Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that if a deterministic description of the events leading up to a morally questionable action is couched in mechanistic, reductionistic, concrete and/or emotionally salient terms, people are more inclined toward compatibilism than when those descriptions use non-mechanistic, non-reductionistic, abstract and/or emotionally neutral terms. To explain these results, it has been suggested that descriptions of the first kind are processed by a concrete cognitive system, while those of the second kind are processed by an abstract cognitive system. The current paper reports the results of three studies exploring whether or not considerations about possible future consequences of holding an agent responsible at a present time affect people’s judgments of responsibility. The results obtained suggest first that the concrete system does not produce compatibilist judgments of responsibility unconditionally, even when facing appropriately mechanistic, reductionistic, emotionally loaded and concretely worded deterministic scenarios. Second, these results suggest that considerations about possible future consequences for innocent third parties that may follow as a result of holding an agent responsible affect people’s judgment as to whether or not the agent is responsible for what she did. Finally, it is proposed that these results compliment extant evidence on the so-called “Side-effect effect”, as they suggest that emotional reactions toward possible future side effects influence people’s judgment of responsibility. The impact of these results for philosophy and moral psychology is discussed.
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Notes
To avoid excessive verbiage throughout the paper, whenever we refer to the consequences of holding an agent responsible, we mean holding an agent responsible at the present time.
This study was initially conducted using the same wording for the Worse condition as in the previous two vignettes, so the last line read “Unfortunately, during that time, they would be living with Social Services, in what might be a much worse environment for them”. This study, however, did not yield a significant effect (p = .08) with an equivalent number of participants. Although the non-significant result in this first study could have been a power issue, we decided to conduct the study anew changing the wording of the Worse condition, so instead of “Social Services” it read, as shown above, “alcoholic father”. This variation allows us to verify that the effect translates into other possible future negative consequences.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out these potential confounds.
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De Brigard, F., Brady, W.J. The Effect of What We Think may Happen on our Judgments of Responsibility. Rev.Phil.Psych. 4, 259–269 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0133-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0133-8