Experimental Ethics

Toward an Empirical Moral Philosophy

C. Lütge, H. Rusch, M. Uhl, C. Lütge, H. Rusch, M. Uhl, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137409805
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Epistemologia in filosofia

Moral philosophy is no longer being pursued from arm-chairs. Instead, ethical questions are dissected in the experimental lab. This volume enables its readers to immerse themselves into Experimental Ethics' history, its current topics and future perspectives, its methodology, and the criticism it is subject to.

1

Introduction: Toward an Empirical Moral Philosophy

Christoph Luetge, Matthias Uhl, and Hannes Rusch

Academic philosophy has experienced a major upheaval in the last decade. Venturous young philosophers, psychologists, and economists have begun to challenge the traditional stance that philosophy is an undertaking best pursued from the safety and calm of an arm-chair. Instead, they took the gloves off and tried to bring philosophical questions to the experimental laboratory.

To date, more than 500 works have been written which fall into the category of ‘Experimental Philosophy’ – see, for example, philpapers.org. Not all of them present actual experimental results, though. The very beginning of Experimental Philosophy was accompanied by a fierce debate about its general purpose, its methodology, and, most importantly, its significance for philosophical theorizing. And this debate is far from being settled.

With this volume we intend to set the stage for the development of a consistent theoretical framework for one of the branches of Experimental Philosophy: the empirical study of human moral reasoning, that is, Experimental Ethics.

To this end we invited contributions from philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists, economists, and sociologists active in this lively and growing field of research. We are convinced that their elaborate and substantiated works which constitute the main part of this volume will enable its readers to immerse themselves into Experimental Ethics’ history, its current topics, its methodology, and the criticism it is subject to. We organized the volume accordingly:

Part I (‘An Experimental Moral Philosophy?’) provides a general introduction to Experimental Ethics and its recent history. Starting with K.A. Appiah’s 2007 APA presidential address in which he outlines the general scope of Experimental Philosophy, C. Luetge then presents an overview of the chances, current problems, and potential limitations of Experimental Ethics. His chapter is followed by N. Dworazik’s and H. Rusch’s sketch of the history of empirical research on human moral reasoning.

Part II (‘Applied Experimental Ethics: Case Studies’) offers a sample of contemporary studies in Experimental Ethics. In his chapter, E. Schwitzgebel presents a review of his latest empirical efforts in tackling the question whether the study of moral philosophy is able to provoke changes in actual behavior using data on professional moral philosophers, that is, ethicists. The chapter by E. Di Nucci focus on one of the most prominent tools in recent experimental moral philosophy, the trolley cases, adding valuable insights to this strand of research. S. Wolf and A. Lenger and U. Frey, finally, present and discuss the results of their original studies on the democratic choice of distributive rules and value assignment in environmental ethics.

Part III (‘On Methodology’) is devoted to systematic discussions of methodological aspects of Experimental Ethics’ tool-box. N. Strohminger et al. present a comprehensive review of recent work on the problem of eliciting implicit morality. Their review represents a promising step forward in overcoming the deficits of mere self-reports, which are the current gold-standard in Experimental Philosophy. In a similar vein, combining the available expertise from philosophy and cognitive science, M. Bruder and A. Tanyi propose a new set of methods for studying philosophically relevant intuitions. A. Bunge and A. Skulmowski, for their part, try to disentangle the pragmatic and the descriptive parts of research in Experimental Ethics and propose respective methodological improvements. Building on work in experimental economics, F. Aguiar et al., finally, devise experimental procedures for bringing Rawls’ famous idea of ‘reflective equilibrium’ to the laboratory.

Part IV (‘Critical Reflections’), then, takes a step back and presents critical discussions of experimental approaches to ethics. In his chapter, J. Rosenthal critically assesses the relevance of survey results for philosophical theorizing. N. Mukerji analyses the weaknesses of three common lines of argumentation against the relevance of empirical results for philosophical reasoning by invoking that all three make use of empirical assumptions themselves.

Part V (‘Future Perspectives’) concludes the volume with perspectives on possible coming developments of Experimental Ethics. Freely taking the idea of experimenting to a higher level, J.F. Müller devises the ambitious idea of large scale social experiments in political philosophy. Comparing the recent history of psychology and economics to current developments in philosophy, H. Rusch, then, provides a historically informed view on the prospects of Experimental Philosophy itself. Finally, we qualitatively summarize our contributors’ personal views on the current state of Experimental Ethics, which we asked them to report in a brief and informal opinion poll.

As Experimental Ethics is still in its infancy, our readers should not expect this volume to be able to deliver a systematic, didactically refined textbook on the subject, though. Rather, we understand this book as a snapshot of the current state of affairs in the empirically informed philosophical study of human moral reasoning and decision making. Readers will find that some of our authors hold opposing opinions. The strongest of such tensions can probably be found between the chapters by J. Rosenthal and N. Mukerji. However, we explicitly welcome these contrasts as they exemplify the many challenges Experimental Ethics still has to overcome.

All contributors of this volume agree, nevertheless, that an experimental approach to research questions traditionally deemed purely philosophical was overdue. It is particularly the focus of this volume, namely, the study of moral intuitions, justification, and decision making as well as metaethical stances, that seems to provide fertile ground for probing the capacity of empirical research in philosophy without directly deriving norms from facts, to be sure.

We would like to stress one point in particular: In our view, because of the natural relevance that research on decision making and actual behavior have in its study, ethics should be regarded as a genuinely interdisciplinary enterprise. While traditional philosophers have contrived a wealth of theories on how we could and should ethically evaluate human behavior, Experimental Ethics has now successfully started to investigate how close their descriptions of moral practices come to what we actually do when we judge an action as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, how these judgments relate to our actions, and how both processes are influenced by individual, situational, and cultural factors. It is plainly mistaken, we think, to claim that ethics as a research program can be pursued using only one single method – be it philosophical arm-chair reflection or experimental work in the laboratory. Instead, we suggest understanding Experimental Ethics as an interface of all methods applicable in the study of moral reasoning and action. These include, but are not limited to, philosophical theorizing, deontic logic, game theory, surveys of moral attitudes, vignette studies, choice and behavioral experiments including incentivized economic games, and, not least, field and archive studies. Every method that promises new insights into the proximate mechanisms and ultimate functions of human morality should be welcomed – notwithstanding the due critical reflection on each single method’s scope and limitations.

With this volume, we hope, this endeavor is brought a small step further.

Acknowledgements

Some of our contributors took part in our 2012 workshop: ‘The Scope and Limits of Experimental Ethics’ at Konstanz University. We thank all participants of this workshop for lively and fruitful discussions. Furthermore, we would like to thank Palgrave Macmillan for very professional support, Wally Eichler for excellent administrative assistance, Peter Löscher for financial support, and Simone Schweizer for her help in editing the manuscripts.

Part I

Experimental Moral Philosophy?

2

Experimental Philosophy

Kwame Anthony Appiah

2.1

Some three score years ago, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess found himself dissatisfied with ‘what are called “theories of truth” in philosophical literature’.¹ ‘The discussion has already lasted some 2500 years’, he wrote. ‘The number of participants amounts to a thousand, and the number of articles and books devoted to the discussion is much greater.’ In this great ocean of words, he went on, the philosophers had often made bold statements about what ‘the man in the street’ or ‘Das Volk’ or ‘la conscience humaine’ made of truth or Wahrheit or vérité. And Naess had a few simple questions about these claims (Naess, 1938, pp. 12–15): ‘How do the philosophers know these things? What is the source of their knowledge? What have they done to arrive at it? ... their writings’, he complained, ‘contain almost nothing of this matter’.² And so Naess began the research that resulted in the publication in 1938 of his first book in English: ‘Truth’ as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers.

Naess’s tone is one of irritated astonishment. ‘Even superficial questioning of non-philosophers would make it almost impossible for anyone to believe that the philosophers writing about the opinion of ordinary people actually ask others than themselves. ... Have the philosophers any interest in writing on a subject capable of empirical treatment without knowing anything about it?’ He proposed to do better. His study began by recovering what he called the ‘verbal reactions’, (Naess, 1938, pp. 17–18) both oral and written, of non-philosophers of varying ‘degrees of philosophical virginity’, (Naess, 1938, p. 45) to a series of questionnaires designed to elicit their views as to the ‘common characteristics’ of the things that were true. The subjects he called ps, the common characteristics c.c.s., and he referred to himself throughout as l (for Leader). Thousands of hours and 250 ps later, l was able to report on the ‘fundamental formulations’ in his subjects’ answers to the questionnaires about the c.c.s.

There are scores of distinct formulations ranging from (1) ‘agreement with reality’ to (98) ‘that one is ready to defend the statement, to direct one’s behavior according to it’. l patiently examines whether there are statistical correlations among these choices and the age, sex, class, or educational level of the ps (Naess, 1938, pp. 42–45). l also reproduces brief excerpts of some of his oral examinations, of which the first begins (Naess, 1938, p. 32):

l:		What is the c.c. of that which is true?
p:		–silence–
l:		Have those things anything in common?
p:		That is not certain.
l:		Is it quite incidental, when you in some situations use the word ‘true’?
p:		It is probably founded on something or other.

It would be a serious project to establish what, among the portentous behaviorism of the talk of ‘verbal reactions’, the solemn abbreviations of every technical term, the mock indignation of l’s comments, and the splendid silliness of the interviews, would get the average Norwegian to crack a smile. I myself, as a sample of one, would report that the monograph is hilarious. It is worth re-examination – I am very grateful to Larry Hardin for drawing it to my attention – for this reason alone.

But Naess was making a serious point. It really is an interesting question how we should decide what ordinary people think ‘truth’ means. And it turns out that just asking them produces a vast and indigestible mess. What you have to do, as Naess showed, is to sort, interpret, and analyze what people say, and then reflect. Towards the end of the book Naess proposes a name for this enterprise (Naess, 1938, p. 161): ‘The diversity and consistency of amateur theories of truth, point to the possibility of an “experimental philosophy”.’

Naess went on to a distinguished philosophical career, writing about skepticism, applied semantics, and the history of philosophy; but his most influential contribution, as philosophers of the environment will be aware, was the invention of the notion of deep ecology, and he was a leader among Norway’s environmental activists at a time when their ranks were thinner. (Aestheticians and others with an interest in music will surely know him as the uncle of Arne Naess Jr., who was for fifteen years the husband of Diana Ross.) But I’d like to talk today about the prospects of his suggestion – which was largely ignored outside Oslo – that it was time to take up experimental philosophy.

2.2

Or should I say: take it up again? Because it’s a fair question to ask whether experimental philosophy is a matter of innovation or of restoration. In philosophy, perhaps more than any other discipline, we say what we are by telling stories about what we were: hence Naess’s pointed reference to a 2500 year-old lineage. But most philosophers look back in ways that are quite unhistorical. We pick and choose among those who carried the label in the past without taking much notice of the people around them who also bore it, people whose work would not belong in our current stories of what we do. And we even pick and choose among the works of those we acknowledge as ancestors, as well. Newton and Locke were both called ‘philosophers’ in the English of their day, but we don’t claim Newton; even though, in saying ‘hypotheses non fingo’, he was apparently announcing himself to be an anti-realist about gravitational theory. And we don’t take much notice of many of Locke’s contributions to the work of the Royal Society, either; even though he would no doubt have been simply puzzled by someone who said this was not philosophy.

There are reasons why we proceed this way, of course. Our contemporary ideas about what makes a question or an answer philosophically interesting are at work in these processes of editing out of the past the stories we choose to tell. Now, you might think that we could explain what philosophy is without telling these stories: that we could say what it is for a question to be philosophical, independently of these stories, and then explain that, in looking back, we are looking for past answers to the philosophical questions, and claiming as ancestors those whose answers were interesting or otherwise valuable contributions. I myself doubt that this sort of approach will do – I doubt the prospects of defining a trans-historical essence for philosophy and looking for the history of that essential subject back through the millennia. Disciplinary identities, so it seems to me, are like many other what you might call historical identities: to decide who is entitled to the label today you need a story about who had it yesterday; and whoever has it tomorrow will be continuing – with modifications – the projects of whoever has it today.

Ernest Renan, the great French historian and nationalist, made a similar point about national identities in his lecture ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ some 125 years ago. ‘Forgetting’, he wrote, ‘and I would even say historical error, is an essential element in the cre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Toward an Empirical Moral Philosophy
• Part I  Experimental Moral Philosophy?
• Part II   Applied Experimental Ethics: Case Studies
• Part III  On Methodology
• Part IV  Critical Reflections
• Part V  Future Perspectives
• Name Index