Do Moral Beliefs Motivate Action?

Díaz, R.

Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2023).

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-023-10389-x

Abstract

Do moral beliefs motivate action? To answer this question, extant arguments have considered hypothetical cases of association (dissociation) between agents’ moral beliefs and actions. In this paper, I argue that this approach can be improved by studying people’s actual moral beliefs and actions using empirical research methods. I present three new studies showing that, when the stakes are high, associations between participants’ moral beliefs and actions are actually explained by co-occurring but independent moral emotions. These findings suggest that moral beliefs themselves have little or no motivational force, supporting the Humean picture of moral motivation.

Conclusion

In this paper, I showed that the use of hypothetical cases to extract conclusions regarding the (lack of) motivational power of moral beliefs faces important limitations. I argued that these limitations can be addressed using empirical research tools, and presented a series of studies doing so.

The results of the studies show that, when the stakes are high, the apparent motivational force of beliefs is in fact explained by co-occurring moral emotions. This supports Humean views of moral motivation. The results regarding low-stake situations, however, are open to both Humean and “watered-down” Anti-Humean interpretations.

In moral practice, it probably won’t matter if moral beliefs don’t motivate us much or at all. Arguably, most real-life moral choices involve countervailing motives with more than a little motivational strength, making moral beliefs irrelevant in any case. However, the situation might be different with regards to ethical theory. Accepting that moral beliefs have some motivational force (even if very low) could be enough to solve the Moral Problem (see Introduction)Footnote33 while rejecting that moral beliefs have motivational force would prompt us to reject one of the other claims involved in the puzzle. Future research should help us decide between competing interpretations of the results regarding low-stakes situations presented in this paper.

Overall, the results presented in this paper put pressure on Anti-Humean views of moral motivation, as they suggest that moral beliefs have little or no motivational force.

With regards to methodology, I showed that using empirical research tools improves upon the use of hypothetical cases of moral motivation by ruling out alternative interpretations. Note, however, that the empirical investigations presented in this paper build on extant hypothetical cases and the logical tools involved in the discussion of these cases. In this sense, the studies presented in this paper do not oppose, but rather continue extant work regarding cases. Hopefully, this paper paves the way for more empirical investigations, as well as discussions on the best ways to measure and test the relations between moral behavior, moral beliefs, and moral emotions.

No Peace for the Wicked? Immorality is (Usually) Thought to Disrupt Intrapersonal Harmony

Prinzing, M., & Fredrickson, B.

(2022, November 28). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ug8tk

Abstract

Past research has found that people who behave morally are seen as happier than people who behave immorally—even when their psychological states are described identically. This has led researchers to conclude that the ordinary concept of happiness includes a role for moral factors as well as psychological states. In three experiments (total N = 1,185), we found similar effects of moral evaluations on attributions of a range of psychological states, including positive attitudes towards one’s life and activities (Study 1), pleasant and unpleasant emotions in general (Studies 2-3) and life-satisfaction (Studies 2-3). This suggests that moral evaluations have pervasive effects on the psychological states that people attribute to others. We propose that this is because immorality is seen as disrupting intrapersonal harmony. That is, immoral people are thought to be less happy because they are thought to experience less positive psychological states, and this occurs when and because they are seen as being internally conflicted. Supporting this explanation, we found that immoral agents are seen as more internally conflicted than moral agents (Study 2), and that the effect of moral evaluations on positive psychological state attributions disappears when agents are described as being at peace with themselves (Study 3).

Implications and Conclusion

We set out to better understand why moral evaluations affect happiness judgments.  One possibility is that, when people judge whether another person is happy, they are partly assessing whether that person experiences positive psychological states and partly assessing whether the person is living a good life. If that were so, then people would not consider immoral agents entirely  happy—even if they recognized that the agents experience overwhelmingly positive psychological states.  That is, morality does not affect the experiential states the people attribute to others—it affects whether they consider such states happiness.  Yet, this research suggests a more striking conclusion.  Our results indicate that people attribute experiential states, like pleasant emotions and satisfaction, differently depending on their moral judgments.  Moreover, we found that this occurs when and because immorality is seen as a source of intrapersonal conflict. When people do not see immoral agents as more conflicted than moral agents, they do not attribute less happiness (or less positive emotion or less life-satisfaction) to those immoral agents. On the lay view, immorality typically means betraying one’s true self, disrupting one’s inner harmony, and leading to at best an incomplete form of happiness.  However, this is not always the case.

Hence, the ordinary concept of happiness appears to be similar to ancient Greek conceptions  of eudaemonia (Aristotle,  2000;  Plato,  2004).  Roughly  speaking, Plato believed that eudaemonia consists in a kind of intrapersonal harmony.  He also argued that moral virtue was necessary for such harmony. Our findings suggest that 21st century Americans similarly see happiness as involving a kind of intrapersonal harmony. However, they don’t seem to think that harmony requires morality. Although immorality is usually a source of intrapersonal conflict, someone who behaves immorally can be happy so long as they can still find peace with themselves.  Hence, according to folk wisdom, there may be very little peace for the wicked. But so long as they find it, there can be happiness too.

The research is here.

Do people understand determinism? The tracking problem for measuring free will beliefs

Murray, S., Dykhuis, E., & Nadelhoffer, T.

(2022, February 8). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/kyza7

Abstract

Experimental work on free will typically relies on using deterministic stimuli to elicit judgments of free will. We call this the Vignette-Judgment model. In this paper, we outline a problem with research based on this model. It seems that people either fail to respond to the deterministic aspects of vignettes when making judgments or that their understanding of determinism differs from researcher expectations. We provide some empirical evidence for a key assumption of the problem. In the end, we argue that people seem to lack facility with the concept of determinism, which calls into question the validity of experimental work operating under the Vignette-Judgment model. We also argue that alternative experimental paradigms are unlikely to elicit judgments that are philosophically relevant to questions about the metaphysics of free will.

Error and judgment

Our results show that people make several errors about deterministic stimuli used to elicit judgments about free will and responsibility. Many participants seem to conflate determinism with different  constructs  (bypassing  or  fatalism) or mistakenly interpret the implications of deterministic constraints on agents (intrusion).

Measures of item invariance suggest that participants were not responding differently to error measures across different vignettes. Hence, responses to error measures cannot be explained exclusively in terms of differences in vignettes, but rather seem to reflect participants’ mistaken judgments about determinism. Further, these mistakes are associated with significant differences in judgments about free will. Some of the patterns are predictable: participants who conflate determinism with bypassing attribute less free will to individuals in deterministic scenarios, while participants who import intrusion into deterministic scenarios attribute greater free will. This makes sense. As participants perceive mental states to be less causally efficacious or individuals as less ultimately in control of their decisions, free will is diminished. However, as people perceive more indeterminism, free will is amplified.

Additionally, we found that errors of intrusion are stronger than errors of bypassing or fatalism. Because bypassing errors are associated with diminished judgments of free will and intrusion errors are associated with amplified judgments, then, if all three errors were equal in strength, we would expect a linear relationship between different errors: individuals who make bypassing errors would have the lowest average judgments, individuals who make intrusion errors would have the highest average judgments, and people who make both errors would be in the middle (as both errors would cancel each other out). We did not observe this relationship. Instead, participants who make intrusion errors are statistically indistinguishable from each other, no matter what other kinds of errors they make.

Thus, errors of intrusion seem to trump others in the process of forming judgments of free will.  Thus, the errors people make are not incidentally related to their judgments. Instead, there are significant associations between people’s inferential errors about determinism and how they attribute free will and responsibility. This evidence supports our claim that people make several errors about the nature and implications of determinism.

The research is here.

One -- but Not the Same

Schwenkler, J. Byrd, N. Lambert, E., & Taylor, M.

Philosophical Studies

Abstract

Ordinary judgments about personal identity are complicated by the fact that phrases like “same person” and “different person” have multiple uses in ordinary English. This complication calls into question the significance of recent experimental work on this topic. For example, Tobia (2015) found that judgments of personal identity were significantly affected by whether the moral change described in a vignette was for the better or for the worse, while Strohminger and Nichols (2014) found that loss of moral conscience had more of an effect on identity judgments than loss of biographical memory. In each case, however, there are grounds for questioning whether the judgments elicited in these experiments engaged a concept of numerical personal identity at all (cf. Berniūnas and Dranseika 2016; Dranseika 2017; Starmans and Bloom 2018). In two pre-registered studies we validate this criticism while also showing a way to address it: instead of attempting to engage the concept of numerical identity through specialized language or the terms of an imaginary philosophical debate, we should consider instead how the identity of a person is described through the connected use of proper names, definite descriptions, and the personal pronouns “I”, “you”, “he”, and “she”. When the experiments above are revisited in this way, there is no evidence that the differences in question had an effect on ordinary identity judgments.

From the Discussion

Our findings do, however, suggest a promising strategy for the experimental study of how philosophically important concepts are employed by people without formal philosophical training. As we noted above, in philosophy we use phrases like “numerical identity” and “qualitative identity” in a somewhat artificial way, in order thereby to disambiguate between the different meanings a phrase like “same person” can have in ordinary language. But we cannot easily disambiguate things in this way when we wish to investigate how these concepts are understood by non-philosophers: for a question like “Is the man after the accident numerically the same as the man before?” cannot be posed to such a person without first explicating the meaning of the italicized phrase.

A pdf can be downloaded here.

Experimental Philosophy of Technology

Steven Kraaijeveld

Philosophy & Technology

Abstract 

Experimental philosophy is a relatively recent discipline that employs experimental methods to investigate the intuitions, concepts, and assumptions behind traditional philosophical arguments, problems, and theories. While experimental philosophy initially served to interrogate the role that intuitions play in philosophy, it has since branched out to bring empirical methods to bear on problems within a variety of traditional areas of philosophy—including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. To date, no connection has been made between developments in experimental philosophy and philosophy of technology. In this paper, I develop and defend a research program for an experimental philosophy of technology.

Conclusion 

The field of experimental philosophy has, through its engagement with experimental methods, become an important means of obtaining knowledge about the intuitions, concepts, and assumptions that lie behind philosophical arguments, problems, and theories across a wide variety of philosophical disciplines. In this paper, I have extended this burgeoning research program to philosophy of technology, providing both a general outline of how an experimental philosophy of technology might look and a more specific methodology and set of programs that engages with research already being conducted in the field. I have responded to potential objections to an experimental philosophy of technology and I have argued for a number of unique strengths of the approach. Aside from engaging with work that already involves intuitions in techno-philosophical research, a booming experimental philosophy of technology research program can offer a unifying methodology for a diverse set of subfields, a way of generating knowledge across disciplines without necessarily requiring specialized knowledge; and, at the very least, it can make those working in philosophy of technology—and those in society who engage with technology, which is all of us—more mindful of the intuitions about technology that we may, rightly or wrongly, hold.

The paper is here.

The Ordinary Concept of a Meaningful Life

Prinzing, M., De Freitas, J., & Fredrickson, B. 

(2020, May 5). 

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/6sx4t

Abstract

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent experiences (feelings of interest, engagement, and fulfillment), or on the objective conditions of their life (e.g., their effects on others). Studies 1a–b found that laypeople think subjective and objective factors contribute independently to the meaningfulness of a person’s life. Studies 2a–b found that positive mental states are thought to make a life more meaningful, even if derived from senseless activities (e.g., hand-copying the dictionary). Studies 3a–b found that agents engaged in morally bad activities are not thought to have meaningful lives, even if they feel fulfilled. In short, both an agents’ subjective mental states and objective impact on the world affect how meaningful their lives appear.

General Discussion

What, according to the ordinary concept, makes a life meaningful?  Studies1a-b found that  laypeople  think positive  mental states (interest,  engagement, fulfillment) can make an agent’s life meaningful. These studies also found that, according to lay assessments, doing something that has value for others can also make an agent’s life meaningful. These findings conflict with the predominant philosophical theories of meaning in life. These theories posit an exclusive role for either positive mental states (subjectivist theories) or objective states of an agent’s life (objectivist theories), or they require that both criteria be met (hybrid theories). In contrast, we found that laypeople think an agent’s life is meaningful when either criterion is met.This indicates that the ordinary concept of a meaningful life does not fit neatly with these three philosophical theories. Instead, they seem to be captured by what we will call the independent-additive theory: subjective factors  (positive mental states like fulfillment) and objective factors (like contribution, sensibility, and morality)each affect the meaningfulness of an agent’s life, and their effects are both independent and additive.  

We investigated the roles of sensibility and morality as plausible boundary conditions for lay attributions of meaningfulness. For sensibility, we saw somewhat mixed results. Study 2a found no evidence that a life characterized by sensible activities (wine connoisseurship) was  seen as more  meaningful than a  life characterized  by senseless  activities(rubber  band collecting). However, Study 2b, with a larger sample and wider variety of vignettes, did find such  an  effect. Nevertheless, in both  studies, fulfilling  lives were seen as  more  meaningful than  unfulfilling  ones—regardless  of  whether  that fulfillment was derived  from sensible  or senseless activities.  Hence, on the ordinary concept, sensibility contributes to meaningfulness, though  not  as  much  as  fulfillment  does. Moreover, in  alignment  with  the independent-additive theory, fulfillment maintains its additive effect, independently of sensibility.  Regarding morality, Studies 3a-b found that morally good lives were viewed as much more meaningful than morally bad ones. In fact, morally bad agents were not thought to live meaningful lives, even if those agents felt very fulfilled. In contrast, morally good agents were seen as having meaningful lives even if they didn’t feel fulfilled.Nevertheless,  though the effect of morality was larger than that of fulfillment, participants still thought that a fulfilled, immoral agent was living more meaningfully than an unfulfilled, immoral agent. Supporting the independent-additive  theory,  the additive  effect  of  fulfillment was independent  of morality.

In short, we identified four factors (fulfillment, contribution, sensibility, and morality) that seem to have independent, additive effects on third-person attributions of meaningfulness.  There  may well be more such  factors.  But  the  evidence  from  these  six experiments supports a model of third-person meaningfulness judgments that—in contrast to subjectivist,  objectivist,  and  hybrid  theories—emphasizes  independent  and  additive  factors that  contribute  to  the  meaning in a person’s life.  We  have called such a model the “independent-additive theory”.

The research is here.

The Centrality of Belief and Reflection in Knobe Effect Cases: A Unified Account of the Data

By Mark Alfano, James R. Beebe, and Brian Robinson

The Monist

April 2012

Abstract

Recent work in experimental philosophy has shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality, knowledge, and other psychological properties to someone who causes a bad side-effect than to someone who causes a good one. We argue that all of these asymmetries can be explained in terms of a single underlying asymmetry involving belief attribution because the  belief that one’s action would result in a certain side-effect is a necessary component of each of the psychological attitudes in question. We argue further that this belief-attribution asymmetry is rational because it mirrors a belief-formation asymmetry and that the belief-formation asymmetry is also rational because it is more useful to form some beliefs than others.

The entire article is here.

Philosophers’ Biased Judgments Persist Despite Training, Expertise and Reflection

By Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman
In press

Abstract

We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers’
judgments about a moral puzzle case (the “trolley problem”) and a version of the Tversky &
Kahneman “Asian disease” scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing
effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of
non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced
delay during which participants were encouraged to consider “different variants of the scenario
or different ways of describing the case”. Nor were framing and order effects lower among
participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects,
nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the
experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these
scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels
of academic expertise.

The entire article is here.

What do Philosophers of Mind Actually do: Some Quantitative Data

By Joshua Knobe
The Brains Blog
Originally published December 5, 2014

There seems to be a widely shared sense these days that the philosophical study of mind has been undergoing some pretty dramatic changes. Back in the twentieth century, the field was dominated by a very specific sort of research program, but it seems like less and less work is being done within that traditional program, while there is an ever greater amount of work pursuing issues that have a completely different sort of character.

To get a better sense for precisely how the field has changed, I thought it might be helpful to collect some quantitative data. Specifically, I compared a sample of highly cited papers from the past five years (2009-2013) with a sample of highly cited papers from a period in the twentieth century (1960-1999). You can find all of the nitty gritty details in this forthcoming paper, but the basic results are pretty easy to summarize.

The entire blog post is here.

What’s Wrong with Experimental Philosophy?

Victor Kumar
University of Michigan
July 10, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

Unsatisfied with armchair speculation, experimental philosophers have responded to empirical questions with empirical answers. Efforts are not always met with success, but the best objections this research faces are narrowly methodological, e.g., improper experimental design or substandard experimental methods. Experimental philosophers, often in collaboration with scientists, are developing new and better ways of testing hypotheses in cognitive science that inform philosophical inquiry. 

Outside of philosophically relevant cognitive science, experimental philosophy studies intuitions in an attempt to contribute to philosophical discussion surrounding those intuitions. A second type is experimental philosophical analysis. Philosophers interested in knowledge, moral judgment, free will, etc., often assume that the first step of philosophical inquiry is analysis of the corresponding ordinary concepts (Smith 1994; Jackson 1998). 

The entire piece is here.

Experimental Moral Philosophy

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
First Published March 19, 2014

Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a methodology in the last decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the larger experimental philosophy (X-Phi, XΦ) approach. From the beginning, it has been embroiled in controversy on a number of fronts. Some doubt that it is philosophy at all. Others acknowledge that it is philosophy but think that it has produced modest results at best and confusion at worst. Still others think it represents an important advance.

The entire post is here.

Experimental Approaches to Free Will: Knobe and Nahmias

Joshuan Knobe and Eddy Nahmias

Knobe and Nahmias begin with an overview of the early history and aims of experimental philosophy. Then they discuss experiments on the contrast between bypassing and throughpassing intuitions about free will (8:57); Nahmias’s “theory lite view,” according to which ordinary people have no strong views about the relation between mind and brain (17:34); whether the folk have a causal or an interventionist view of agency (24:17); the effect of descriptions of determinism on folk intuitions (32:52); and Nahmias’s work on “willusionism,” inspired by his critical view of certain popularized versions of free-will skepticism (41:47). Finally, Knobe and Nahmias consider future results that could resolve some of their disagreements (48:49) and forecast the next big steps in experimental philosophy of free will (57:00).

Mental lives and fodor’s lot

Susan Schneider interviewed by Richard Marshall
3:AM Magazine
Originally posted February 14, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

3:AM: You make strong claims about thought experiments and find them valuable. Some philosophers like Paul Horwich disagree and find them misleading and useless. How can something imaginary lead to knowledge and enlightenment?

SS: Philosophers face a dilemma. On the one hand, philosophers often theorize about the nature of things, so it is useful to think of what might be the case, as opposed to what happens to be the case. For instance, metaphysicians who consider the nature of the self or person commonly consider cases like teleportation and brain transplants, to see if one’s theory of the self yields a viable result concerning whether one would survive such things. On the other hand, thought experiments can be misused. For instance, it strikes some as extreme to discard an otherwise plausible theory because it runs contrary to our intuitions about a thought experiment, especially if the example is far-fetched and not even compatible with our laws of nature. And there has been a movement in philosophy called “experimental philosophy” which claims that people of different ethnicities, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds can come to different conclusions about certain thought experiments because of their different backgrounds.

I still employ thought experiments in my work, but I try to bear in mind three things: first, the presence of a thought experiment that pumps intuitions contrary to a theory should not automatically render the theory false. But a thought experiment can speak against a theory in an all-things-considered judgment; this is an approach I’ve employed in debates over laws of nature.

The entire story is here.

Experimental Philosophy and the Notion of the Self

Joshua Knobe
HeadCon '13
Edge Video
Originally published February 16, 2014

What is the field of experimental philosophy? Experimental philosophy is a relatively new field—one that just cropped up around the past ten years or so, and it's an interdisciplinary field, uniting ideas from philosophy and psychology. In particular, what experimental philosophers tend to do is to go after questions that are traditionally associated with philosophy but to go after them using the methods that have been traditionally associated with psychology.




The video and transcript is here.

Experimental Philosophy: Intentionality, Emotion, and Moral Reasoning

By Joshua Knobe
Edge Videos
Originally published February 2014

Joshua Knobe outlines research on intentionality, emotion, and moral reasoning.

Pushing the Intuitions behind Moral Internalism

Derek Leben and Kristine Wilckens

Introduction 

Moral Internalism claims that there is a necessary connection between judging that some action is morally right/wrong and being motivated to perform/avoid that action. For instance, if I sincerely believe that it is morally wrong to eat animals, then I would be automatically motivated not to eat animals. If I sincerely believe that it is morally required for me to take care of my children, then I would be automatically motivated to take care of my children. This claim is called ‘Internalism’ (or more technically, ‘Motivational Judgment Internalism’) because in such cases, the motivation is internal to the evaluative judgment. There are different types of Moral Internalism, but we will here be concerned with the conceptual variety advocated by Hare (1952), which claims that the link between moral judgments and motivation is an a priori conceptual truth.

The fact that Internalism appears intuitively to be true specifically for moral judgments has been extremely important to moral philosophers. In response to the skeptical question: “Why should I care about right and wrong?” some ethicists have argued that the question is nonsensical, since by making judgments about right and wrong, one is automatically motivated to care about these judgments. In response to the question: “What kind of judgments are moral judgments?” philosophers going back to Hume have argued that beliefs like ‘my car is black’ or ‘today is Tuesday’ can never in themselves motivate or direct anyone to perform some action, but only in conjunction with an emotion. If one adopts this Humean Theory of Motivation along with Moral Internalism, then, as Hume states, “it is impossible that the distinction betwixt moral good and evil can be made by reason; since that distinction has an influence on our actions, of which reason alone is incapable” (Hume, 1739). In other words, since beliefs are never inherently motivating, moral judgments cannot be normal beliefs about the world. This conclusion is known as (psychological) non-cognitivism, and has obvious consequences for how we engage in moral debate and consideration. 

The entire article is here.

Second-Person vs. Third-Person Presentations of Moral Dilemmas

By Eric Schwitzgebel

Experimental Philosophy Blog

Originally published on 10/03/2013

You know the trolley problems, of course. An out-of-control trolley is headed toward five people it will kill if nothing is done. You can flip a switch and send it to a side track where it will kill one different person instead. Should you flip the switch? What if, instead of flipping a switch, the only way to save the five is to push someone into the path of the trolley, killing that one person?

In evaluating this scenario, does it matter if the person standing near the switch with the life-and-death decision to make is "John" as opposed to "you"? Nadelhoffer & Feltz presented the switch version of the trolley problem to undergraduates from Florida State University. Forty-three saw the problem with "you" as the actor; 65% of the them said it was permissible to throw the switch. Forty-two saw the problem with "John" as the actor; 90% of them said it was permissible to throw the switch, a statistically significant difference.

The entire story is here.

The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior

Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust
Philosophical Psychology
DOI:10.1080/09515089.2012.727135

Abstract

Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues, we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with the self-reports. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation. We discuss implications for several models of the relationship between philosophical reflection and real-world moral behavior.

The article is here, hiding behind a paywall.