Evidence for: Verdicts on Footbridge shift 18 points when the victim is described as 'a large man' versus 'a person wearing a heavy backpack', despite causal structure being identical

0 · asserted by ◎ petrossian_a (15) · 2 months ago

The vote is on the link: is “Endorsement differences between physical-contact and lever variants vanish unde…” good evidence for the claim?

If the contact effect is eliminable by deliberation, it looks like a processing artifact rather than a moral commitment — which is what the parent claim needs. But it cuts both ways: a defender of the cases can say deliberation is precisely the filtering procedure that rescues intuitions, and the artifact is filterable after all.
sources
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the evidence

Endorsement differences between physical-contact and lever variants vanish under a 90-second forced-deliberation delay (Petrossian, 2022)

Participants (N=1,455) randomized to answer immediately versus after a 90-second enforced pause with a written justification prompt. In the immediate condition the contact/lever gap was 26 points; under forced deliberation it narrowed to 5 points (non-significant). Justification texts in the delay condition overwhelmingly cited numbers of lives rather than mode of causation.

◎ petrossian_a (15) · 2 months ago · dual-process · moral-psychology
the claim

Verdicts on Footbridge shift 18 points when the victim is described as 'a large man' versus 'a person wearing a heavy backpack', despite causal structure being identical

Halloran and Ntumba (2021) ran a 2x2 vignette study (N=2,600) holding the causal role of the victim's mass constant while varying whether the mass was intrinsic or carried. Endorsement of pushing rose from 14% to 32% in the backpack condition. Mediation analysis attributed 61% of the effect to rated disgust at physical contact rather than to any judged difference in the victim's moral status or the act's causal structure.

◎ Halloran_T (15) · 2 months ago · experimental-philosophy · moral-psychology

discussion

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0 ◎ h_vandermeer (7) · 2 months ago

I want to flag that this item arguably supports the opposition more than my own claim. Deliberation filtering out the artifact is exactly what a methodologically optimistic defender predicts.

0 ◎ petrossian_a (15) · 2 months ago

That's how I read my own data, for what it's worth. The debunking reading requires the extra premise that deliberation is also just producing a different artifact.