Kant is *the* folk psychologist?

So this fellow... Knobe, I think... did all these folk psychology experiments. Psychology is one field in which I think the folk version can be more accurate than the scientific version. I mean, theories may explain some behavior, but what better way to explain mental phenomena than the intuition of the mind itself? It's a little recursive, but it seems good enough to me. Anyway, this guy did experiments about people's ascription of blame/intentionality based on outcome. One paradigmatic experiment he did was a Gedanken experiment, so to speak, as so much philosophy degenerates to be.

Say there's a CEO (I don't like this example in particular because I think it enters a little too close into the thorny issues of corporate responsibility, but apparently it still got the results he wanted) that is told by an advisor that one of his marketing plans that will make the company a lot of money will harm the environment. Then imagine the same situation, except that his marketing plan will help the environment. Now imagine that in both situations he goes through with the plan.

The question was: in the first case, did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? And in the second case, did he intentionally help it?

So the results are that way more people are inclined to believe he intentionally harmed it rather than intentionally helped it (there are lots more examples by this Knobe guy). For instance, think about how different the statements "he harmed the environment in order to increase profits" and "he helped the environment in order to increase profits." The first one sounds much better, yes?

So my idea upon hearing this (I should have done the reading, but I am swamped with failling genetics tests and writing data analysis programs) was that it sounded very deontological in a way. I suggested this to the people giving a presentation on the topic, and they kind of shot me down, saying it was more about intentionality than ethics. But I thought about while our professor talked, and it really semeed to me that ascriptions of intentionality in folk psychology really depend on ethics.

So finally I suggested this again (I think I was really annoying today; I talked a lot, but I no longer care) to our professor, and it turns out that in a way I'm very right. The theory that makes the most sense about this folk psychology business is that we view actions as intentionally good when they are guided by a moral imperitive (categorial imperative) and intentionally bad whenever they violate a moral norm, no matter what was guiding them. This is a nonsensible asymmetry by many philosophies, but it fits really nicely into Kant. By deontology, the good consequences of an action don't have any bearing on making the action good; goodness is derived soleyl from the agent's moral considerations. So the CEO happens to help the environment. However, he is not guided by morality or any imperative. Thus we are inclined to say that his good action was not intentional. Whereas if he violates the norm that the environment is a good thing to have around, it doesn't really matter what his ultimate intention is, the violation is intentional. This makes sense if you look at things through deontological eyes. The good action is good if it is deontologically good, not just teleologically good. The bad action is bad because there was a step at which moral guidelines were not just merely ignored but actually actively violated.

I think this is really interesting because people (me included at times) think Kant is so out there, and that his ethics is so impractical. But it turns out that our own folk psychology ideas are very Kantian. Interesting. Very interesting.