Sydney Levine, John Mikhail and Alan Leslie (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Georgetown University Law Center and Rutgers University, New Brunswick) have posted Presumed Innocent? How Tacit Assumptions of Intentional Structure Shape Moral Judgment (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Theories of intention inference must explain how adults and children infer the goals of novel actions, especially when a single action has more than one salient effect. The moral domain provides a useful way to study this “intention inference” problem. When a novel action has both good and bad effects, determining which of them are intended is critical to making a moral judgment about that action. Many theories of moral judgment have either ignored the intention inference problem or have simply assumed a particular solution without empirical support. We propose that the intention inference problem may be solved by appealing to domain-specific prior knowledge that is either built-up over the probability of prior intentions or built-in as part of core cognition. We further propose a specific solution to this problem in the moral domain: a good intention prior, which entails a rebuttable presumption that if an action has both good and bad effects, the actor intends the good effect and not the bad effect. Finally, in a series of experiments we provide the first empirical support – from both adults and preschool children – for the existence of this “presumption of innocence.”
Highly recommended.