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.”

Here.

(1) Ethics in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism

(2) The Ethics of Belief

(3) Faith