Video Describing the Knobe Effect

The following video provides a colorful little summary of a key area of study among experimental philosophers (sometimes known as the (Joshua) Knobe effect):

Comments

[Anibal]

Truly didactic and pedagogical.

Not only X-Phi is shaking the pillars of traditional metaphilosphical methodology, but also renewing the way philosophy can be teach and learn in the digital era.

[joneilortiz]

There’s a good reason why, aside from questions of normative baggage, the respondents perceive ‘harm’ caused to the environment as intended but ‘help’ for the environment as not. The first question makes perfect sense: environmental damage is traditionally a known side-effect of business practices otherwise concerned with maximizing profit. Thus, to do nothing to prevent anticipated environmental effects is an active, intended, and moral endeavor.

'Helping' the environment, by contrast, is not as much a matter of negligence and passivity. The sentence, ‘This business plan will maximize profits and also, as it were, help the environment’, simply doesn’t make sense - i.e., it’s not a recognizable, coherent proposition. The environment cannot be helped incidentally, at least not in the way the environment can be harmed incidentally, as an (acceptable) 'effect' of other practices. (No company has ever found, much to its surprise, that it has been helping the environment all along.)

To help the environment, a company would have to actively implement specific measures, something most people probably otherwise understand; but this clear sense of intentionality is lost in the unusual wording of the question (which makes it sound like helping the environment can be a side-effect in exactly the same way as harming the environment can be). Thus, the respondent confronted with this sentence will most likely not only think it doesn’t bear much on the question of intentionality but will find its formulation more strange and less natural than the contingency with which it’s contrasted.

[Anibal]

I think you stress too much on wether we can foresee the unknown alongside the known or wether "helping" outcomes can be predicted but "harming" outcomes not.

Any operations research analyst could say you that decisions in general brought unknown outcomes either labeled good or bad.

And the knobe effect shows, whatever cognitive mechanism is involve, that we tend to judge intentionality depending on the moral character of an action.