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Framing Effects and Mikhail’s Linguistic Analogy

framing effects are a problem for Mikhail’s argument

Mikhail, 2014 table 2

Mikhail’s theoretical argument (reconstruction)

Do humans have a language ethics module?

1. ‘adequately specifying the kinds of harm that humans intuitively grasp requires a technical legal vocabulary’

Compare: ‘ concepts like battery, end, means and side effect [...] can [...] predict human moral intuitions in a huge number and variety of cases’ (Mikhail, 2007, p. 149).

Therefore:

2. The abilities underpinning unreflective ethical judgements must involve analysis in accordance with rules.

Mikhail, 2007

framing effects are a problem for Mikhail’s argument

Fini, Brass, & Committeri (2015, p. figure 1, part)

Done in VR
Measure: Judgment’s transition threshold (JTT) = ‘The point where participants expressed a transition from “Far” to “Near” (descending series) and from “Near” to “Far” (ascending series)’
Suppose you are asked to judge whether an object is near or far from you. Your judgements can be influenced by whether another person is in the scene and able to interact with the object (Fini et al., 2015). Yet the judgement you are making is supposed to be about the distance between you and an object; the distance from another person and that person’s ability to interact with the object are irrelevant considerations.

framing effects are a problem for Mikhail’s argument

Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2015 figure 2 (part)

order effects. (Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2015, p. figure~2 (part))
Potentially two problems here: (i) order effects themselves [main point]; and (ii) reflection makes people more consistent (which seems not expected given the language analogy—should not get change towards truth; does the language analogy imply that reflection takes you away from the truth about ethical attributes of particular actions (as it does for linguistic judgements)?)

order-of-presentation effects (Schwitzgebel & Cushman, 2015)

additional irrelevant options (Wiegmann, Horvath, & Meyer, 2020)

‘Asian disease’ (Prospect) framing (Wiegmann & Horvath, 2020)

ethical
judgements

spatial
judgements

financial
judgements

...

In certain cases
‘there is no underlying preference that is masked or distorted by the frame. Our preferences are about framed problems, and our moral intuitions are about descriptions, not about substance’

(Kahneman, 2013)

‘Our moral judgments are apparently sensitive to idiosyncratic factors, which cannot plausibly appear as the basis of an interpersonal normative standard. [...] we are not in a position to introspectively isolate and abstract away from these factors.’

(Rini, 2013, p. 265)

‘expert ethicists have a genuine advantage over laypeople with respect to some well-known biases’

(Wiegmann & Horvath, 2020)

Wiegmann & Waldmann (2014) offer evidence that order-of-presentation effects are a consequence of one scenario selectively highlighting an aspect of the causal structure of another scenario.

If this is correct, we might think that the order-of-presentation effect does not show that moral intuitions are not about substance after all.

Mikhail (2014, p. table 2)

framing effects are a problem for Mikhail’s argument