Implicit cognitions workshop | University of Nottingham | July 15th 2014

Not conscious, not responsible?

Sophie Stammers | King’s College Londonsophie.stammers@kcl.ac.uk

Outline- Levy’s ‘consciousness thesis’ (Consciousness and Moral Responsibility, 2014)

- Levy on implicit bias:

1. We’re not conscious of the facts that give our actions their moral significance 2. Relevant attitudes are inconsistent with the agent’s endorsed values 3. Relevant attitudes are not responsive to reasons = not morally responsible

- My aim: Not to deny CT, but question whether CT rules out MR for IB actions.

R1. Do have awareness of some putatively morally relevant facts about IB actions. + A worry for explicit actions

R2. A dilemma for the consistency claim. + doubts about dissociation

R3. Relevant attitudes are as responsive to reasons as some explicit attitudes + covary with motivations

The Consciousness Thesis“...only when we are conscious of the facts that give our actions their moral significance are those actions expressive of our identities as practical agents and do we possess the kind of control that is plausibly required for moral responsibility,” (Levy, 2014: 1)

CT: consciousness of the facts that give our actions their moral significance is a necessary condition for moral responsibility.

The focus: agents who are not necessarily educated about implicit bias as a phenomenon

Defining ‘conscious’- Informational as opposed to phenomenal:

Readily accessible to the “systems of memory, perceptual categorization, reasoning, planning, evaluation of alternatives, decision-making, voluntary direction of attention, and more generally, rational control of action,” (Block, 2005: 47)

Occurrent? Dispositional?

Occurrent?

Too restrictive!

Dispositional?

Too permissive!

Too

‘Personal availability’

1. Online: representation guides behaviour

“[A person might] choose to wear the necklace her husband gave her on their last anniversary, and choose it because it is their anniversary,” (L 2014: 32-3).

2. Effortless recall: ‘large range of ordinary cues’

“Information is available for easy and effortless recall if it would be recalled given a large range of ordinary cues: no special prompting (like asking a leading question) is required.” (L 2014, 34)

Of Angela Smith’s birthday forgetter (2005)Levy: Considered conscious of the information that it’s her friend’s birthday if a telephone would cause recall

What counts as an ordinary cue?

back to...dispositional?

An object O is an ordinary cue for subject S’ informational state X, if, when O is encountered by S, S effortlessly recalls X...

Special features of Consciousness

1) Reasoning

- Some nonconscious processes represent the contents of a negated term as asserted = blind to logical constructs(Deutsch, Gawronski and Strack, 2006; and Hasson and Glucksberg, 2006)

-Two-word phrases have independent priming effect on unconscious processes = not sensitive to syntax (Baumeister and Masicampo 2010 [Greenwald and Liu (1985) and Draine (1997].)

- Loading conscious processes during logical reasoning results = decreased performance(De Neys 2006; DeWall, Baumeister and Masicampo, 2008)

Special features of Consciousness

2) Consistency

- Somnabulism: Ken Parks

Levy:“[Parks] is not conscious that he is stabbing an innocent person; he is

not conscious that she is begging him to stop, and so on. ...

Because Parks is not conscious of the facts that give to his actions their moral significance... they do not interact with the broad range of the attitudes constitutive of his evaluative agency.

...his behaviour are not plausibly regarded as morally condemnable.”

(2014: 89 bold emphasis mine).

Implicitly biased actionsHiring police chief (Uhlmann and Cohen, 2007)

Group A1. Streetwise | Not educated | female 2. Not streetwise | Educated | male = group preference

Group B1. Not streetwise | Educated | female2. Streetwise | Not educated | male = group preference

Levy: participants are unable to assess their actions for consistency with their personal-level attitudes and bring them inline accordingly

= not MR for action qua implicitly biased hiring (2014: 95)

Three claims

1) Agents are not conscious of the morally relevant facts regarding attitudes which generate implicitly biased actions

2) Implicitly biased actions are generated by attitudes which are inconsistent with the agent’s endorsed values

3) Implicitly biased actions are generated by attitudes which are not responsive to reasons at the personal-level

Claim 1: Agents not conscious of morally relevant facts

F1: my behaviour is being mediated by cognitive process P - where P is a tendency to associate class of people C with stereotypical trait T resulting in systematic disfavouring over time of people in C

‘automaticity revolution’...“...if the thesis is that agents must be conscious of all the mental states that shape their behaviour, no one would ever be responsible for anything,” (Levy, 2014: 36).

F2: I tend to hire a lot of men over women

“If the action is morally bad, for instance, the agent must be conscious of (some of ) the aspects that make it bad, and conscious of those aspects under an appropriate description, in order to be blameworthy for the action.” (Levy, 2014: 37)

Claim 1: Agents not conscious of morally relevant facts

F3: I am hiring this man, when this woman is equivalently qualified

Obj: not occurrently aware when hiringBut remember - occurrent awareness = too restrictive

Is F3 personally available? 1) Online, guiding behaviour: Perhaps triggers a ‘for and against’ tally

2) Ordinary cue prompts recall: Glance at the CVs, side by side?

- Explicit recognition of qualifications +‘just a feeling’ man is better. - Overtime... still looks like an IB.

Claim 1: Agents not conscious of morally relevant facts

Other IB actions:

- Automatically clutching possessions when a dark skinned person gets on the bus.- Finding it harder/ notice more mistakes when matching ‘woman’ + ‘career’ on the IAT - occurrently aware that they are doing these, even if not intentional

How specific must the morally relevant facts be?

- denying people access to goods which they deserve - attributing negative qualities to arbitrary characteristics - exacerbating hardship of already marginalised groups

But then... are agents aware of these kinds of facts when they are explicitly racist/sexist?

“...[implicitly biased actions are] not plausibly taken to be an expression of [agent’s] evaluative agency...were the agent able to detect this inconsistency she would prevent [it],” (Levy, 2014: 95).

Distinguish: assessed vs assessable

assessed: too restrictive, assessable: some IB attitudes get in?

Claim 2: inconsistent with the agent’s endorsed values

Claim 2: inconsistent with the agent’s endorsed values

What are ‘endorsed values’?

Measuring explicit attitudes: The Modern Racism Scale:- Blacks are getting too demanding in their push for equal rights.- Blacks should not push themselves where they are not wanted. (McConahay, 1986)

Do participants’ mediate their MRS responses fit in with expect non-racist norms?

Participants express more highly prejudiced explicit attitudes when their responses to explicit attitude measures are anonymous vs reporting directly to the experimenter. (Plant and Devine, 1998)

Explicit attitudes become more consistent with implicit attitudes as the motivation to accurately report explicit attitudes increases. (Nier, 2005)

“It is characteristic and perhaps even definitive of [implicit attitudes] that they do not respond to our reasons... Instead, we can influence our implicit attitudes only indirectly...(by attempting to form new associations).” (Levy, 2014: 99).

Two interpretations:

1) Not responsive to wanting to suppress our implicitly biased actions.

2) Not responsive to general reasons we already have (even before aware of implicit bias as a phenomenon).

Claim 3: not responsive to reasons

1) Wanting to suppress IB actions

-Exposure to counter-stereotypical exemplars (for instance, thinking of admired black celebrities) weakens the expression of bias. (Dasgupta and Greenwald 2001)

-When participants form specific ‘implementation intentions’ such as ‘If I see a black face, then I will think safe’ they manifest less implicit bias. (Stewart and Payne 2008)

- Implementation intentions enable people to gain control over implicit attitude responses, thereby modifying scores on popular implicit measures of attitude. (Webb, Sheeran and Pepper 2012)

Levy: It’s ‘controversial’ as to whether such methods are ‘relatively rapid’ or ‘arduous, slow and extremely uncertain’ (2014: 99)

Claim 3: not responsive to reasons

Claim 3: not responsive to reasons

Arduous, slow and extremely uncertain?

2) General reasons we already have

Even without making effortful attempts to change, manifestation of implicit bias already seems to covary with agentive level attitudes:

-Participants who value responding without prejudice for the very reason that doing so is valuable in itself manifest less implicit bias than those who are not motivated by this reason (Devine et al 2002)

Claim 3: not responsive to reasons

CT: consciousness of the facts that give our actions their moral significance is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. (Levy, 2014)

Levy claims that agents of implicitly biased actions are:1) not conscious of the relevant facts2) unable to assess their actions for consistency with endorsed values3) not responsive to reasons = not morally responsible for implicitly biased actions

I suggested:1) They might be conscious of some morally relevant facts - and tightening → problematic2) Some aspects of the action assessable? Explicit attitude measures ≠ ‘endorsed values’3) IB attitudes might be no less responsive to reasons than some explicit attitudes, the results of which we do seem to be MR for.

Sum up

Sophie Stammers | KCL | sophie.stammers@kcl.ac.uk

THA NKS!

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