Abstract
Philosophers and legal scholars have long theorized about how intentionality serves as a critical input for morality and culpability, but the emerging field of experimental philosophy has revealed a puzzling asymmetry. People judge actions leading to negative consequences as being more intentional than those leading to positive ones. The implications of this asymmetry remain unclear because there is no consensus regarding the underlying mechanism. Based on converging behavioral and neural evidence, we demonstrate that there is no single underlying mechanism. Instead, two distinct mechanisms together generate the asymmetry. Emotion drives ascriptions of intentionality for negative consequences, while the consideration of statistical norms leads to the denial of intentionality for positive consequences. We employ this novel two-mechanism model to illustrate that morality can paradoxically shape judgments of intentionality. This is consequential for mens rea in legal practice and arguments in moral philosophy pertaining to terror bombing, abortion, and euthanasia among others.
Highlights
Philosophers and legal scholars have long theorized about how intentionality serves as a critical input for morality and culpability, but the emerging field of experimental philosophy has revealed a puzzling asymmetry
Experimental philosophers have repeatedly shown that actions leading to negative consequences are judged as being more intentional than otherwise similar actions leading to positive consequences—often called the Knobe Effect (KE)[9,10,11]
In exploratory analyses not corrected for multiple comparisons, there was a positive correlation between ratings for negative consequences and measures of moral harm sensitivity on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire[32], and this was replicated across two rounds of experimentation (r = 0.23, p = 0.05, N = 68 and r = 0.30, p = 0.01, N = 70)—making it a target for future studies
Summary
Philosophers and legal scholars have long theorized about how intentionality serves as a critical input for morality and culpability, but the emerging field of experimental philosophy has revealed a puzzling asymmetry. We included a novel low-salience, neutral condition (Supplementary Methods) that the emotional salience model would predict to have the lowest intentionality rating of all. When analyzing the different condition valences independently, we found an effect of emotional salience in predicting ratings of intentionality only in the negative condition
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