Read more: Special report: Morality put to the test
Our moral judgements affect our thinking in surprising ways, says Joshua Knobe. Test your own intuition
A CORPORATE executive is considering a new policy. He thinks: 鈥淚 know this policy will harm the environment, but I don鈥檛 care at all about that.鈥� So he implements the policy and, sure enough, the environment is harmed. Now ask yourself: did he harm the environment intentionally?
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But suppose we now change the word 鈥渉arm鈥� to 鈥渉elp鈥�. So the executive thinks: 鈥淚 know this policy will help the environment, but I don鈥檛 care at all about that.鈥� He implements the policy, and the environment is helped. Did the executive help the environment intentionally?
These cases, or variations on them, have been given to participants in numerous studies 鈥� part of the growing field of experimental philosophy 鈥� and the results are always the same. People who receive the first case tend to say that the executive harmed the environment intentionally, but those who receive the second usually say that the helping was unintentional.
What could be happening here? The only difference lies in the moral qualities of the executive鈥檚 behaviour 鈥� harming in one case, helping in the other. So people鈥檚 moral judgements must somehow be affecting their intuitions about what appears to be an entirely non-moral question: whether a person acts intentionally or unintentionally.
Over the past month, philosopher Richard Samuels and I have been conducting a study on to extend this finding to a new domain. Some participants were asked to imagine that human genetics works in such a way that as long as your parents treat you decently some of the time, you will end up developing a hypothetical trait called trait X. They were then given the statement 鈥淭rait X is innate鈥� and asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed with it.
But of course there was a second version of the story in which we changed 鈥渄ecently鈥� to 鈥渂adly鈥�: if your parents treat you badly sometimes, you will develop trait X. How do you think this scenario affected judgements of innateness?
You have probably guessed that participants who received the first story were more likely to say that trait X was innate compared with the people given the second story (see diagram). Somehow the moral difference between the two cases seems to affect people鈥檚 intuitions about innateness 鈥� an issue which at first might appear to have nothing to do with morality.
Additional studies have extended this effect ever farther, showing it not only for intentionality and innateness but also for happiness, knowledge, freedom and causation. It seems that our whole way of thinking about phenomena that appear to lie outside the bounds of morality may actually be rooted in hidden moral judgements.
