Impartiality and Objectivity

The possibility of giving a rich descriptive account of morality and the absence of any agreed upon method of verification for the assessment of disputed moral claims suggests that the notion of moral truth is at best a useful social fiction. To escape this conclusion, I argue that we must begin at the other end, deriving moral epistemology from moral historiography, much as we derive scientific epistemology from consideration of the history of science, regardless of the absence of a consensus omnium.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 2013

This paper examines the idea that ethics might be understood as a domain of straightforwardly empirical inquiry with reference to two of its defenders. Sam Harris has recently urged that ethics is simply the scientific study of welfare and how best to maximize it. That is of course to presuppose the truth of utilitarianism, something Harris considers too obvious to be sensibly contested. Richard Boyd's more nuanced and thoughtful position takes the truth of the ethical theory – homeostatic consequentialism – he favours to be determined by what best explains the success of moral practice over its history. But what is to count here as success is too theory dependent for this to be helpful. From consideration of both Harris and Boyd, the conclusion emerges that once we have satisfied ourselves by ethical reflection about what we ought to do, it may then be a straightforwardly empirical question how to do it, but that arriving at that point, the core concern of the moral philosopher...

Hypatia, 1997

Sandra Harding is working on the reconstruction of scientific objectivity. Lorraine Daston argues that objectivity is a concept that has historically evolved. Her account of the development of “aperspectival objectivity” provides an opportunity to see Harding's “strong objectivity” project as a stage in this evolution, to locate it in the history of migration of ideals from moral philosophy to natural science, and to support Harding's desire to retain something of the ontological significance of objectivity.

RIIM

I reconstruct here the implicit rationale of Smith's ethical system, which unites in a single and consistent theory the most valuable features of both ancient virtue ethics and modern deontology. I propose that Smith could do this because of his approach to what I call "sympathetic impartiality", and the pretension of universality that arises from it. In Smith's theory, sentiments are moralized through the impartial spectator procedure which, willingly or not, changes the moral axis from emotivism to practical reason. * Paper delivered at the American Philosophical Association Meeting held in 2004. I am most indebted to Samuel Fleischaker, Douglas Den Uyl and Eric Schleisser's comments on the draft of this paper.

Economics and Philosophy, 2012

Third-party decision-makers, or spectators, have emerged as a useful empirical tool in modern social science research on moral motivation. Spectators of a sort also serve a central role in Adam Smith's moral theory. This paper compares these two types of spectatorship with respect to their goals, methodologies, visions of human nature and emphasis on moral rules. I find important similarities and differences and conclude that this comparison suggests significant opportunities for philosophical ethics to inform empirical and theoretical research on moral preferences and vice versa.

Conference proceedings: Integrated History and Philosophy of Science, Virginia Tech , 2021

Introduction: Integrated H(E)PS First we would like to situate our research within the context of history and the philosophy of science. Several authors advocated for a larger deployment of methods from the cognitive sciences and sociology in the philosophy of science as they understood their importance as other empirical sources besides those from the history of science (Arabatzis & Schickore 2012; Giere 1990; Giere 2011 etc.) Recently, philosophy in general, and in some fields in particular, has taken a naturalistic turn with an orientation towards empirical methodology that manifested in the steep rise of experimental philosophy (x-phi) studies (Knobe & Nichols 2008). New methods were adopted from neuroscience, psychology, cognitive sciences, and sociology, and applied to the inquiry into philosophical concepts, or intuitions, moral dilemmas and other similar topics. In the experimental3 philosophy of science (also referred to as “x-phi of science”), the adoption of new methodologies seems to be slower (Wilkenfeld & Samuels 2019) but there is a handful of studies that have gone in this direction: for instance, the landmark analysis of the gene concept (Stotz, Griffiths, Knight 2004), the innateness concept (Machery et al 2019), a study of philosophical views across scientific disciplines (Robinson, Gonnerman, O’Rourke 2019), or of scientific virtues (Schindler forthcoming 2021). Experimental philosophy of science focuses primarily on scientists' intuitions and concepts, or on the comparisons of lay and scientific concepts. This has hardly been a novelty in the philosophy or history of science. But this recent turn has been motivated by the fact that while historians and philosophers have traditionally relied on empirical sources which were often created or procured only haphazardly with a different intended purpose, or not in a research context, experimental philosophy does this in a systematic and controlled manner in which hypotheses are tested according to a previously designed plan. Conventionally, these non-methodically obtained primary sources, such as historical records or cases, scientific accounts, laboratory logs etc., are often analyzed to extract scientists’ intuitions, views, and concepts to support various theoretical claims. Or philosophers and historians suggest their own concepts or classifications based on secondary sources, i.e. other philosophers’ or historians’ works. This conventional methodology, however, creates some serious issues. For example, the process of how these concepts, intuitions or beliefs emerge is not always recorded or reflected, and their existence is sometimes implicitly considered unproblematic and universally valid. This matter was already raised by one of the recently recognized fathers of experimental philosophy, Ness (1938), who made a case against the handling of the truth-concept by Tarski and the Vienna Circle. A few decades later, Laudan cites "intuitions of scientific rationality" (1977) as a priori assumptions of scientists in support of his theory of science, and similarly, Lakatos's meta-theory (1971) is highly dependent on the same implicit premise of the rationality of scientists. Such approaches can be also considered problematic from the philosophical point of view (Machery & O'Neill 2014). The other problem is that the concepts, taxonomies, interpretations suggested by philosophers can lack grounding in actual scientific work, and can be highly selective in their choice of sources and thus become divorced from the everyday practices, not to mention the fact that these philosophical outputs are seldom validated or critically assessed by scientists themselves. Thus, while conventional methods are a legitimate and fruitful branch of historians' or philosophers' work, especially when better sources are simply not available, experimental philosophy provides a viable alternative, with more overview and control over the whole process of data creation and collection, which can help to avoid or minimize some of the pitfalls which inadvertently accompany the traditional methods4. In our project Objectivity: An Experimental Approach to the Traditional Philosophical Question5 – in addition to classical philosophical and historical analysis – we explore the potential of empirical methodology to investigate the concept of objectivity among natural scientists. Our research lies at the intersection of three approaches: historical, philosophical and experimental (empirical), and can be thus classified as integrated history and (experimental) philosophy of science – IH(E)PS.

Kimberly Kemf-Leonard (ed), Encyclopedia of Social Measurement (San Diego: Academic Press, 2004), 2004

Journal of philosophical Investigations , 2024

The idea that science is objective, or able to achieve objectivity, is in large part responsible for the role that science plays within society. But what is objectivity? The idea of objectivity is ambiguous. This paper distinguishes between three basic forms of objectivity. The first form of objectivity is ontological objectivity: the world asit isin itself does not depend upon what we think about it; it is independent of human thought, language, conceptual activity or experience. The second form of objectivity is the objectivity of truth: truth does not depend upon what we believe or justifiably believe; truth depends upon the way reality itself is. The third form of objectivity is epistemic objectivity: this form of objectivity resides in the scientific method which ensures that subjective factors are excluded, and only epistemically relevant factors play a role in scientific inquiry. The paper considers two problems that arise for the notion of epistemic objectivity: the theorydependence of observation and the variability of the methods of science. It is argued that the use of shared standard procedures ensures the objectivity of observation despite theory-dependence. It is argued that the variability of methods need not lead to an epistemic relativism about science. The paper concludes with the realist suggestion that the best explanation of the success of the sciences is that the methods employed in the sciences are highly reliable truth-conducive tools of inquiry. The objectivity of the methods of the sciences leads to the objective truth about the objective world

Husserl’s Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity, 2018