Recently, Gilbert Harman has suggested that Marc Hauser's book, Moral Minds, relied on the work of John Mikhail to a much greater extent than is acknowledged in the book itself. Though Hauser does acknowledge contributions from Mikhail in a few places, Harman believes that the extent of Hauser's reliance is not in keeping with appropriate scholarly standards of attribution. Harman goes so far as to consider whether Hauser stole ideas in a manner that could be deemed plagiarism.
I have a question about one aspect of the exchange. Harman states:
Hauser pp. 113-121 discusses four "trolley problems," involving Denise, Frank, Ned, and Oscar. Mikhail 2000 (pp. 95-99, 125-35) gives the same account with the same names. Two of the problems are standard (Denise and Frank) and two are new with Mikhail (Ned, Oscar). Hauser does not cite Mikhail from whom he must have taken these examples. (Mikhail discusses several other trolley problems as well.) In addition, Hauser p. 120 adopts Mikhail (2000)'s table format (pp. 105, 128, 131, etc.) to present trolley problems and their salient features.
Hauser responds:
I indeed used the same names, cases and table as did Mikhail in his thesis, but cited instead our coauthored empirical paper (2007, Mind & Language, 22(1): 1–21) because it too used these cases and structure. The paper, rather than the thesis, was more relevant because of the sectionʼs focus on empirical evidence.
I write to see if people know where Hauser cites to their coauthored paper. I believe that this is the relevant co-authored paper. But I don't see it listed in the references in Moral Minds. The paper was published in 2007, while the book has a 2006 copyright. Perhaps there is some reference to a draft of the paper that didn't make it to the reference list. If you can find the pertinent section where Hauser makes the reference asserted in his reply to Harman, please post it in the comments. (Comments are moderated and will not appear immediately.)
