Do moral considerations affect our concept of intentional action?

[matthew...@gmail.com]

Let's try an experiment. Read the following story:

The Vice-President of a company went to the chairman of the board and
said, "We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us
increase profits, but it will also harm the environment."

The chairman of the board said, "I don't care at all about harming the
environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start
the new program."

They started the new program, sure enough the environment was harmed.


Most people, after reading this story, say the chairman intentionally
harmed the environment. But suppose the word 'harm' is replaced with
the word 'help'.



The Vice-President of a company went to the chairman of the board and
said, "We are thinking of starting a new program. It will help us
increase profits, but it will also help the environment."

The chairman of the board said, "I don't care at all about helping the
environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start
the new program."

They started the new program, sure enough the environment was helped.

Confronted with this version of the story, very few people say that
the chairman intentionally helped the environment.

This example is from a terrific paper on 'Experimental Philosophy" by
Joshua Kobe. You can read it here. The idea is to go out and
empirically test the various claims of popular intuitions appealed to
by many philosophers. They find out what intuitions people actually
have, and the results are quite surprising.

I wonder how this problem of our tendency to shift our concept of when
an agent counts as being intentional affects Brandom's project of
cashing out Intentionality with his system of meaning use analysis.
There seems to be an asymmetry with respect to the practices
underpinning of conceptual understanding of 'intentionality' that the
above experiment brings out.

Thoughts?

[matthew...@gmail.com]

Here's the link to the Kobe paper mentioned in the last post.

http://www.unc.edu/%7Eknobe/ExperimentalPhilosophy.pdf

[Wesley Cooper]

This puts me in mind of the Norway school of `empirical semantics'
(Arne Naess, et al). I don't know much about either empirical
semantics or experimental philosophy, but they look pretty similar.
Also I think Jeff Pelletier has done this sort of research, asking
people about their use of words and looking for patterns in their
responses.

--
Dr Wesley Cooper, Prof
Dept of Philosophy, U of Alberta
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~pex/wordpress/