An investigation of the use of linguistic probes “by” and “in order to” in assessing moral grammar

ABSTRACT

Proponents of the linguistic analogy suggest that methodologies originally developed for investigating linguistic grammar can also be fruitfully applied to the empirical study of moral grammar: the causal and intentional representations of moral events which – according to the linguistic analogy – drive moral judgements. In the current study, we put this claim to the empirical test. Participants were presented with moral dilemmas which previously have been shown to implement a central principle in moral judgements: the principle of double effect (PDE). Participants responded to by and in order to probes to assess causal and intentional representations of this principle. Results show that these linguistic probes do not relate to moral judgement in the manner predicted by proponents of the linguistic analogy and moral grammar. Although the linguistic analogy is a theoretically rich framework, the procedures posited to give it empirical traction require revision.

Keywords:

• Linguistic analogy
• moral grammar
• moral judgements
• principle of double effect
• methodology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2015.1046489

Notes

¹ Following the theory of linguistic grammar, Mikhail (2011) makes a distinction between two uses of the word grammar in the case of morality: A person's mental grammar is the “internal” structural descriptions of moral events which organise event components – such as acts and outcomes – with reference to cause, intention, and other morally relevant aspects of the event (Mikhail, 2007, 2011). Mental grammar is not available to introspection, but it forms a person's moral competence and allows moral judgements to be made. A theoretical grammar, on the other hand, is an “external” construct; an idealised structure proposed by moral grammar theorists and used to derive predictions about the kind of moral judgements people will make. As study advances, the theoretical grammar becomes an increasingly accurate representation of people's mental grammar (Mikhail, 2011, see p. 60–61). We do not employ this distinction in the present study, as it is a common practice in experimental psychology to refer to both a construct and its scale using the same word (see, for example, constructs such as Social Dominance Orientation (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994) and Right Wing Authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1988)), and separating the two thus seems unnecessary for the current purposes.

² This reference appears on p. 569 of Knobe (2010a). “For example, J. Mikhail (unpublished data) has shown that people confronted with this case think it is right to say: He killed the one man in order to save the five”.

³ Running the between-subject analyses on the moral judgements and the asymmetry scores again with these participants included did not change the significance of the results.

⁴ We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the possible relevance of domain-general vs. domain-specific processes to the present study.