Empirically Informed Moral Theory: A Sketch of the Landscape

This volume is titled Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology and it is part of a series addressing recent advances in the field of experimental philosophy more generally. Thus, it behooves us to say at least something about both moral psychology and its relationship to experimental philosophy.

Metaethics after Moore, 2006

's diatribe against the naturalistic fallacy in 1903 set the stage for most of twentieth-century moral philosophy. The main protagonists over the next sixty years were intuitionists and emotivists, both of whom were convinced by Moore that empirical science is irrelevant to moral philosophy and common moral beliefs. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, when a wider array of moral theories entered the scene and applied ethics became popular, few moral philosophers paid much attention to developments in biology and psychology. This isolation must end. Moral philosophers cannot continue to ignore developments in psychology, brain science, and biology. Of course, philosophers need to be careful when they draw lessons from empirical research. As Moore and his followers argued, we should not jump straight from descriptive premises in psychology or biology to positive moral conclusions or normative conclusions in moral epistemology. That would be a fallacy.² Nonetheless, psychology can still affect moral philosophy in indirect ways. That is what I want to illustrate here. I will trace an indirect path from empirical premises to a normative conclusion For comments on drafts and oral presentations, I thank

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2017

How do we form our moral judgments, and how do they influence behavior? What ultimately motivates kind versus malicious action? Moral psychology is the interdisciplinary study of such questions about the mental lives of moral agents, including moral thought, feeling, reasoning, and motivation. While these questions can be studied solely from the armchair or using only empirical tools, researchers in various disciplines, from biology to neuroscience to philosophy, can address them in tandem. Some key topics in this respect revolve around moral cognition and motivation, such as moral responsibility, altruism, the structure of moral motivation, weakness of will, and moral intuitions. Of course there are other important topics as well, including emotions, character, moral development, self-deception, addiction, well-being, and the evolution of moral capacities.

Philosophical Psychology, 2012

Experimental research in moral psychology can be used to generate debunking arguments in ethics. Specifically, research can indicate that we draw a moral distinction on the basis of a morally irrelevant difference. We develop this naturalistic approach by examining a recent debate between Joshua Greene and Selim Berker. We argue that Greene's research, if accurate, undermines attempts to reconcile opposing judgments about trolley cases, but that his attempt to debunk deontology fails. We then draw some general lessons about the possibility of empirical debunking arguments in ethics.

Over the last 20 years, a movement calling itself 'experimental philosophy' (x-phi for short) has branched out in the field of philosophy. Practitioners use empirical methods to study aspects of lay people's judgements on issues of philosophical interest; for example, what affects people's willingness to ascribe moral responsibility to an agent acting in a strictly determined world; or under what circumstances people will ascribe knowledge rather than (mere) belief to an agent. Practitioners draw on their results to support or challenge some claims made by philosophers. This paper considers the approach taken in experimental philosophy to assessing moral judgement. I will note some of the contributions the approach can make to philosophers' discussion of moral judgement and explore some of the difficulties it faces. In the process, I will map the experimentalists’ approach to assessing moral judgement against the contexts in which real-life moral judgement takes place.

Are there objective moral truths (things that are morally right or wrong independently of what anybody thinks about them)? To answer this question more and more scholars have recently begun to appeal to evidence from scientific disciplines such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, and anthropology. This book investigates this novel scientific approach in a comprehensive, empirically-focused, partly clarificatory, and partly metatheoretical way. It argues for two main theses. First, it is possible for the empirical sciences to contribute to the moral realism/anti-realism debate. And second, most appeals to science that have so far been proposed are insufficiently empirically substantiated. The book’s main chapters address four prominent science-based arguments for or against the existence of objective moral truths: the presumptive argument, the argument from moral disagreement, the sentimentalist argument, and the evolutionary debunking argument. For each of these arguments Thomas Pölzler first identifies the sense in which its underlying empirical hypothesis would have to be true in order for the arguments to work. Then he shows that the available scientific evidence fails to support this hypothesis. Finally, he also makes suggestions as to how to test the hypothesis more validly in future scientific research. Moral Reality and the Empirical Sciences is an important contribution to the moral realism/anti-realism debate that will appeal both to philosophers and scientists interested in moral psychology and metaethics.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2007

. Introduction Regarding the assessment of Darwall and colleagues, we couldn't agree more: Far too many moral philosophers have been content to invent the psychology or anthropology on which their theories depend, advancing or disputing empirical 05-Jackson-Chap-05.qxd 17/5/05 5:19 PM Page 114 empirical perspectives on ethics  claims with little concern for empirical evidence. We also believe-and we expect Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton would agree-that this empirical complacency has impeded progress in ethical theory and discouraged investigators in the biological, behavioural, and social sciences from undertaking philosophically informed research on ethical issues. We realize that some moral philosophers have taken there to be good reasons for shunning empirical inquiry. For much of the twentieth century, many working in analytic ethics-variously inspired by Hume's (: ) pithy injunction against inferring ought from is and the seductive mysteries of Moore's (, esp. -) 'Open Question Argument'-maintained that descriptive considerations of the sort adduced in the natural and social sciences cannot constrain ethical reflection without vitiating its prescriptive or normative character (e.g. Stevenson : -; R. M. Hare : -). The plausibility of such claims is both debated and debatable, but it is clear that they have helped engender suspicion regarding 'naturalism' in ethics, which we understand, broadly, as the view that ethical theorizing should be an (in part) a posteriori inquiry richly informed by relevant empirical considerations.¹ Relatedly, this anti-naturalist suspicion enables disciplinary xenophobia in philosophical ethics, a reluctance to engage research beyond the philosophical literature. The methodology we advocate here-a resolutely naturalistic approach to ethical theory squarely engaging the relevant biological, behavioural, and social sciences-flouts both of these anxieties. Perhaps those lacking our equanimity suspect that approaches of the sort we endorse fail to heed Stevenson's (: ) advice that 'Ethics must not be psychology', and thereby lapse into a noxious 'scientism' or 'eliminativism'. Notoriously, Quine (: ) advocated eliminativism in his rendering of naturalized epistemology, urging philosophical 'surrender of the epistemological burden to psychology'. Quine was sharply rebuked for slighting the normative character of epistemology (e.g. Kim ; Stich a), but we are not suggesting, in a rambunctiously Quinean spirit, 'surrender of the ethical burden to psychology'. And so far as we know, neither is anyone else. Ethics must not-indeed cannot-be psychology, but it does not follow that ethics should ignore psychology. The most obvious, and most compelling, motivation for our perspective is simply this: It is not possible to step far into the ethics literature without stubbing one's toe on empirical claims. The thought that moral philosophy can proceed unencumbered by facts seems to us an unlikely one: There are just too many places where answers to important ethical questions require-and have very often presupposed-answers to empirical questions. A small but growing number of philosophers, ourselves included, have become convinced that answers to these empirical questions should be informed by systematic ¹ Compare Railton's (: -) 'methodological naturalism'. 05-Jackson-Chap-05.qxd 17/5/05 5:19 PM Page 115 ⁶ This follows quite a standard theme in philosophical writings on virtue and character. For example, Blum (: -) understands compassion as a trait of character typified by an altruistic attitude of 'strength and duration', which should be 'stable and consistent' in prompting beneficent action (cf. Brandt : ; Dent : ; McDowell : -; Larmore : ).

Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, 2013

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2011

Moral properties are widely held to be response-dependent properties of actions, situations, events and persons. There is controversy as to whether the putative response-dependence of these properties nullifies any truthclaims for moral judgements, or rather supports them. The present paper argues that moral judgements are more profitably compared with theoretical judgements in the natural sciences than with the judgements of immediate sense-perception. The notion of moral truth is dependent on the notion of moral knowledge, which in turn is best understood as a possible endpoint of theory change for the better.

2010

In this thesis I explore the impact and arguments that were based on recent discoveries in empirical moral psychology on the explicit and implicit ideas of philosophical moral rationalism.