Fun With Causality and Morality
causal participation is the basic precondition for ascribing blame and responsibility in virtually all attributional theories of responsibility – Alicke, 1992
Zachary left his mannequin on the train tracks (See the figure). An oncoming train is about to plow into it.
You are sitting in the control room. There are three buttons in front of you. One button, if you press it, will divert the train to Sidetrack A. A second button, if you press it, will divert the train to Sidetrack B. A third button is labeled “Maintain Route.” If you press this button, nothing changes; the train just continues on its way, as if you hadn’t done anything at all. It’s really just a piece of plastic with the words “Maintain Route” on it.
Suppose someone came into the control booth – let’s call him Alan – saw the approaching train and, opposed to senseless harm to dummies, pressed the Sidetrack A button. The train would bypass Zachary’s mannequin, safe from harm. Hooray.
Now suppose someone else had come into the control room – let’s call her Beth – saw the mannequin on the track, and did nothing. The mannequin gets run over by the train. Here’s the question: Did Beth cause the mannequin to be destroyed by the train?
Causality is a bit of a tricky business, but it seems as though she didn’t. All Beth did was enter into a control room. The train would have hit the mannequin whether Beth was there or not. She didn’t actually change anything about the train or the configuration of the tracks. From the point of view of standard billiard-ball, garden variety mechanics, Beth didn’t cause the destruction of the mannequin.
Now, with this in mind, suppose Zachary complains to you that Beth destroyed his mannequin. Is Beth responsible? Well, she didn’t cause it to be destroyed. Normally, unless there is some pre-existing duty or responsibility, people can’t be held morally responsible for something unless they had some role in causing it to happen. You might be sympathetic to Zachary – though one wonders what his mannequin was doing on the tracks – but you probably don’t think that Beth should be punished. After all, she didn’t do anything.
Does the answer to this question – especially the one about causality – depend on whether it’s a mannequin or something else on the track? If it were a box of popcorn, or a pile of leaves, does that change the answer? Now suppose it’s a dog? At a minimum, if Beth didn’t cause the mannequin to be destroyed, it can’t be that she caused the dog to be killed by the train. After all, inferences about causality don’t depend on what it was that the train hit, right?
What about her moral responsibility? Should Beth be punished for walking into the control room and doing nothing, given that she could have saved the dog?
Now suppose it was a person on the track. If Beth walks into the control room, sees that there’s a person on the track, and does nothing, did she cause that person to die? How morally wrong was Beth’s (lack of) behavior?
Now let’s talk about Charlie. Charlie comes into the control room and, seeing the train coming, on its way to hit the person on the main track, presses the “Sidetrack B” button. From the picture, it’s clear that while this might delay things for a few moments, the person will still die. Did Charlie cause the death of the person on the track?
Now let’s take Doug. He sees the person on the track, and presses the “Maintain Route” button.
Beth, Charlie, and Doug all had no causal effect, at least as traditionally understood. In some sense, if your theory of responsibility is that behavior is wrong if and only if one caused the outcome (again, holding aside pre-existing duties or obligations), then these people should all be equally morally culpable.
A paper, by Peter DeScioli and collaborators (yes, including me…) is now available online (subscription) investigates these issues. (Interested readers might be interested in Josh Knobe’s work.)
When asked how much jail time Doug should get – the guy who pushed the “Maintain Route” button – people say he should get about 22 years, the same penalty they assign to someone who killed someone by pushing a button that diverted the train from a path that otherwise wouldn’t have killed anyone. A person who just stood by, but didn’t push the useless button, gets only a few years of jail time.
Why is Doug, who didn’t cause the person on the tracks to die, considered so much more culpable than someone who walked into the control room and did nothing at all? Pushing a useless button seems to have the same effect as just standing there – no effect, in both cases – but psychologically, Doug seems much worse.
Mysterious…
References
Alicke, M. D. (1992). Culpable causation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 368–378.
DeScioli, P., Bruening, R., & Kurzban. R. (2011). The omission effect in moral cognition: Toward a functional explanation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32,204-215.
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