Law & Society Blog

Over at X-Philosophy, posts are centered around the Knobe effect like tornados around Kansas. The Knobe effect is essentially the idea that moral intuitions muddle with peoples’s attributions of intention to the acts of others. (I’ve offered some philosophical objections there previously. Rise from your grave, Kohlberg.) For various reasons, the effect is quite puzzling.

Recently, Clayton has attempted to explain the Knobe effect. I would like to respond to it. Before I do, I should warn the reader that my commentary here will probably seem like unintelligible abstractions unless they take a gander at his paper first. Luckily, Clayton’s paper is short, relatively self-contained, and straightforward.

Clayton argues that the Knobe effect may be understood by way of two distinctions. The first is in terms of selective/collective treatment of reasons. A person may evaluate a reason for acting on a case-by-case basis, or they may evaluate them all at once. [Implicitly, we know that reasons can either recommend a certain action (”pro”-reasons), or they can provide reasons not to act (”con”-reasons).] The second distinction is in terms of conformity/compliance. Conformity is when a pro-reason is merely consistent with the greater goal, and compliance is when a pro-reason provides impetus for the greater goal. The conformity/compliance distinction only applies to reasons which have been examined selectively (though it is not immediately clear why).

He seems to argue that, for a case in which the goal is decided in favor of some pro reasons, one cannot treat con reasons selectively, because the cons taken selectively would have provided motivational weight against the goal (thus undermining the motivation to pursue the goal). So a person must treat con-reasons collectively; thus, there is no conform/comply distinction in such a case. “To respond selectively to them, she’d have to conform or comply with some of [the con-reasons] without conforming or complying with the others… Blight could not conform to their demands without giving in to them and deciding against starting Project Z.” Moreover, the conform/comply distinction is what explains the Knobe effect for the Benison case; some reasons (care for the environment) take a back seat relative to the overall goal, but are consistent with it, and so, conform to it without complying.

I want to make two replies. One is to cast doubt on whether or not a selective treatment of con-reasons collapses the conform/comply distinction. The other is to cast the problem in terms of the relevance of goals with subgoals in terms of apathy and defiance.

1. Maybe Clayton means something specific about “selectivity” which I haven’t understood. But from my first reading, I’m not at all clear on why it is that, from a Humean standpoint, the consideration of con-reasons entails that they would definitely motivate a person in a con-direction. Reasons don’t necessarily provide motivation. They provide reasons, which may be taken seriously, or may be dismissed, at the whim of the listener’s fancy. So if Blight selectively treated the con-reasons, then it wouldn’t necessarily matter; she doesn’t have to take them seriously, she just has to consider them. What Clayton might mean is that Blight be selective in the sense that she in fact accepts some reasons, and in fact denies others; but that’s not a comment on selection, which is a process, but rather upon an outcome.

2. It seems to me that a person may cite any relevant condition or consequence which they were aware of at the time of the action as a reason for acting. For present purposes, relevance has to do with the place of action within a wider chain of goals and subgoals. It also seems to me that it is a poor thing to fail to attribute to a person even those minimally relevant things which they have known at the time of the action; and this is what Knobe’s subjects fail to do in the Benison case. So something genuinely surprising seems to be happening in their responses, at least for me — or, is not surprising, then outright wrong.

Relevance comes in degrees. So, if I drive my lawnmower just to annoy my neighbor (the manifest consequence), but fully expect that I’ll cut the grass in the process (the latent consequence), then there will be a rich series of motivations and goals behind the goal of “annoying my neighbor”, perhaps involving an ongoing slapstick feud, but the connections to “cutting the grass” will be weak (it is a mere means to the end). Using Raz’s language, as presented here, compliance would seem to describe the conditions which are more relevant to an action, and conformity would describe the conditions which are less relevant.

If we admit that mere conformity constitutes an intention, as I would like to, then we’re up the creek in our examination of the Knobe effect, it seems, in the Benison case; for while Benison’s consideration of the environment conforms to his overall decision, his de facto intent to do well for the environment does not register with those people who examine the case. And the Blight case may be selective, as I’ve suggested in (1), but clearly it involves neither conformity nor compliance to environmental protection. Rather, it must be characterized as either apathy or defiance towards that subgoal; and it seems that Knobe’s subjects want to treat apathy towards reasons (at least in this case) as intentional. I don’t immediately see how the conformity/compliance distinction helps us in the Blight case — especially since the distinction seems irrelevant in the Benison one, where we are supposed to expect it to do some work.

There may be a way out of this problem if we postulate an ambiguity in interpretation. I might attribute the Knobe effect in the Benison case to an implicit tendency on the part of Knobe’s subjects to examine intention only above a certain threshold of relevance, because it seems more useful to them to interpret the words that way for the purposes of the discussion. Compliance is the theory of intention which people are attracted to, for moral, epistemic, and everyday purposes. (Morally, to make the distinction between doing and allowing; epistemically, because we don’t know the deep-seated knowledge in a person’s mind.) In other words: in the Benison case, our conversational purposes as readers are not morally exhaustive, as our attention is not morally charged; we are focused only on the compliant acts, and unimpressed either way by his amoral apathy, we have no moral desire to interpret any care for merely conforming reasons. But in the Blight case, our conversational purposes are entirely moral, since it is a morally charged issue; so we focus both on her intentional apathy and bad compliant acts. In this way, moral interest acts as a kind of radioactive dye which lights up areas which would otherwise have been hidden. It follows that if we were to ask someone with a plausible and fully-formed moral theory, we would find that they would be willing to attribute some intent to help the environment in the Benison case, although they would likely take pains to say that he’s not behaving virtuously or somesuch.

In some cases, like the Blight case, the subject is aware of certain conditions but fails to give them motivational weight in a decision, such as in situations involving carelessness. I want to require, in moral cases, along with Knobe’s subjects, that apathy to some peripheral condition be considered a part of their intent, in order to explain their decision adequately. Here is the knowledge of so-and-so; here is the flouting of so-and-so; thus, here is the intention to get such-and-such done, in the context of this wider web of goals. I also want to require that conformity be understood as an aspect of a person’s intent.

I don’t believe that a reason must be a possible defeater in order to be relevant to an explanation of a person’s intent. It may be the case that some description does not and would not have the power to change an action, given the dispositions of the person, their wider goals, etc., but that doesn’t mean that the description is explanatorily idle. I disagree with the claim that, “When we consider those side effects or pros we don’t say the agent brought about intentionally, we recognize that the agent wouldn’t have changed course had those pros not favored her decision.” For sometimes it’s precisely the disposition to suppress the possible motivating content of a particular peripheral goal which is intentional (so long as the subject is consciously aware of doing so). And, anyway, explanations need not be tossed aside as “idle” just because they aren’t the primary moving parts in some phenomenon. To claim so, is to pretend to know the whole story about causes (especially with respect to matters of intent), and that’s not something that anyone has lisence to claim.

I think all of this is supportive of Knobe’s interpretation of the effect, in a way. It’s just that it relies on the pragmatics of the situation more than a principled examination of intentions.

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