Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness

Suppose you discovered that someone has committed a horribly violent crime. And now suppose I tell you one additional fact about the person who performed this act: he or she is mentally ill. In fact, suppose I tell you that the reason he performed this act he is suffering from damage to a particular area of his brain. Would you still conclude that he could be morally responsible for what he had done?

At this point, you might be guessing that no one would hold an agent morally responsible in such a circumstance. After all, how could we hold someone morally responsible for behavior that was clearly the result of neurological illness? Surely, anyone would agree in such a case that the agent is not to blame for what he has done!

Guess again.  A new paper from the philosophers Eric Mandelbaum, David Ripley and Felipe De Brigard shows that people actually are willing to ascribe moral responsibility in cases like that one. In their study, subjects were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Subjects in the 'abstract' condition received the following story:

Dennis has recently found out from his doctor that he has a neurological condition that has caused him to behave in certain ways. Were someone else to have this neurological condition then that person would have had to behave in the same ways as Dennis.

Just as you might expect, most subjects who received this story said that Dennis was not morally responsible for the behaviors he performs. But don't be too swift to assume that people with neurological conditions will get off the hook. Mandelbaum and colleagues also included a 'concrete' condition, in which subjects were told:

Dennis has recently found out from his doctor that he has a neurological condition that has, in the past, caused him to rape women. Were someone else to have this neurological condition then that person would have had to behave in the same ways as Dennis.

When the story is made more concrete in this way, people's intuitions change radically. They end up concluding that Dennis actually is morally responsible for what he'd done. 

It seems that, no matter how much we tell people about damage to an agent's brain, the impulse to blame will get the last word. It is as though people are thinking: 'Well, he does have a neurological condition... but then again, someone ended up getting raped.  We just can't let this go by without declaring at least one person to be morally responsible!'

Call for Papers: Experimental Philosophy

The newly-created European Review of Philosophy and Psychology is calling for papers for a special issue on experimental philosophy.  The editors welcome papers that report new experimental results, papers that engage in philosophical or theoretical reflection on existing results, or papers that address metaphilosophical questions about the very idea of experimental philosophy. 

Papers can either support or oppose the project of using experimental data to address philosophical issues.  Both highly empirical and highly philosophical work are very welcome. 

The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2008.

Nelkin on Experimental Philosophy

I was happy to see the recent post about the superb article by Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran in Midwest Studies.  I hope this doesn't end up stealing any attention from that earlier post, but I thought it might be helpful to draw your attention to another article in the same special issue. 

The article I have in mind is Dana Nelkin's 'Do We Have a Coherent Set of Intuitions about Moral Responsibility?' There, Nelkin goes through almost all of the recent work on moral responsibility within experimental philosophy and argues that it is actually possible to capture all of the intuitions uncovered by this work in a single coherent theory. 

One thing I found especially striking in her paper was the explanation she offers for cases in which people seem to think that moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism.  Her suggestion is that, when people hear that an agent's behavior is entirely determined, they conclude that the agent is not truly making decisions at all.  In arguing for this claim, she writes:

Additional anecdotal support for the idea... is provided by my experience presenting some of the relevant experimental results to an interdisciplinary academic audience that contained a number of psychologists.  Several objected to the set-up of the experiments in which subjects are supposed to respond to agents performing deliberate actions in a deterministic scenario. In particular, they worried that the scenarios might already beg a key question in describing actions in such terms at all in a deterministic world, and that the scenarios were actually incoherent because determinism precludes deliberate actions done for reasons [!].

I feel certain that Nelkin is getting at something important here -- that people ordinarily do show a tendency to think that determinism precludes even the possibility of taking into account certain reasons and then making a decision.  Yet this phenomenon strikes me as a highly puzzling one.  Just on the face of it, the concept of determinism doesn't seem to have much to do with the question as to whether people can genuinely make decisions.  Why then would people be drawn to the idea that determinism and decision are incompatible?

 

Roskies on Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will

The unstoppable philosopher/neuroscientist Adina Roskies has a new paper on 'Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Moral Responsibility.' 

In essence, she argues that it is a mistake to think that work in neuroscience could in any way threaten our sense that human choice is indeterministic.  If we learn that the universe is deterministic, it will have to be from discoveries in physics.  Perhaps physics will show that the universe is deterministic, perhaps it won't... but neuroscience won't end up settling the question either way.  (After all, theoretical models in neuroscience are always probabilistic.) 

I'd be interested to hear what the experts here at the Garden think of this argument.  Do you think that neuroscience really can provide a challenge to our conception of ourselves as free and morally responsible, or should we conclude that the whole issue is -- as Roskies suggests -- a red herring? 

Sosa on Moral Responsibility

Ernie Sosa has a new paper on experimental philosophy. Among other topics, he discusses some of the recent experimental work on moral responsibility.

In essence, he argues that the English word 'responsible' is ambiguous -- with one sense corresponding roughly to the concept of attributibility, the other corresponding roughly to the concept of accountability. Sosa then suggests that some of the surprising recent results can be understood in terms of certain factors pushing subjects more toward one or another of the two possible interpretations.

Psychopaths and Moral Responsibility

Can psychopaths be morally responsible for their behaviors?  The question is a difficult one -- with different theories of moral responsibility yielding different answers -- and I'm sure there will be some interesting discussion of it at the exciting conference this weekend organized by Manuel Vargas.

Shaun Nichols, Daniel Batson and I were curious about how ordinary people would approach this issue, and we recently ran an experiment to see if we could figure it out.  All subjects were given a description of a disorder loosely based on psychopathy.  Subjects were then asked whether people who had such a disorder could be morally responsible for the immoral actions they performed.

But different subjects were asked this question in different ways.  Half of the subjects were simply asked in the abstract whether anyone who had this disorder could ever be morally responsible for the immoral actions they performed.  The other half were given a concrete story about a person who had the disorder and who therefore decided to kill his own wife and children.  They were then asked whether this particular person was morally responsible for what he had done.

By now, you have probably guessed the results.  Subjects who were asked the abstract question tended to say that people with the disorder could not be morally responsible for their immoral actions, but subjects who were given the concrete story tended to say that this particular person actually was morally responsible for killing his wife and children.

These results certainly don't leave us with a clear picture of people's ordinary understanding of moral responsibility and psychopathy, but they do provide some puzzling data that cry out for explanation...

Velleman on Experimental Philosophy

Over at Left2Right, David Velleman has a post arguing that experimental philosophy will not be a helpful method in trying to understand either the nature of intentional action or the problem of free will.  His concluding paragraphs are:

Of course, it's useful to know what most people think about intentional action and moral responsibility.  In philosophizing on these topics, we can't stray too far from what people think, lest we end up changing the subject, talking about things that won't be recognizable as intentional action or moral responsibility at all.  Even Aristotle relied on endoxa — received opinions — as a starting point of his inquiries. 

Maybe Aristotle was the first "experimental philosopher", then?  No.  Aristotle knew that the real philosophizing starts after the endoxa have been surveyed. 

His view remains true today.

I think that Velleman's own philosophical work has been consistently excellent, and I'm a bit surprised that his reaction to experimental philosophy was so negative.  I'd be curious to hear what readers of this blog think of his argument. 

Desires vs. values: A new experiment

Ever since  Watson's classic paper, philosophers have been concerned with the distinction between desires and values. The usual view is that this distinction is a purely psychological one -- the sort of thing that might figure in a scientific theory of the human mind.

Erica Roedder recently suggested to me that this view might be leaving out an important aspect of our ordinary folk concept of values. She pointed out that certain moral norms might be playing an irreducible role in the concept.

Together, we designed an experiment to test this hypothesis:

Subjects in one condition were given a story about a character loosely modeled on Huck Finn. On a conscious level, he believes that the racist practises of his society are morally right, but he sometimes feels a pull in the opposite direction. He finds himself feeling guilty when he performs racist behaviors and sometimes ends up doing things that promote racial equality as a result. Subjects in this condition were then asked whether, despite his conscious beliefs, the character actually values racial eqaulity.

Subjects in the other condition were given a story about a kind of 'inverted Huck Finn.' On a conscious level, he believes that he ought to treat all races equally, but he sometimes feels a pull in the opposite direction. He finds himself feeling guilty when he performs behaviors that advance other races at the expense of his own, and he sometimes ends up doing things that promote racial discrimination as a result. These subjects were then asked whether, despite his conscious beliefs, the character actually values racial discrimination.

The results showed a marked asymmetry. People who had been given the first story tended to say that the character's attitude toward racial equality was one of his values, whereas people who had been given the second story tended to say that the character's attitutde toward racial discrimination was not one of his values. This result is puzzling, since the two stories seem exactly parallel on a psychological level, differing only in the moral worth of the attitudes themselves.

Any interpretations?