Joshua Knobe is quoted:

“It seems very puzzling that all we changed was this one word, just changing the word harm to help, and yet we’re now having completely different judgments about whether what he did was intentional or unintentional. Yet it seems like it’s only the moral status of what he did that is changing. … Somehow the moral judgments people are making are affecting their intuitions about something like how the mind works.”

I don’t think this is quite right. There is an apparent substantive moral difference between the two cases. But first, let’s distinguish three morally relevant elements in the scenario. Two elements are each of the effects on the environment – one deleterious, the other beneficial. A third element in the scenario is the attitude of the chairman, which remains the same in both cases. In both cases we could say the chairman is blameworthy in being indifferent to an important effect of his actions. Note that in both scenarios he is willing to harm the environment for company profit.

However, there is another important aspect of the two scenarios. Generally, it is more blameworthy to consciously act immorally than it is praiseworthy to consciously act morally. No one praises a man for not being a rapist, but we do blame a man for being a rapist.

So I think it is this distinction that is at work in the study, which is a good distinction. There is no reason to think, as does Knobe, that respondents are changing their minds about whether an action is “intentional.” What has happened is that the respondents have just been tricked by the curious addition that the chairman is indifferent to the effects of his actions, which makes his character just as evil in both cases. But this is hard for a non-philosopher respondent to pick out, since the scenarios draw special attention to the results of the chairman’s actions. It is relatively trivial that if someone does something evil to achieve an end, they are blameworthy for that action. Whether or not they’ve done the evil “intentionally” is somewhat ambiguous – it does us no good to give people a messy thought experiment. It is also trivial that if I cure cancer incidentally in the process of playing a video game for pleasure, I’m not any more praiseworthy than someone who played the game without curing cancer.

The response seems to me to be reflecting an accurate intuition about this moral difference, not some deep contradiction in folk metaphysics or psychology of intention.

So, like much experimental philosophy, this study teaches us only something very trivial: some thought experiments have subtleties, which you have to think about for more than a second.

UPDATE: Notice that the percentages actually are quite consistent. They are roughly 80% that think he intentionally did something bad in the first case, and 20% that think he did something good in the second. Probably the same 80% voted “no” in the second case, because they recognize, correctly, that the chairman’s apathy with respect to doing evil makes him bad in both cases, and that we are more blameworthy for bad we knowingly do incidentally than we are praiseworthy for good we knowingly do incidentally. This has nothing to do with people’s intuitions about “how the mind works.”

[Background: Loftus has been having a tortured exchange with Victor Reppert on whether religious belief is the result of preference (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here.]

Loftus’ starting point/conclusion is characteristically overgeneralized, trivial if taken literally, or false if taken more rhetorically. For example, here’s one that he has been repeating over and over again on his blog:

People believe and defend what they prefer to be true. This is an obvious and non-controversial fact. That’s who we are as human beings. That’s what we human beings do. That’s what psychological studies have repeatedly shown us over and over.

Maybe “people” believe and defend what they prefer to be true insofar as they prefer to have what they take to be accurate beliefs. But that is trivial and probably not what Loftus means. He probably means that they/them/people/the humans believe certain things (or all things?) because they prefer them. Their preference is either the psychological cause or the conscious reason for their beliefs. Judging by Loftus’ citing of, evidently, “Psychology,” we can assume he thinks the preferences of the humans cause them to have certain beliefs, which are conveniently correlated to the beliefs that Loftus currently thinks are false.

So Loftus thinks this “fact” about each human or some humans and each, or some, or most, or the set of, their beliefs, is “obvious and uncontroversial.” Loftus thinks he knows this partly because of worthless and probably tautological evidence like “That’s who we are as human beings,” and the reciprocally superfluous “That’s what we human beings do.” (Mother of God, he’s such a bad writer…). His other evidence is “psychological studies.” It is impressive that Loftus has gained the expertise to conduct a literature survey of psychological research papers in his free time. It might be even more amazing that he has found any psychological research papers at all that make a claim as general as that “people believe and defend what they prefer to be true.” In my knowledgeable survey of all working scientists, done during my two-year blogging sabbatical, I have discovered that psychological and other scientific research actually makes much narrower claims than these. In fact, it is only in science tabloids like Psychology Today or Scientific American that you might get a scientist inferring, perhaps in a casual interview, something this general from studies on narrow particulars. That’s because they have to sell copies of their magazines to popular audiences, who like shallow but sensational content.

So that epitomizes the number one reason why Loftus is so irritating to review, or engage with at all. His most basic claims are frequently outlandish or just exaggerated. Some of them are trivially true but without the implications he deduces from them. Furthermore, his presentation seems like it is conceptually sloppy and poorly organized on purpose. Almost as if his goal isn’t the acquisition and promotion of clear thinking, but something else. Perhaps “overwhelming the believer,” a non-truth-oriented goal Loftus has admitted, and I have cheerily critiqued as involving the sacrifice of basic truisms of intellectual integrity and virtue, here.

In Loftus’ most recent post on how we prefer to believe, he asserts several times, without utility, that he (and “people”) find the “Christian story” very compelling. Loftus writes things like this:

Who needs Christian apologetics with a story like this? Who needs to defend such a story at all? The story itself provides the only evidence people need to believe. Just tell the story. Claim it as a properly basic belief. Tell us the Holy Spirit testifies to this story through an inner witness. After all, it does resonate with us.

While this paragraph might have psychological pull designed to “overwhelm the believer,” consider how confused it is. The function of Christian apologetics is more or less twofold:

(1) To promote the truth of Christian belief and

(2) To defend Christian belief against objections to its truth

Except in rare cases, Christian apologetics has nothing to do with showing that the story is or is not “compelling,” which is something more relevant in the context of evangelism. So in no sense is the telling of the story even a possible replacement for Christian apologetics. In any case, many people don’t accept the story based on its emotional components – in fact, like John Loftus, many people don’t accept the story at all. So it is just irrelevant from both perspectives that the story has some happy things in it. Then Loftus says “Claim it as a properly basic belief,” apparently unaware that this claim is itself a product of Christian apologetics, linked to the sister claim, elaborated by apologists, about the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Responding to confusions such as these, while it provides some psychological pull in the form of easy intellectual self-satisfaction, is ultimately boring.

Then Loftus lists several pleasing truth-claims believed by many people, some of them Christians. For example, “We want to believe there is divine help when in trouble.” Loftus could have added, “We want to believe that there is no morally significant genetic differences between races or sexes.” Or, “We want to believe that it is possible to curtail the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming.” Or, “We want to believe that knowledge is possible.” The list could go on forever.

The point is, Loftus’ statements here are just worthless. It is so trivially true that many of our beliefs are preferable to their denial that there is nothing significant left to do with this fact. We should, perhaps, be most critical of incoming claims that sound nice to us. But “people,” as surely Pychology, Astrophysics, and Entomology have shown, are quite adept at resisting being duped by happy stories. In fact, it is commonly believed that we can’t make ourselves believe based on preference for happy stories. In fact this is one of the common attacks on one reading Pascal’s Wager, where some see Pascal as saying we should believe for practical, not epistemic, reasons.

It would be interesting to note which happy beliefs are worth accepting, or isolating what intellectual tools sort out happy false from happy true, but that is territory uncharted by Loftus’ excursions into this non-topic.

Then, characteristically, Loftus adds on some non-sequiturs, just listing without comment some of the Christian things he doesn’t believe. Undoubtedly, this is meant to “overwhelm the believer.” For example, he writes without utility, “Nevermind the fact that we haven’t a clue as to how a child could be 100% God and 100% human with nothing left over.” I’m not sure what this adds to discussion other than obfuscation. What does “nothing left over” even mean? Does Loftus understand the orthodox doctrine of the trinity to be a proposition in mathematics? Even if it was, what relation does this have to believing for emotional reasons? Is anyone made happy or comforted by the abstruse idea that Jesus has two 100%’s inside of him?

But there is truly no point in pursuing Loftus’ non-sequiturs, since his goal is not accurate portrayal and engagement with religious concepts, but is to “overwhelm the believer.” It is indeed overwhelming to chase down every flippant, poorly educated non-sequitur. That kind of overwhelming, no one needs.

Loftus then issues a number of mutually exclusive caricatures of supposedly apologetic responses to him (putting your brain on a shelf, finding reasons, appealing to omniscience, all at the same time?). This is another reason why Loftus, the self-proclaimed former insider, is so tedious to engage. He doesn’t even bother constructing straw men, but instead constructs single-sentence caricatures that prove their own silliness. So, to take one example, a respondent would have to go through and explain how, like any type of argument, “appealing to omniscience” is sometimes reasonable and sometimes not reasonable; this is a very tempered but accurate assessment, perhaps not suitable for online theatrics.

Loftus finishes with some happy talk about himself. The most excruciating and histrionic of these is “I have nothing more to offer but knowledge and understanding.”

For a final reason why it is annoying to engage Loftus, consider this line: “But I’m here to tell Christians their faith is a delusion. They reject and attack me for telling them this.”

Sometimes Christians read atheist books, have some corroborating set of experiences, and become atheists. Sometimes atheists do the opposites of those things. Like many of the true statements that correct for Loftus’ sloppiness, these are barely worth saying, perhaps not worth saying at all. In any case, some people disagree with Loftus and express their disagreements because they genuinely think he is incorrect, not for “telling them” they are delusional (who cares if John Loftus calls you delusional?) but in his opinions on certain topics.

Lastly, it is very annoying and tedious engaging Loftus when he imputes motives to his interlocutors without basis or utility. Loftus telling his opponents that they have angry-crazy motives for “attacking” him is about as useful as me saying Loftus promotes the Outsider Test because last night he had a dream about potatoes. I can’t possibly know this. But even if I did know this, it would have no relevance to evaluating the Outsider Test, or Loftus’ arguments. It would be, in function, subterfuge. Loftus has proudly admitted that his tactics are subterfuge, intended to “overwhelm the believer.”

There is at least one hypocritical element of my post. I observe that Loftus is highly disorganized (I should say, even in his published work, ostensibly overseen by editors). Yet, this post is itself somewhat disorganized. While this is partly because in responding to Loftus one has to make one’s own structure, it is also because I am not putting very much care or effort into this post. But I thought that it might be nice, even fun, to have an interim condescending critique of Loftus, while my hundreds of thousands of readers await the continuation of my highly scholarly review of his collection of other people’s aphorisms, Why I Became an Atheist. My review, I might add, is supported and corroborated by the composite literature in all academic subjects.

During a conclave with reporters, the NYT reports, the Pope gave a “direct condemnation” of “the sexual abuse crisis.” Playing its own Devil’s Advocate, the article immediately refutes itself, showing how the Pope issued nothing but non-sequitur. Raising the Christian persecution complex to new institutional levels, Ratzinger portrayed “the church” as a victim. Indeed, the Church is attacked “not only from outside,” but also from inside. That is to say, the anti-Catholic media and the clergy who molest children share a common victim: “the church.” Ratzinger thinks the church must “relearn” “conversion, prayer, penance.”

What is so obnoxious about these statements is that they amount to changing the subject. The object of public outrage is divided into a couple of areas: (1) the disturbingly frequent occurrence of child molestation and rape even at very high levels and (2) the cover-ups, transfers, and delays issued in response to the crimes when they were first brought to supposed spiritual authorities, including Ratzinger, now the “Vicar of Christ on Earth.” Will he ever address those topics with anything other than obscurantist generality? Notice that everything he says about this scandal would be true without it. When does the Church not need to relearn “conversion, prayer, penance”? Such fluffy theological language always applies. When is there not sin in the Church? Etc.

There are of course extra theological embarrassments, e.g. that Ratzinger is Pope partly due to getting some of the child rapist vote. In general, claims that the Catholic Church makes for itself and its Pope are so inflated that perhaps this scandal is what will put wavering Catholics over the edge. But lucky for Catholicism, much of its inflated membership is constituted by cultural Catholics, Catholics who show up once or twice a year, and so on.

I will end by stating the morally obvious: There are indeed identifiable victims; they are children who have been molested, raped, and psychologically damaged for the rest of their lives by Catholic clergy, including at the highest levels. Victim status actually can be shared by some outside parties – namely, the parents of the children. The Catholic institutions of authority and humans who populate them are the opposite of victims. Some of them are direct molesters and rapists, others are culpable for protecting and advocating for molesters and rapists (for the good of the “church”), others are culpable for looking the other way, others were ignorant of the whole affair, and the last group includes those who tried and failed to do something about the issue. Ratzinger, an accomplishment of whose is forgiving child rape (on behalf of …? did someone molest the church?), now says that “justice” is important. Therefore, he should take everyone in the first three groups above, including himself, and submit to civil authorities in the relevant domains. This ultimate fate, common for poor offenders, for cults, etc., will not befall Catholic officials.

The issue here is not some general spiritual combat involving the church. The problem is very particular, involving identifiable individuals and events. The only broad or general implication is that these individuals and events were supported and protected within the Catholic institutional structure. But unless you think that the church and its authorities are magical, it doesn’t strictly matter that it is the church. The same issues and objections would arise for any other institution founded and sustained by humans (say, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts of America, or the United Nations). But the Catholic Church and its leadership, who are now making morally grotesque public statements with regularity, are so colossally arrogant that they can’t think of themselves in this lowly way.

The recent NYT article reinforces my failure to understand this American policy position. I’ll succinctly express my confusion by grouping the following items:

(1) Every year, the President marks the occasion by using phrases like “one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century” when “1.5 million Armenians were massacred or marched to their death.”

(2) Often, before he is elected, the President has made unequivocal statements. In the case of Obama as late as January 2008: “the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact.”

(3) The president does not renounce previous statements. Obama has said explicitly he agrees with his previous statement: “I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed.”

(4) Every year, Turkey expresses outrage at the president’s language despite the fact that he hasn’t used the word genocide. This year: “Third countries neither have a right nor authority to judge the history of Turkish-Armenian relations with political motives.”

(5) This year, Congress passed a resolution in March condemning the genocide, over protests of the Obama administration. Turkey’s response? “Turkey briefly recalled its ambassador from Washington in protest.”

I do not see the credibility of foreign policy concerns over Turkey’s reaction to American acknowledgement of the genocide. They evidently are happy to maintain relations with the United States when the man holding the presidency has acknowledged the genocide, the Congress has officially acknowledged it, the President has agreed with his own previous statements, and so on. We do not sugarcoat the crimes of the Soviet Union or the Nazis in order to placate Russia and Germany, respectively. Why do we sugarcoat crimes in this case? The alleged political fallout would be slightly more credible if the President avoided talking about the genocide at all; but how is it that he can describe literally what happened, but just can’t use the word genocide? Are there legal ramifications? What does Turkey credibly leverage over us? Etc.

Probably when you become President, you learn some secret knowledge about how the world will blow up if you discuss this particular event. Maybe someday the National Security Archive will publish relevant documents, but I doubt it.

Lastly, isn’t it bizarre that 1.5 million is both the size of the Armenian-American voting bloc and the number of people massacred by the Turks?