Eastern Intuitions about Framing the Innocent (by guest blogger Brad Cokelet)

Consider this stock problem case for Utilitarians: if a judge frames an innocent person and has him killed in order to placate a violent mob, he will produce better overall results than if he refuses to do so.

Assuming the Utilitarian thinks we should choose to do whatever maximizes utility, he has to bite the bullet and condone the framing, which is a blatant injustice and therefore wrong.

To avoid condoning framing the innocent, many Utilitarians adopt forms of indirect Utilitarianism, according to which utility will not be maximized if people consciously aim to maximize it; they claim that utility will be maximized when people, including judges, don’t (directly) aim to bring about that result. We might defend this shift by appeal to a general methodological principle: when an ethical theory conflicts with an intuition that all reasonable people share, the theory needs to yield to the intuition. On this view, then, all reasonable people share the intuition that framing the innocent is an injustice and therefore wrong. But is that true?

In a forthcoming paper (available here), John Doris and Alexandra Plakias raise doubts about that very claim by citing empirical evidence that the anti-framing intuition is a parochial artifact of Western culture. More specifically, they appeal to a study (which is forthcoming) that contrasts the intuitions of, “Americans of predominantly European descent and Chinese living in the People’s Republic of China,” and suggests that people in China are more likely to have pro-framing intuitions. Doris and Plakias suggest that the variability of intuitions (if it exists) is evidence for a surprising conclusion: the intuition that framing an innocent is unjust and wrong is something about which reasonable people can disagree.

Now even assuming that the empirical claim about cultural variability is true, one might resist the suggestion about reasonable disagreement on the grounds that the relevant Easterners --­ Chinese living in the PRC --­ have distorted intuitions. The most promising argument to this effect is that some background theory or value conception has distorted the intuitions. One possibility that Doris and Plakias mention is the collectivist conception of self that some attribute to Easterners. Other possibilities include Marxist theories and more traditional value conceptions (e.g. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism).

One thing to do, I suppose, would be to by running the study in other Eastern countries that do not have the history of Marxist rule or the same traditional value conceptions. But it is also important to ask whether any of these background theories or value conceptions would actually (purport to) support, or have been thought to support, the pro-framing intuition. One question here is about whether a conception claims to support the intuition that framing and killing an innocent is not wrong; the other is about whether people who endorse the conception have in fact avowed the intuition. For example some Japanese Zen Buddhists endorsed Japanese militarism, but that does not show that a Zen Buddhist conception would support militarism or war.

So I am wondering:

(1) Are there Chinese philosophers who explicitly discuss cases or issues like this and come down one way or the other?

(2) Would the Communist ideology promulgated in China support framing an innocent to placate a mob? Has it been taken that way in China or elsewhere?

(3) What is a collectivist conception of self and would it support pro-framing intuitions?