>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

The Trolley Problem and Self-Defense

I realize that the main focus here at the Garden is usually on issues pertaining to free will and moral responsibility, but since there is a special category for The Trolley Problem, I figured I would post a draft of a short piece I am working on about the trolley problem and self-defense.  Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.  Just be gentle--it's still a little rough around the edges.  But before I do any more work on it, I thought I would see what the gardeners think about the general strategy I adopt first.  Thanks in advance!

Download trolley_problem_revisited.pdf

Neurolaw in The NY Times

I originally hoped that my first post here would be more substantive than this one, but apparently that was not in the cards!  Instead, I simply want to point the Gardeners to an article in yesterday's NYT about neurolaw in the event that some of you have not already seen it.  I thought the crew here might not only find the piece interesting, but it might even open the door to yet another discussion here concerning the thorny relationship between the gathering data in the sciences of the mind and our (shrinking?) autonomy and responsibility. 

Cognitive Biases and Free Will Part I: The Dual-Process Challenge

I’ve presented challenges to free willism in other posts. For example, I still find the prospect of a “Medicalized Society”, according to which wrongdoers are treated almost like sickly or diseased people, to pose a fascinating challenge.

More recently, I’ve become interested in cognitive biases that seem to affect humans in general. These biases suggest another possibility: the dual process hypothesis. The dual process hypothesis paints a picture of the mind like the following:

1. the mind has both (i) slower, smarter, more generalized (SlowSMG) circuits and (ii) faster, dumber, more domain specific (FastDDS) circuits
2. amongst the FastDDS circuits are circuits relating to identifying other agents,      understanding the causal relationship between events, assigning blame and praise, and the emotions such as anger, thirst-for-revenge, and so on
3. the FastDDS circuits compensate in speed for what they lack in accuracy, and so represent a “knee jerk” response that, upon cooler and more thoughtful reflection, is sometimes mistaken
4. so our prephilosophical or instinctive attitudes and beliefs about other agents,      responsibility and blame, and anger and retribution, etc. are sometimes mistaken or imprudent.

Now, we are all fairly familiar with the dual process challenge because Nichols & Knobe did fascinating studies showing that affect, or the moral salience of an event, seems to increase compatibilist responses at the expense of incompatibilist responses. For example, Nichols & Knobe suggest that “[p]erhaps the most obvious way of explaining the data reported here would be to suggest that strong affective reactions can bias and distort people’s judgments.” This would fit with the dual process challenge: the affective or morally salient situations *trigger* the faster, dumber, more domain specific circuits in our brain (such as those dealing with anger and retribution), which produce less accurate or more imprudent responses.

NOTE: I know some, such as Eddy Nahmias, take issue with this research. I would love to hear any possible explanations for the differences between their data and the Nichols & Knobe data.

Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt have done similar research on issues such as consequentialism/deontology, moral realism, and the relationship between the emotions and moral reasoning. For example, I think Greene has found that people who give consequentialist answers give them *slower*, consistent with the hypothesis that the SlowSMG circuitry is trumping the FastDDS circuitry. I think he has also put subjects in MRI scanners and actually mapped how different parts of the brain “light up” with respect to consequentialists and deontologists. And Haidt has done fascinating research on “moral dumbfounding” which suggests that people have FastDDS circuits for moral reasoning and, furthermore, that the more cerebral or cognitive parts of their brain *rationalize* the response, which has already been determined by the FastDDS circuits.

These lines of research suggest future directions for studies on the free will problem. Do those who give incompatibilist or non-realist/eliminativist answers give them slower (like the consequentialists)? When subjects give compatibilist or incompatibilists answers while in an MRI scanner, which parts of their brains “light up”, and can one argue that these parts of the brain are more like SlowSMG circuits or FastDDS circuits?

NOTE: This dual process picture of the mind is a hypothesis. It is an empirical question and cannot be settled by thought experiment (or whatever else philosophers do). But, as a live hypothesis, I think it is worth contemplating the ramifications, should the hypothesis turn out to be true or largely true.

Here are some questions for other Gardeners:

1. Do you tend to think that this dual process theory will turn out to be true or largely true? If not, where do you think it goes wrong and why?
2. Regardless of whether you that this dual process hypothesis is right, what ramifications do you think it would have for the free will debate (libertarianism, compatibilism, non-realism/eliminativism)? Is the existence and relevance of such FastDDS circuits likely to undermine one group more than others?

Moral Sense Test

PEA soup already linked to this, so you may have seen it, but just in case you haven't -- you should go take Harvard's Moral Sense Test.  Here's the description of the project:

The Moral Sense Test is a Web-based study into the nature of moral intuitions. How do humans, throughout the world, decide what is right and wrong? To answer this question, we have designed a series of moral dilemmas designed to probe the psychological mechanisms underlying our ethical judgments. By putting these questions on the Web, we hope to gain insight into the similarities and differences between the moral intuitions of people of different ages, from different cultures, with different educational backgrounds and religious beliefs, involved in different occupations and exposed to very different circumstances. Participation in the study is easy, quick and completely confidential. As a subject, you will only be given a small sample of the scenarios we are currently testing. The test of our moral sense therefore comes from combining the responses of many hundreds of subjects taking different tests, each with different scenarios.

New Papers!

Don't forget to check our Papers on Agency Blog, which now has new pieces by John Fischer, Pamela Hieronymi, Neil Levy, Saul Smilansky and Manuel Vargas. (To regularly access the Papers on Agency Blog, go to the the right-hand column, scroll down, and between "Archives" and "Other Homepages" you will find the link Online Papers).

A brief overview: Fischer's papers address recent criticisms to his r.r. view; Hieronymi argues that, although belief is not voluntary, it is subject to two robust forms of agency; she then draws a parallel between intention and belief which yields the following conclusion: in the same sense that you cannot believe at will, you cannot intend at will; Levy's paper discusses new Trolley Problem type examples; Smilanksy examines Fischer's recent approach to the moral luck problem (which allegedly threatens compatibilism). Finally, Vargas's PPQ paper will be helpful to better understand the discussion that Dan Speak has just launched here in the Garden on the need (or not?) to revise our folk concepts regarding moral responsibility.

Welcome!

Thanks for visiting The Garden of Forking Paths ! It's still under construction, but feel free to look around and leave comments. Soon we will have papers online and more links, so remember to check back occasionally to see what's new ! If you have any questions or comments, contact the coordinators.

Blogging norms

Here's another posting in Brian Weatherson's blog on "Blogging Etiquette", which addresses interesting issues on discussing people's ideas in public fora like blogs. It's worth looking into...