Abstract
How do people judge the degree of causal responsibility that an agent has for the outcomes of her actions? We show that a relatively unexplored factor – the robustness (or stability) of the causal chain linking the agent’s action and the outcome – influences judgments of causal responsibility of the agent. In three experiments, we vary robustness by manipulating the number of background circumstances under which the action causes the effect, and find that causal responsibility judgments increase with robustness. In the first experiment, the robustness manipulation also raises the probability of the effect given the action. Experiments 2 and 3 control for probability-raising, and show that robustness still affects judgments of causal responsibility. In particular, Experiment 3 introduces an Ellsberg type of scenario to manipulate robustness, while keeping the conditional probability and the skill deployed in the action fixed. Experiment 4, replicates the results of Experiment 3, while contrasting between judgments of causal strength and of causal responsibility. The results show that in all cases, the perceived degree of responsibility (but not of causal strength) increases with the robustness of the action-outcome causal chain.
Highlights
The causal responsibility an agent has for the effects of her actions is thought to play a major role in the attribution of the agent’s legal, moral and even criminal responsibility (Hart and Honoré, 1959; Tadros, 2005; Moore, 2009; Lagnado and Gerstenberg, 2017; Usher, 2018)
We start with the causal strength and causal responsibility judgments that are ascribed to the dart-throw agent for wins
The exact same pattern is shown for judgments of causal strength
Summary
The causal responsibility an agent has for the effects of her actions is thought to play a major role in the attribution of the agent’s legal, moral and even criminal responsibility (Hart and Honoré, 1959; Tadros, 2005; Moore, 2009; Lagnado and Gerstenberg, 2017; Usher, 2018). The reduced judgments of responsibility people typically make for agents who were forced to act or were manipulated by others (Sripada, 2012; Phillips and Shaw, 2015) are best accounted for by the manipulation “bypassing” the agent’s mental states (Murray and Lombrozo, 2017). To explain these results, Murray and Lombrozo (2017) relied on the notion of counterfactual robustness, which is central to our investigation and on which we elaborate below
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