Forthcoming in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology Causal Judgment and Moral Judgment: Two Experiments1

Note: This paper is forthcoming in a volume on moral psychology, where it will be included as a response to a chapter by Julia Driver. However, the paper is written in such a way that it should be easily accessible to anyone interested in the relationship between causal judgment and moral judgment ─ including those who are not familiar with Driver’s work. It has long been known that people’s causal judgments can have an impact on their moral judgments. To take a simple example, if people conclude that a behavior caused the death of ten innocent children, they will therefore be inclined to regard the behavior itself as morally wrong. So far, none of this should come as any surprise. But recent experimental work points to the existence of a second, and more surprising, aspect of the relationship between causal judgment and moral judgment. It appears that the relationship can sometimes go in the opposite direction. That is, it appears that our moral judgments can sometimes impact our causal judgments. (Hence, we might first determine that a behavior is morally wrong and then, on that basis, arrive at the conclusion that it was the cause of various outcomes.