Judging Those Who Do the Right Thing - Unintentionally

Compare the following two scenarios.

1) An executive of a company approaches the CEO with an initiative that will increase profits but also harm the environment. The CEO says, "I don't care at all about harming the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program." The program is instituted. Profits rise and the environment is harmed.

2) An executive of a company approaches the CEO with an initiative that will increase profits and also help the environment. The CEO says, "I don't care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program." The program is instituted. Profits rise and the environment is helped.

When the philosopher Joshua Knobe asked participants to rate how intentional the CEO's action was in these two scenarios a striking pattern jumped out: 82% said the CEO intentionally harmed the environment but only 23% said he intentionally helped the environment. Remember, the scenarios are identical except for "help" versus "harm. Any text having to do with intentionality is kept constant. And yet people who read these scenarios do not see them as parallel, symmetric sides of the same coin - not by a long shot.

Based on studies like these, Knobe and others have argued that perhaps we need to rethink the traditional relationship between intentionality and blame/praise. Whereas the commonsense view holds that first we assess how intentional the act was and then we assign blame or praise (intentionality → blame/praise), Knobe's data suggest that the reverse might be true (blame/praise → intentionality). In other words, all things being equal, the more harmful the action, the more intentional it appears.

In a recent article, Steve Guglielmo and Bertram Malle of Brown University disagree with this position. They argue that Knobe's scenarios contain more differences than initially meet the eye. In addition to varying whether the CEO's action was harmful or helpful, Knobe may have also unwittingly varied the CEO's desire for the outcome. Their logic is as follows:
1. Societal norms lead us to expect others to behave decently.
2. Actively causing harm is a greater violation of societal norms than failing to do good. After all, most of our everyday life is made up of mundane tasks that have little to do with morality. Doing nothing moral is way more common than doing something immoral.
3. Thus, people typically consider actual harm to be worse than the withholding of benefit. Causing harm can be thought of as dipping into the negative side of the ledger, while withholding benefit leaves things status quo. Thus, actively committing a harmful act is seen as more demonstrative and more intentional; the person must really want to do it.

For these reasons, when the CEO says, "I don't care at all about harming the environment," he is expressing tacit approval - and even some desire - for causing a negative outcome on the environment. But the meaning of the statement, "I don't care at all about helping the environment" is less clear. Rather than holding an anti-environment attitude, it may simply be that he is not motivated enough to go out and actively help the environment. His aim is neither to destroy nor save the environment; he has other burning interests. Many of us probably fall into this camp. Thus, although it would be nice if he actually cared about the environment, his action is viewed as less of a sin than if his decision had explicitly caused the harm.

To test this idea, Guglielmo and Malle asked participants one question that Knobe did not ask: "To what extent did the CEO want to harm (or help) the environment?" They found that, as predicted, participants did not infer much desire on the part of the CEO who helped the environment (an average of 1.5 on a 0-6 scale). But participants inferred a good deal more desire on the part of the CEO who harmed the environment (3.55 on the 0-6 scale). Moreover, these judgments of desire were correlated with judgments of intentionality; the more the CEO was judged to want the outcome, the more intentional the action was judged to be.

This finding suggests that, in fact, people do judge how intentional an act was before judging its blameworthiness - not the reverse. Moreover, these results suggest that a calculation of the actor's desire factors into the judgment of intentionality.

The resolution of this debate has noteworthy real-life consequences. If the Knobe position is true, then members of a jury - whose job is often to assess the defendant's degree of intentionality - might be so swayed by their evaluation of the crime's badness that they will fail to make distinctions between, for example, first and second-degree murder. But if Guglielmo and Malle are correct, then jury members are actually quite sophisticated; they are perfectly capable of making inferences about what the defendant wanted and, in turn, how intentional the "death blow" was.

References

Guglielmo, S. & Malle, B.F. (2011). Can unintended side effects be intentional? Resolving a controversy over intentionality and morality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1635-1647.

Knobe, J. Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63, 190-193.