Linguistics & Philosophy IUSS Center
IUSS Philosophy Seminar
“DOING, ALLOWING, FRAMING: A CASE FOR MORAL HEURISTICS”
Speaker: Camilla Colombo – IMT Lucca
Abstract:
Is doing harm morally worse than allowing it to occur? Our every-day intuitions, supported by a long-standing tradition in moral philosophy, suggest that this is the case. Nonetheless, the study of framing effects and cognitive biases has pointed out that our intuitions over the doing/allowing distinction are far from robust and reliable. This line of research casts doubts over the adequacy of our intuitions in grounding the moral principle “doing is worse than allowing”, and seems to downplay the doing/allowing distinction as a cognitive bias or as a byproduct of our flawed reasoning skills. In this talk, I take evidence about framing and biases as a serious threat to the doing/allowing distinction. However, if we aim to explain common-sense morality, we need to account for its widespread use. . This means that, to some extent, we cannot easily dismiss the intuitive judgement that doing is worse than allowing, and that these two conducts are distinct. To keep these two insights together, I build a causal model of the distinction, and I argue that a suitable way to characterize the doing/allowing distinction is the concept of heuristic.
The seminar will be also available via Zoom at:
https://iusspavia.zoom.us/j/99529506550