Norms, causes, and alternative possibilities

We propose Knobe’s explanation of his cases encounters a dilemma: Either his explanation works and, counterintuitively, morality is not at the heart of these effects; or morality is at the heart of the effects and Knobe’s explanation does not succeed. This dilemma is then used to temper the use of the Knobe paradigm for discovering moral norms. Knobe presents two kinds of theories that compete with his own: motivational bias theories and conversational pragmatic theories. He presents his own theory as a competence account. While we agree with his criticisms of the other accounts, we think his taxonomy is incomplete. We would like to suggest a different form of competence account, one that does not take morality as such to play a crucial role in these effects. (In this regard, we agree with Phelan and Sarkissian [2008], Machery [2008], and indeed even Knobe and Mendlow [2004].) On our account, the effects of morality are a piece of a larger puzzle: Morality affects judgments of intentionality and related concepts only in virtue of its effects on expectations. Consequently, we think that anything affecting expectations will produce effects similar to those produced by moral norms. In fact, Knobe’s own account points to a similar conclusion, although he doesn’t acknowledge this. According to Knobe’s competence theory, people’s moral norms influence their default expectations of others’ intentions, beliefs, values, causal roles, and so on, and these default expectations in turn affect participants’ judgments. Thus, he concludes, morality plays a deep role in explaining judgments in these various domains. But in this explanation, expectations are doing all the work; moral expectations have their effects only because they are expectations, not because they are moral. Thus, if Knobe’s theory is right, we should find effects similar to the effects cited here in cases that have nothing to do with morality, but instead involve participants’ non-moral expectations in parallel ways. And if this is right, it suggests that there is nothing specifically moral going on in the cases Knobe cites. These effects are, rather, effects of expectation, and expectations can be affected by both moral and non-moral factors (e.g., we expect people to have con-attitudes towards losing a game, although losing a game is not, normally at least, moral in any way). Consequently, we think Knobe encounters a dilemma: Either his explanation of the effects he cites is correct, and then there is nothing especially moral at play here, but only an effect of expectations in general; or else his explanation of the effects is incorrect (in which case there may still be room for morality to play a distinctive role). Either way, Knobe finds himself in an awkward position; it doesn’t seem that his explanation of morality’s effects is compatible with the conclusion that moral considerations as such figure in our folk-psychological competence. But we do not merely mean to present the dilemma. We take sides. We think Knobe’s explanation is substantially correct, and that the effects Knobe finds would follow from any expectations participants hold firmly enough, whether or not those expectations have a moral character. To see whether this is indeed the case, it is not enough to look at cases that involve moral factors. Similar cases involving non-moral norms must be constructed and tested. As a step in this direction, we have conducted some preliminary studies involving variations on the CEO cases that involve non-moral norms. These studies were conducted using participants on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk website. We ran multiple studies attempting to measure possible non-moral effects on judgments of intention. In one such study, we used the following vignettes: