Reacting to wrongdoers - victims, intentionality and partner management

With regards to the behaviours of our social partners, how do we make judgments of moral relevance? For example, under what conditions do we assign responsibility, level blame, and determine and institute the appropriate responses? How do we determine what constitutes a moral transgression, who the valid victim is and what responses are the most appropriate? These questions lie in the gaps between the conceptual frameworks provided by philosophical ethics, philosophy of mind, and the empirical investigations of the cognitive and social sciences. Leveraging the stereotypical structure of everyday moral judgement (discussed below), this thesis highlights each specific element of that structure and aims to consolidate the most recent research on each element whilst also, across three papers, establishing novel findings for each element. Kurt Gray and colleagues (2011; 2012; 2014; 2015; 2018) outline what they consider to be the fundamental structure of moral judgement. One [reacts] to an [agent] who [intentionally] [violates/harms] a moral [patient]. This cognitive template forms part of the Theory of Dyadic Morality (TDM). Although the theory is more extensive, for now, this structure will form the basis for this chapter of this thesis. As written, there are five elements in this structure. 1. Harming/Violating, 2. Moral agents (the principal transgressors), 3. Reactions to those agents, 4. Ascriptions of intentionality, and 5. Moral patients. These five elements are discussed, respectively, as the five sections of the Introduction. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 contain the three papers that form the empirical work for this thesis. Finally Chapter 5 summarises how this novel work fits into the overview established in Chapter 1. 1.1 covers what kind of actions constitute moral harms, how psychologists have disagreed about the centrality of harm over other kinds of violation (e.g., violations that appear to not contain actual physical or emotional harm to a victim) and discusses current pluralist accounts of moral psychology that argue for a range of different kinds of moral violation. 1.2 focuses on judgments that go beyond the act to inferences over the moral agents themselves. Recent work has discovered that a great deal of moral psychology entails character-based rather than act-based judgments and this section discusses how this is important for the understanding of different kinds of moral transgression. 1.3 covers how we react to transgressors including emotional responses, ascriptions of blame and wrongness and how these emotions and judgments drive our different behaviours towards the transgressor. There is a specific focus on the behaviours of Partner Choice (avoidance and ostracization) and Partner Control (punishment). These first sections of Chapter 1 then guide the hypotheses of the first paper, 2.1, Reacting to Wrongdoers: Harm Leads to Partner Control and Impurity to Partner Choice. 1.4 covers our current understanding of how people ascribe intentionality, especially how cognitive psychology has highlighted significant deviations from the most prominent normative theories of intentionality ascription. This lays the foundation for the second paper, 2.2, Does Counterfactual Requirement Explain the Side-Effect Effect? Finally, 1.5 covers judgments with regard to the victims of moral transgressions. For example, how do we perceive the minds of moral patients and why does this matter for moral judgement and also whether we are especially sensitive to human moral patients compared to our cousins in the animal kingdom. This establishes the open questions explored in the third paper, 2.3, Suffering and Dying: How Speciesism Matters for Assessing Extreme Harms