Experimental Philosophy and the Knobe Effect

The problem with this “experiment” is that the second question put to the executive - ‘This business plan will maximize profits but help the environment’ - does not correspond to the first question (’This business plan will maximize profits but harm the environment’). It’s a false, forced analogy - with predictable results.

There’s a good reason why, aside from questions of normative baggage, the respondents perceive ‘harm’ caused to the environment as intended but ‘help’ for the environment as not. The first question makes perfect sense: environmental damage is traditionally a known side-effect of business practices otherwise concerned with maximizing profit. Thus, to do nothing to prevent anticipated environmental effects is an active, intended, and moral endeavor.

Helping the environment, by contrast, is not as much a matter of negligence and passivity. The sentence, ‘This business plan will maximize profits and also, as it were, help the environment’, simply doesn’t make sense - which is to say, it’s not a recognizable, coherent proposition. The environment cannot be helped incidentally, at least not in the way the environment can be harmed incidentally, as an (acceptable) effect of other practices. (No company has ever found, much to its surprise, that it has been helping the environment all along.) To help the environment, a company would have to actively implement specific measures, something most people probably otherwise understand; but this sense of clear intentionality is lost in the unusual wording of the question (which makes it sound like helping the environment can be a side-effect in exactly the same way as harming the environment can be). Thus, the respondent confronted with this sentence will most likely not only think it doesn’t bear much on the question of intentionality but will find its formulation more strange and less natural than the contingency with which it’s contrasted.

It seems to me that this experiment was not in fact designed to determine popular understandings of intentionality as they relate to helping and harming the environment. What the philosophers did instead was force fit the questions to a model that quite clearly attempts to reduce, in advance, any difference in response to the substitution of a single word - with the goal, presumably, of showing how common sense beliefs of everyday people are “normatively loaded” (which I think is otherwise true, if poorly demonstrated by this study) and effectively triggered by unmistakable semantic markers.