Kevin Reuter

Is there really an omission effect

Abstract The omission effect, first described by Spranca and colleagues (Spranca, Minsk, & Baron, 1991), has since been extensively studied and repeatedly confirmed (Cushman, Murray, Gordon-McKeon, Wharton, & Greene, 2012). All else being equal, most people judge it to be morally worse to actively bring about a negative event than to passively allow that event to happen. In this paper, we provide new experimental data that challenges previous studies of the omission effect both methodologically and philosophically. We argue that previous studies have failed to control for the equivalence of rules that are violated by actions and omissions. Once equivalent norms are introduced, our results show that the omission effect is eliminated, even if the negative outcome of the behavior is foreseen and intended by the agent. We show that the omission effect does not constitute a basic, moral disposition but occurs exclusively in complex moral situations. Building on these empirical results, we cast doubt onto two influential explanations of the omission effect, the Causal Relevance Hypothesis and the Overgeneralization Hypothesis, and provide a novel explanation of the phenomenon. Furthermore, we discuss various ramifications of the interplay between our understanding of omissions and legal systems.

The Importance of Intentions in Introspection

When it comes to the introspection of sensory states, two dominant views have emerged within the last few decades — process-based accounts and conceptual accounts. Whereas contemporary process-based theorists (e.g Gertler 2001; Goldman 2006; Lycan 1997) believe that some sort of introspective attention is necessary to have introspective access to one’s sensory states, conceptualists (e.g Dretske 1994; Rosenthal 2000; Tye 2000) believe that introspection of sensory states is primarily the entertaining of higher-order thoughts about these states. The latter usually add that these higher-order thoughts are formed not by conceiving of the way things are, but by conceiving of the way things appear. Tye claims that ‘if you are attending to how things look to you, as opposed to how they are independently of how they look, you are bringing to bear your faculty of introspection’ (2000: 46). Rosenthal states that introspection ‘tells us only how things appear, not how they actually are’ (2000: 237), and Dretske argues that in introspection ‘we are conceiving of how things seem’ (1994: 266–267). What it means to conceive of how things appear remains mostly unclear. More specifically, although appearance statements are probably the most common way for people to express their introspective awareness of sensory states, it is hardly ever discussed which appearance statements count as introspective and which do not.