Text

theses

Philosophers and psychologists have long been interested in deontic judgments of cases of double effect -- morally charged scenarios in which one action has two effects and only one of those effects is intended (eg: Foot, 1967; Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley & Cohen, 2001). Cases of double effect have been critical test-cases for the study of moral judgment, giving us insight into how our moral faculty functions. The Moral Grammar Hypothesis is one attempt to describe the cognitive mechanisms that underwrite our moral competence (Mikhail 2007, 2011). The Moral Grammar Hypothesis suggests that deontic judgments are the output of a modular system that runs a series of computations over highly structured, informationally rich mental representations. For this theory to be viable, a major question looms large: how do these structured, rich mental representations get formed from the impoverished stimuli available in the environment? For example, determining the intentional structure of the moral agent’s mental state is critical to the Moral Grammar Hypothesis. Yet, mental state information is entirely absent from the kinds of stimuli that have been used to gather evidence in support of the theory, which are typically trolley-like cases of double effect. In fact, what has gone largely unnoticed in research on double effect scenarios is that two possible intention structures are equally compatible with the causal structure of the case. To solve this poverty-of-the-stimulus problem, we propose that subjects deploy a good intention prior, namely, if the action of an agent has two effects – one good and one bad – the agent intends the good effects of her action and does not intend the bad effects. We report two studies (one with adults, one with preschoolers aged three to five years old) that provide evidence for the use of this prior to disambiguate between intention structures in double-effect scenarios.

ETD_6122

M.S.

Includes bibliographical references

by Sydney Levine

doi:10.7282/T3K35WDF

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.