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261The Effect of Outcome Severity on Moral Judgment and Interpersonal Goals of Perpetrators, Victims, and BystandersEuropean Journal of Social Psychology 51 (7). 2021.When two actors have the same mental state but one happens to harm another person (unlucky actor) and the other one does not (lucky actor), the latter elicits a milder moral judgement. To understand how this outcome effect would affect post-harm interactions between victims and perpetrators, we examined how the social role from which transgressions are perceived moderates the outcome effect, and how outcome effects on moral judgements transfer to agentic and communal interpersonal goals. Three v…Read more
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256This article applies the tools of experimental philosophy to the ongoing debate about both the theoretical viability and the practical import of partially aggregative moral theories in distributive ethics. We conduct a series of three experiments (N=383): First, we document the widespread occurrence of the intuitions that motivate this position. Our study then moves beyond establishing the existence of partially aggregative intuitions in two dimensions: First, we extend experimental work in such…Read more
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214On Second Thought: Reflections on the Reflection DefenseIn Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 4, . 2021.This chapter sheds light on a response to experimental philosophy that has not yet received enough attention: the reflection defense. According to proponents of this defense, judgments about philosophical cases are relevant only when they are the product of careful, nuanced, and conceptually rigorous reflection. The chapter argues that the reflection defense is misguided: Five studies (N>1800) are presented, showing that people make the same judgments when they are primed to engage in careful re…Read more
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207Causation, Foreseeability, and NormsProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45. 2023.A growing body of literature has revealed ordinary causal judgement to be sensitive to normative factors, such that a norm-violating agent is regarded more causal than their non-norm-violating counterpart. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for this phenomenon: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. The Bias View, but not the Responsibility View, predicts features peripheral to the agent’s responsibility to impact causal attributions. In a series of three preregistered expe…Read more
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190Correction to: Estimating the Reproducibility of Experimental PhilosophyReview of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (1): 45-48. 2018.Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.
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189Guilty Artificial Minds: Folk Attributions of Mens Rea and Culpability to Artificially Intelligent AgentsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW2). 2021.While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for …Read more
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176The truth about assertion and retraction: A review of the empirical literatureIn Alex Wiegmann (ed.), Lying, Fake News, and Bullshit, . forthcoming.This chapter reviews empirical research on the rules governing assertion and retraction, with a focus on the normative role of truth. It examines whether truth is required for an assertion to be considered permissible, and whether there is an expectation that speakers retract statements that turn out to be false. Contrary to factive norms (such as the influential “knowledge norm”), empirical data suggests that there is no expectation that speakers only make true assertions. Additionally, contrar…Read more
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174What is Art? The Role of Intention, Beauty, and Institutional RecognitionProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45 3039-3047. 2023.In two experiments (N=888), we explore to what extent the folk concept of art is compatible with the leading philosophical definitions of art, and whether it is an essentialist or a non-essentialist concept. We manipulate three factors: whether an object is created intentionally, whether it has aesthetic value, and whether it is institutionally recognized. In addition, we also manipulate the artistic domain (visual art or music). The results suggest that none of the three properties is seen by t…Read more
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161Extant research has shown that ordinary causal judgments are sensitive to normative factors. For instance, agents who violate a norm are standardly deemed more causal than norm-conforming agents in identical situations. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for the Norm Effect: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. According to the former, the Norm Effect arises because ordinary causal judgment is intimately intertwined with moral responsibility. According to the alternative …Read more
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155Intention, cause, et responsabilité: Mens Rea et effet KnobeIn Samuel Ferey & Florence G'Sell (eds.), Causalité, Responsabilité et Contribution à la Dette. 2018.Condition essentielle de la responsabilité civile, la notion de causalité reste aujourd’hui difficile à saisir et sujette à nombreuses discussions. Les contributions présentées dans cet ouvrage abordent la question à nouveaux frais, en adoptant un point de vue résolument interdisciplinaire mêlant philosophie, droit et économie. Sont envisagées successivement des difficultés que le contentieux de la causalité met régulièrement en évidence. Ainsi, la difficile articulation entre causalité juridiqu…Read more
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126Implementations in Machine Ethics: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys 53 (6). 2020.Increasingly complex and autonomous systems require machine ethics to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks to society arising from the new technology. It is challenging to decide which type of ethical theory to employ and how to implement it effectively. This survey provides a threefold contribution. First, it introduces a trimorphic taxonomy to analyze machine ethics implementations with respect to their object (ethical theories), as well as their nontechnical and technical aspects. Sec…Read more
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60There is a large literature exploring the effect of norms on the attribution of causation. Empirical research on this so-called “norm effect” has predominantly focused on two data points: A situation in which an agent violates a salient norm, and one in which there is no violation of a salient norm. Since the phenomenon is understood in bivalent terms (norm infraction vs. no norm infraction), most explanations thereof have the same structure. In this paper, we report several studies (total N=479…Read more
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33Outcome effects, moral luck and the hindsight biasCognition 232 (C): 105258. 2022.In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N=2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability – a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently to increased attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating a hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety …Read more
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30Several empirical studies have documented an asymmetry in people’s assessments of intentional action, so-called ‘Knobe effect’. Accordingly, foreseen (yet undesired) outcomes that are harmful are judged intentional, whereas foreseen (yet undesired) outcomes that are helpful are judged unintentional. The Knobe-effect has been standardly conceived of in bivalent terms: The presence or absence of perceived intentionality contingent on a negative or positive outcome valence. Unsurprisingly, explanat…Read more
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26In an important and widely discussed series of studies, Jonathan Phillips and colleagues have suggested that the ordinary concept of happiness has a substantial moral component. For in- stance, two persons who enjoy the same extent of positive emotions and are equally satisfied with their lives are judged as happy to different degrees if one is less moral than the other. Considering that the relation between morality and happiness or self-interest has been one of the central questions of moral p…Read more
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25Coordination and expertise foster legal textualismProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 119 (44). 2022.A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a pl…Read more
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21Predictability is a prerequisite for effective human control of artificial intelligence (AI). The inability to predict malfunctioning of AI, for example, impedes timely human intervention. In this paper, we empirically investigate how AI’s predictability compares to the predictability of humans in a real-effort task. We show that humans are worse at predicting AI performance than at predicting human performance. Importantly, participants are not aware of the differences in relative predictabilit…Read more
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6While artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly applied for decision- making processes, ethical decisions pose challenges for AI applica- tions. Given that humans cannot always agree on the right thing to do, how would ethical decision-making by AI systems be perceived and how would responsibility be ascribed in human-AI collabora- tion? In this study, we investigate how the expert type (human vs. AI) and level of expert autonomy (adviser vs. decider) influence trust, perceived responsibility…Read more
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6The effect of outcome severity on moral judgment and interpersonal goals of perpetrators, victims, and bystandersEuropean Journal of Social Psychology 51 (7): 1158-1171. 2021.When two actors have the same mental state but one happens to harm another person (unlucky actor) and the other one does not (lucky actor), the latter elicits a milder moral judgement. To understand how this outcome effect would affect post-harm interactions between victims and perpetrators, we examined how the social role from which transgressions are perceived moderates the outcome effect, and how outcome effects on moral judgements transfer to agentic and communal interpersonal goals. Three v…Read more
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5The reasonable person standard is of great importance to US criminal and tort law. According to the law, whether or not an agent acted reasonably does not depend on features of the outcome which are not under her control. Mock juror attributions of reasonableness, however, are shown to be outcome-dependent. A series of experiments reveals that this outcome-dependence does not constitute a bias, since the very folk concept of reasonableness is outcome-sensitive. Consequently, the law makes a mist…Read more
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Coordination and expertise foster legal textualismProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (44). 2022.A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a widespread tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which acts violate the rule. This tendency’s strength varied markedly across (k = 15) field sites, owing to cultural variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared to laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether, and consequently exhibited more pronounced textualist tendencies. F…Read more
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University of GrazProfessor
Graz, Styria, Austria
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |