of these mechanisms. Since causal judgments make use of counterfactuals, and since moral considerations play a role in the mechanisms underlying counterfactual reasoning, moral considerations end up playing a role in causal judgments as well. (p. 242) The same idea is expressed in Hitchcock and Knobe (2009): " people's causal intuitions are determined in part by judgments about the relevance of counterfactuals and (...) judgments of relevance are, in turn, determined in part by the application of norms. " (p. 612) Many others have expressed similar views about the influence of normative considerations on causal judgments, though sometimes without claiming that normative considerations are a constitutive component of the cognitive processes underwriting such judgments (e. Strong claims demand strong evidence or strong arguments. While the extant empirical results may show that normative considerations sometimes influence some kinds of causal judgments, we argue that the strong claims found in the recent literature on causal cognition are overstated: They …