Poetic Justice

As Josh mentioned in his recent post, one of the better known results in the experimental philosophy of free will is that people's intuitions seem to alter depending on whether cases are described abstractly or concretely. Subjects may answer 'no' to a question like 'are people responsible for crimes in determined universes' (or rather to some suitable folk-friendly paraphrase of a question like this) while holding that Bob, an agent in a determined universe who commits a concretely described crime for personal gain, is responsible for his crime. There are several possible ways of responding to these results. One might argue that emotional responses swamp reasoning in the concrete condition (as Josh Greene argued that deontological emotion swamps consequentialist reasoning), dismiss the abstract response as theory-driven, offering an error-theory for the result (like Eddy), and so on. Here I want to explore another possibility.

The thought was prompted by some extensive 'research' I have been conducting on www.snopes.com. Consider this post-Katrina story (lightly edited to remove egregious racism):

Lori works with a lady whose relatives live in Lakeview [Louisiana]. When they evacuated, they put ll of their valuables, jewelry and things of that nature, up on the second floor of their home. When the water went down enough to walk through, one of the local lowlife looted the home and stuffed most of their valuables into a pillow case and went out the back. The water was probably at about 5 feet. The looter did not know about the in-ground pool in the yard and proceeded to walk into it. As luck would have it, he could not swim, was weighted down by the loot and drowned in the pool.

 Last week, the home owners had a pool service come in to drain and clean the pool. They found the body at the bottom of the pool with the pillow case filled with their valuables. Just goes to show you, there is some justice out there.

Stories like this are immensely satisfying. It is immensely satisfying to read narratives in which the universe is a morally ordered placed, in which the good are rewarded and the bad suffer. What if it is our sense of narrative fittingness that causes our responses to concrete cases (which are, after all, little stories)?

Why would this be interesting? First because the fitting ending intuition, if that is what it is, would explain the irrelevance of determinism. Indeed, a morally determined universe, with the right qualities, might actually be preferable to an undetermined universe, if the latter entails some probability that rewards would fail to match desert. Second because it seems to hold out the prospect of an error theory for retributive intuitions: our narrative sense seems to be a poor - non-truth-preserving - source for our moral views.

As Dan Cohen has pointed out to me in conversation, there is an issue here about the order of explanation. It might be that poetic justice stories are satisfying because of our intuitions about responsibility, rather than the other way round. How do we begin to test which way round our intuitions go?

Here are a couple of suggestions. We might vary either the desert of the agent, or the mode of delivery of the punishment,

1. We might test to see whether subjects find poetic justice endings satisfying regardless of the moral responsibility of the agents involved. These cases might involve brainwashed or manipulated agents for instance. There are already experiments that seem to fit descriptions like this, for instance by Woolfolk, Doris and Darley. It might be useful to extend this work to cover animals which lack the capacities necessary for moral responsibility.

2. The moral-responsibility-drives-narrative story seems to predict that punishment will be more fitting an ending than other ways in which poetic justice is meted out. The rival story might be indifferent to mode of delivery. We might therefore give subjects multiple possible endings to a story (like one of those choose your own adventure books), all of which involve comparable levels of harm coming to a person whose has done wrong. Will subjects prefer the legal punishment to, for instance, having the wrongdoer struck by lighting? Note that in the Katrina story, it seems that it is in part because the punishment was partly caused by the crime (the looter was weighed down by the loot) that it is so satisfying. That kind of link seems hard to explain on the moral-responsibility-drives-narrative story. If subjects would actually prefer this kind of mechanism to meting out of lawful punishment, then that would seem to be bad news for the explanatory story. Not, I grant, terrible news, but a difficulty.

Can anyone suggest better ways of testing the hypothesis?

Comments

[Kip]

I think this is a brilliant idea.

One way to test the idea is to correlate beliefs about free will with beliefs about a just world. The "just world phenomenon" is a well known cognitive bias. If compatibilists (and/or others) are more vulnerable to it than others, then that would be worth knowing.

For a while, as a non-academic, I've proposed to try to correlate beliefs about free will with vulnerability to various cognitive biases. You can read a short summary of my proposal here:

http://makeapubliccommitment.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/experiments-about-free-will/

[Philoponus]

Neil,

Let me second Kip’s commendation, and offer you an anecdote you might enjoy. I used to love to present variants of Trolley (and Fat Man) to my students for discussion. In one variant of Trolley I described the five men as the railroad employees responsible for the maintenance of the trolley and notorious for their drunken laxness, implying they are were responsible for the trolley’s brakes failing. This scenario strongly elicited the response that those five men, not a lone innocent party, deserved to suffer the consequences of their incompetence. The numbers (5 to 1) not longer seemed to matter. My interpretation of this result (and similar Fat Man cases) is that ordinary people, in the absence of any information about who is responsible, default to a consequentialist verdict. But people are responsible for real tragedies like Trolley, and there is a strong intuition that those responsible and not innocent parties should suffer for their incompetence and negligence.

Ordinary people want as much detail as possible in framing their moral judgments. The perniciously abstract (ie ambiguous) that philosophers like to present confuse people, whose moral intuitions are geared to very concrete, detail-rich cases. I am repeatedly impressed by the wise judgments of juries in sorting out real cases like Trolley.

[leslieglazer]

reading over this thread I was reminded of kants way of dividing up the world in his three critiques, you correctly point to how seeing things in terms of aesthetic fittingness would lead to a different judgement from the one arrived at from a theoretical stance. seeing things concretely may pull for a more aesthetic stance. or perhaps, and this may be more relevant, seeing something concretely may pull for a practical [in kants sense] moral way of approaching the matter. and it is difficult to think practically- morally without seeing in terms of choice and responsibility. one can consider things abstractly from a distance and imagine a deterministic world, but concretely, when one isn't distant, this is more difficult.

[Chris Weigel]

Hi Neil,
You’ve asked whether narrative fittingness plays a role in concrete cases. That makes me interested in what Construal Level Theory would say or predict about narrative fittingness. CLT characterizes the abstract/concrete distinction slightly differently. Instead of being based on whether the scenario does not/does contain a determinate person or action, CLT characterizes the distinction between abstract and concrete mental representations in terms of whether core, schematic, superordinate features/ peripheral, specific, subordinate features are involved. It seems that a story that involves poetic justice would be more abstract in this sense. Abstract representations yield greater consistency in prediction and explanation, and they discount situation-specific factors. So it seems like poetic justice would lead to a more abstract representation (and vice versa), since poetic justice makes everything fit together in the big picture. Some research has found that abstract representations lead us to judge transgressions as worse. Maybe that is part of what is going on in poetic justice cases?

I didn’t suggest ways of testing the hypothesis, but your post raises a lot of interesting issues!