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Experimental Moral Philosophy

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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano

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Experimental Moral PhilosophyFirst published xxxxxxxxxxxx

Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a methodology in thelast decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the larger experimentalphilosophy (X-Phi, XΦ) approach. From the beginning, it has beenembroiled in controversy on a number of fronts. Some doubt that it isphilosophy at all. Others acknowledge that it is philosophy but think that ithas produced modest results at best and confusion at worst.

1. Introduction1.1 What Counts as an Experiment?1.2 Who Conducts the Experimental Investigation?1.3 How Directly Must the Experimentation be Related to thePhilosophy?1.4 What Counts as Experimental Philosophy, as Opposed toPsychology?

2. Moral Judgments and Intuitions2.1 Two “Negative” Programs2.2 Three “Positive” Programs2.3 An Example: Intentionality and Responsibility2.4 Another Example: The Linguistic Analogy

3. Character, Wellbeing, and Emotion3.1 Character and Virtue3.2 Wellbeing3.3 Emotion and Affect

4. Some Metaethical Issues4.1 Moral Disagreement4.2 Moral Language

5. Criticisms of Experimental Moral Philosophy5.1 Problems with Experimental Design and Interpretation

1

5.2 Philosophical ProblemsBibliographyAcademic ToolsOther Internet ResourcesRelated Entries

1. Introduction

Before the research program can be evaluated, we should have someconception of its scope. But controversy surrounds questions about itsboundaries as well. Uncontroversially, the distinction betweenexperimental and non-experimental philosophy is not identical to thedistinction between a posteriori and a priori philosophy. Experimentalevidence is a proper subset of empirical evidence, which is itself a subsetof a posteriori evidence. Can any more be said?

One reason it is so difficult to specify the boundaries of the program is thatthe current surge in interest in experimental philosophy is relatively new.Another is that practitioners of experimental philosophy are pulled inopposing directions. On the one hand, there is a desire to see experimentalphilosophy as continuous with the history of philosophy, and thus to viewthe class broadly. Admirers are likely to think that there is little room fordoubt about the approach's claim to philosophical respectability, arguingthat it is really just an extension of traditional philosophical approachesgoing back to Aristotle. He and many others in the philosophical canonwould not have seen an important distinction between science andphilosophy. They were as interested in “natural philosophy”—or science—as in anything else; distinctions among fields of study are relativelyrecent phenomena.[1] On the other hand, there is an inclination to think ofthe methodology as novel—even revolutionary—and thus to characterizeit more narrowly. When we factor in issues about the scope of moral


2 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

philosophy in general, things become even more complex. Still, there are anumber of dimensions along which we might wish to understand the fieldmore or less broadly. Among the most important are:

1.1 What Counts as an Experiment?

Paradigmatic experiments involve randomized assignment to varyingconditions of objects from a representative sample, followed by statisticalcomparison of the outcomes for each condition. The variation inconditions is sometimes called a manipulation. For example, anexperimenter might try to select a representative sample of people,randomly assign them either to find or not to find a dime in the coin returnof a payphone, and then measure the degree to which they subsequentlyhelp someone they take to be in need.[2] Finding or not finding the dime isthe condition; degree of helpfulness is the outcome variable.

While true experiments follow this procedure, “studies” allow non-randomassignment to condition. Astronomers, for example, sometimes speak of“natural experiments”. Although we are in no position to affect themotions of heavenly bodies, we can observe them under a variety ofconditions, over long periods of time, and with a variety of instruments.Likewise, anthropological investigation of different cultures' moral beliefsand practices is unlikely to involve manipulating variables in the lives ofthe cultures' members, but such studies are valuable and empiricallyrespectable. Still, for various reasons, the evidential value of studies is lessthan that of experiments, and indeed, most published research inexperimental philosophy involves true experiments.

Arguably, other modes of inquiry such as historical research should alsobe treated as natural and legitimate extensions of paradigmaticallyexperimental approaches. Indeed, some would treat history itself as aseries of quasi-experiments in which different ways of life produce a


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variety of outcomes. [3] In all these cases, what matters most is whetherthe conclusions of the inquiry are grounded in evidence rising to thestandards set by social and natural science.

The distinction between studies and experiments primarily concerns inputvariables. Another distinction has to do with outcome variables. One ofthe paradigmatic outcome measures of experimental philosophy is thesurvey, though others such as functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI), physiological measures, and behavioral measures are also in use.There are decades of top-flight research in personality and socialpsychology using the survey paradigm, but it is also subject to trenchantcriticism. Instead of revealing what people think, surveys might establishwhat people think they think, what they think the experimenter wants themto think, what they think other participants think, or just something theymade up because they had to provide a response. This is a worry thatarises for all surveys, but it is especially pertinent in the context ofexperimental philosophy because participant responses are often treated asequivalent to “what one would say” or even “how one would judge.”

The survey paradigm suffers from other methodological drawbacks aswell. Presumably, morality is not just a matter of what people would say,but also a matter of what they would notice, do and feel, as well as howthey would reason and respond. Surveys provide only tenuous andindirect evidence about these activities, and so it might behooveexperimental philosophers to employ or devise outcome measures thatwould more reliably and directly capture these features of morality.

How closely tied to true experiments must a philosophical investigationbe, then, if it is to count as experimental moral philosophy? According tothe most capacious view, the guiding principle of experimental philosophyis that when philosophical arguments invoke or make assumptions aboutempirical matters, those assumptions should be assessed according to the



best natural and social scientific evidence available, and that if suchevidence is not currently available it should where possible be acquired,either by seeking the help of specialists with the relevant scientific trainingor by having well-trained philosophers conduct the research themselves.Thus, the term, “experimental moral philosophy” might be replaced by aphrase like empirically well-informed moral philosophy. While this seemsunobjectionable, there may still be local objections to the scientificmethodology and to the relevance or probative force of empirical researchin particular cases. Some of these are discussed in the concluding sectionof this entry.

1.2 Who Conducts the Experimental Investigation?

A good deal of the work in experimental moral philosophy involvesexperiments performed by philosophers in pursuit of answers tophilosophical questions. In other cases, philosophers draw on experimentalresults produced by social scientists. It is hard to see why it would beimportant that the philosopher herself have done the experimental work.By way of illustration, consider the case of Richard Brandt, the well-known moral philosopher, who spent time living among the Hopi NativeAmericans as an anthropological observer in an effort to understand theirethical views. During that time, he conducted the empirical investigationhimself (Brandt 1954), but in later work (1998) he called upon a great dealof research by others, many of whom were social scientists by training, notphilosophers. It seems arbitrary to treat the former work as of afundamentally different sort from the latter. Both qualify as fine examplesof empirically well-informed moral philosophy.

Surely what matters, then, is not the identity or affiliation of theexperimenter, but whether the experiment is well-designed, as free ofconfounds as possible, sufficiently highly powered[4], carefullyinterpreted, informed by the existing literature, and so on. Philosophers



can be especially insightful in helping to design experiments that are notplagued by such problems, partly because one of the capacities cultivatedby philosophical training is the ability to imagine and construct potentialcounterexamples and counterarguments. When the conclusions aimed atare recognizably philosophical, there seems to be little room for doubt thatphilosophers should be included in both experimental design and theinterpretation of results. They are likely to improve the operationalizationof the relevant concepts and to better understand the philosophicalimplications of the results.

1.3 How Directly Must the Experimentation be Related to thePhilosophy?

Moral philosophers often rely on beliefs about the way the world is, how itworks, and how it got that way—assumptions whose empirical credentialsare impeccable but difficult to reconstruct. In many cases, the justificationfor the beliefs is unimportant so long as their justificatory status is well-established. A philosopher considering the moral permissibility of stemcell research, for example, ought to understand the nature of these cells,gestation and embryonic development, the aims of the research projectsemploying (or seeking to employ) stem cells, and their prospects forsuccess. Knowledge about these matters depends in many ways on theresults of scientific experimentation, though perhaps conducted long agoand without any expectation of philosophical payoff.

Still, in some cases it is important that an experiment aim at answering aparticular question, since this can improve experimental design.Experiments that merely aim to find out “what will happen when…” tendto be under-theorized, to rely on the wrong distinctions, and even to beuninterpretable. Well-designed confirmatory experiments make specificpredictions in advance of data-collection, rather than spinning post hoc“just-so stories” after the data are in. Such stories can be useful in the



context of exploring the hypothesis space, but they are not themselvesevidence. Since confirmatory experiments can provide evidence that isuseful in ethical (or more broadly philosophical) reasoning, philosophershave an important role to play in their design and interpretation.

1.4 What Counts as Experimental Philosophy, as Opposed toPsychology?

As is often the case, there are examples at either extreme for which it'seasy to give an answer. Virtually any question in ethics will have anempirical dimension. Most people would agree that it is impermissible totorture an animal just for fun and that the reason has something to do withthe pain the animal would experience. No doubt part of our evidence thatthe animal would indeed suffer is grounded in experimental or at leastempirical knowledge of animal psychology. But it seems overbroad tothink of this case as arising in experimental moral philosophy orpsychology. Thinking in terms of empirically well-informed moralphilosophy seems to moot the issue of how to characterize a case like this,and arguably captures the most important motivations underlying the morecommon phraseology.

Other cases are more easily classified as belonging to disciplines otherthan philosophy. It seems more accurate to think of research showing thatpeople are much more inclined to be organ donors if donation is thedefault position and those wishing not to donate are permitted to opt out(Gigerenzer 2008, 2–3) as psychology or sociology rather thanphilosophy. But good thinking about the question of what sort of policies,practices, and institutions we morally ought to adopt should take note ofthis evidence.[5] Once again, moving the focus from experimental toempirically well-informed moral philosophy might be thought to moot theconcern about how to characterize such cases without sacrificing muchthat is useful to understanding the various research projects. Indeed, the



problem of what counts as experimental moral philosophy is just aparticular application of the vexed (but perhaps unimportant) question ofwhat counts as philosophy in the first place.

Here is a roadmap for the rest of this entry. Section 2 canvassesexperimental research on moral judgments and intuitions, describingvarious programmatic uses to which experimental results have been put,then turning to specific examples of experimental research on moraljudgment and intuition, including intuitions about intentionality andresponsibility, as well as the so-called “linguistic analogy.” Section 3discusses experimental results on “thick” (i.e., simultaneously descriptiveand normative) topics, including character and virtue, wellbeing, andemotion and affect. Section 4 discusses questions about moraldisagreement and moral language, both thought to be relevant to thelongstanding debate over moral objectivity. Section 5 considers somepotential objections to experimental moral philosophy.

2. Moral Judgments and Intuitions

As mentioned above, ethics encompasses not only moral judgment butalso moral perception, behavior, feeling, deliberation, reasoning, and soon. Experimentalists have investigated moral intuition, moral judgments,moral emotions, and moral behaviors, among other things. The mostthoroughly investigated are moral intuitions,[6] discussed below.

2.1 Two “Negative” Programs

One project for the experimental ethics of moral judgment, associated withStephen Stich and Jonathan Weinberg,[7] is to determine the extent towhich various moral intuitions are shared by philosophers and ordinarypeople. As some experimental philosophers are fond of pointing out, manyphilosophers appeal to intuitions as evidence or use their content as



premises in arguments. They often say such things as, “as everyone wouldagree, p,” “the common man thinks that p,” or simply, “intuitively, p.” Butwould everyone agree that p? Does the common man think that p? Is pgenuinely intuitive? These are empirical questions, and if the early resultsdocumented by experimental philosophers survive attempts to replicate,the answer would sometimes seem to be negative.

Still, even if we suppose that these results hold up, the philosophicalimplications remain in dispute, with some thinking that they wouldseriously undermine our reliance on moral (or metaethical) intuitions, andothers thinking that they wouldn't matter much at all. At least this muchshould be relatively uncontroversial: If the claim “intuitively p” is meantto be evidence for p, then philosophers who make such claims shouldtread carefully, especially when it matters whether the philosopher'sintuition is as widely shared as the philosopher believes it to be.

A second “negative” project involves examining the degree to whichmoral intuitions are influenced by factors that are widely agreed to be non-evidential. If the experimentalists conducting this research are right,women sometimes find p intuitive, whereas men find ~p intuitive(Buckwalter & Stich forthcoming); Westerners mostly agree that q, butEast Asians tend to think ~q (Machery, Mallon, Nichols, & Stich 2004);[8]

and people find r plausible if they're asked about s first, but not otherwise(Nadelhoffer & Feltz 2008; Sinnott-Armstrong 2008d; Sinnott-Armstrong,Mallon, McCoy, & Hull 2008). Once again, the philosophical implicationsof this growing body of evidence are hotly disputed, with some arguingfor the unreliability of moral intuitions, and, to the extent that moraljudgments are a function of moral intuitions, those as well. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (2008d) and Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman (2012)have recently followed this train of thought, arguing that moral intuitionsare subject to normatively irrelevant situational influences (e.g., ordereffects), while Feltz & Cokely (2009) and Knobe (2011) have documented



correlations between moral intuitions and (presumably) normativelyirrelevant individual differences (e.g., extroversion). Such results, if theycan be replicated and adequately explained, might again warrantskepticism about moral intuitions, or at least about some classes ofintuitions or intuiters.[9]

2.2 Three “Positive” Programs

Other philosophers are more sanguine about the upshot of experimentalinvestigations of moral judgment and intuition. Joshua Knobe, amongothers, attempts to use experimental investigations of the determinants ofmoral judgments to identify the contours of philosophically interestingconcepts and the mechanisms or processes that underlie moral judgment.He has famously argued for the pervasive influence of moralconsiderations throughout folk psychological concepts (2009, 2010; seealso Pettit & Knobe 2009), claiming, among other things, that the conceptof an intentional action is sensitive to the foreseeable evaluative valence ofthe consequences of that action (2003, 2004b, 2006).[10] Such claimsremain extremely controversial at present, with some philosophersstrongly inclined to treat such differences as reflecting performance errors,widespread though they may be.

Another line of research, associated with Joshua Greene and hiscolleagues (2001, 2004, 2008), argues for a dual-system model of moraljudgment. On their view (very crudely), a slower, more deliberative,system tends to issue in a person's utilitarian-like judgments, whereas aquicker, more automatic system tends to produce judgments more in linewith a Kantian approach. Which system is engaged by a given moralreasoning task is determined in part by personal style and in part bysituational factors.[11] Still, even if something like this story is correct, it isnot clear that it reflects in any way on the moral dispute between Kantiansand Utilitarians.



A related approach, favored by Chandra Sripada (2011), aims to identifythe features to which intuitions about philosophically important conceptsare sensitive. Sripada thinks that the proper role of experimentalinvestigations of moral intuitions is not to identify the mechanismsunderlying moral intuitions. Such knowledge, it is claimed, contributeslittle of relevance to philosophical theorizing. It is rather to investigate, ona case by case basis, the features to which people are responding whenthey have such intuitions. On this view, people (philosophers included)can readily identify whether they have a given intuition, but not why theyhave it. An example from the debate over determinism (the view that allour actions are the products of prior causes) and free will: “manipulationcases” have been thought to undermine compatibilist intuitions—intuitionsupporting the notion that determinism is compatible with “the sort of freewill required for moral responsibility” (Pereboom 2001). In such cases, anunwitting victim is described as having been surreptitiously manipulatedinto having and reflectively endorsing a motivation to j. Critics ofcompatibilism say that such cases satisfy compatibilist criteria for moralresponsibility, and yet, intuitively, the actors are not morally responsible(Pereboom 2001). Sripada (2011) makes a strong case, however, throughboth mediation analysis and structural equation modeling, that to theextent that people feel the manipulees not to be morally responsible, theydo so because they judge him them in fact not to satisfy the compatibilistcriteria.[12] Thus, by determining which aspects of the case philosophicalintuitions are responding to, it might be possible to resolve otherwiseintractable questions. Whether or not that is so is unsettled for now.

2.3 An Example: Intentionality and Responsibility

Since Knobe's seminal (2003) paper, experimental philosophers haveinvestigated the complex patterns in people's dispositions to makejudgments about moral notions (praiseworthiness, blameworthiness,responsibility), cognitive attitudes (belief, knowledge, remembering),



motivational attitudes (desire, favor, advocacy), and character traits(compassion, callousness) in the context of violations of and conformity tovarious norms (moral, prudential, aesthetic, legal, conventional,descriptive).[13] In Knobe's original experiment, participants first read adescription of a choice scenario: the protagonist is presented with apotential policy (aimed at increasing profits) that would result in a sideeffect (either harming or helping the environment). Next, the protagonistexplicitly disavows caring about the side effect, and chooses to go aheadwith the policy. The policy results as advertised: both the primary and theside effect occur. Participants are asked to attribute intentionality or anattitude (or, in the case of later work by Robinson et al. 2013, a charactertrait) to the protagonist. What Knobe found was that participants weresignificantly more inclined to indicate that the protagonist hadintentionally brought about the side effect when it was perceived to be bad(harming the environment) than when it was perceived to be good (helpingthe environment). This effect has been replicated dozens of times, and itsscope has been greatly expanded from intentionality attributions afterviolations of a moral norm to attributions of diverse properties afterviolations of a wide variety of norms.

The first-order aim of interpreters of this body of evidence is to create amodel that predicts when the attribution asymmetry will crop up. Thesecond-order aims are to explain as systematically as possible why theeffect occurs, and to determine the extent to which the attributionasymmetry can be considered rational. Figure 1, presented here for thefirst time, models how participants' responses to this sort of vignette areproduced:



In this model, the boxes represent entities, the arrows represent causal orfunctional processes, and the area in grey represents the mind of theparticipant, which is not directly observable but is the target ofinvestigation. In broad strokes, the idea is that a participant first reads thetext of the vignette and forms a mental model of what happens in thestory. On the basis of this model (and almost certainly while the vignette isstill being read), the participant begins to interpret, i.e., to make bothdescriptive and normative judgments about the scenario, especially aboutthe mental states and character traits of the people in it. The participantthen reads the experimenter's question, forms a mental model of what isbeing asked, and—based on her judgments about the scenario—forms ananswer to that question. That answer may then be pragmatically revised(to avoid unwanted implications, to bring it more into accord with whatthe participant thinks the experimenter wants to hear, etc.) and is finally

Figure 1: Model of Participant Response to X-Phi Vignettes



recorded as an explicit response to a statement about the protagonist'sattitudes (e.g., “he brought about the side effect intentionally,” graded on aLikert scale.)[14]

What we know is that vignette texts in which a norm violation is describedtend to produce higher indications of agreement on the Likert scaleresponses. What experimental philosophers try to do is to explain thisasymmetry by postulating models of the unobservable entities.

Perhaps the best known is Knobe's conceptual competence model,according to which the asymmetry arises at the judgment stage. He claimsthat normative judgments about the action influence otherwise descriptivejudgments about whether it was intentional (or desired, or expected, etc.),and that, moreover, this input is part of the very conception ofintentionality (desire, belief, etc.). Thus, on the conceptual competencemodel, the asymmetry in attributions is a rational expression of theordinary conception of intentionality (desire, belief, etc.), which turns outto have a normative component.[15]

The motivational bias model (Alicke 2008; Nadelhoffer 2004, 2006)agrees that the asymmetry originates in the judgment stage, and thatnormative judgments influence descriptive judgments. However, unlikethe conceptual competence model, it takes this to be a bias rather than anexpression of conceptual competence. Thus, on this model, the asymmetryin attributions is a distortion of the correct conception of intentionality(desire, belief, etc.).

The deep self concordance model (Sripada 2010, 2012; Sripada & Konrath2011) also locates the source of the asymmetry in the judgment stage, butdoes not recognize an influence (licit or illicit) of normative judgments ondescriptive judgments. Instead, the model claims that when assessingintentional action, people not only attend to their representation of a



person's “surface” self—her expectations, means-end beliefs, moment-to-moment intentions, and conditional desires—but also to theirrepresentation of the person's “deep” self, which harbors her sentiments,values, and core principles. According to the model, when assessingwhether someone intentionally brings about some state of affairs, peopledetermine (typically unconsciously) whether there exists sufficientconcordance between their representation of the outcome the agent bringsabout and what they take to be her deep self. For instance, when thechairman says he does not care at all about either harming or helping theenvironment, people attribute to him a deeply anti-environment stance.When he harms the environment, this is concordant with his anti-environment deep self; in contrast, when the chairman helps theenvironment, this is discordant with his anti-environment deep self.According to the deep self concordance model, then, the asymmetry inattributions is a reasonable expression of the folk psychological distinctionbetween the deep and shallow self. (Whether that distinction in turn isdefensible, and how good people are at recognizing others' deep selves,are further questions.)

Unlike the models discussed so far, the conversational pragmatics model(Adams & Steadman 2004, 2007) locates the source of the asymmetry inthe pragmatic revision stage. According to this model, participants judgethe protagonist not to have acted intentionally in both norm-conformingand norm-violating cases. However, when it comes time to tell theexperimenter what they think, participants do not want to be taken assuggesting that the harm-causing protagonist is blameless, so they reportthat he acted intentionally. This is a reasonable goal, so according to thepragmatic revision model, the attribution asymmetry is rational, thoughmisleading.

According to the deliberation model (Alfano, Beebe, & Robinson 2012;Robinson, Stey, & Alfano forthcoming; Scaife & Webber forthcoming),



the best explanation of the complex patterns of evidence is that the veryfirst mental stage, the formation of a mental model of the scenario, differsbetween norm-violation and norm-conformity vignettes. When theprotagonist is told that a policy he would ordinarily want to pursueviolates a norm, he acquires a reason to deliberate further about what todo; in contrast, when the protagonist is told that the policy conforms tosome norm, he acquires no such reason. Participants tend to model theprotagonist as deliberating about what to do when and only when a normwould be violated. Since deliberation leads to the formation of othermental states—such as beliefs, desires, and intentions—this basaldifference between participants' models of what happens in the story flowsthrough the rest of their interpretation and leads to the attributionasymmetry. On the deliberation model, then, the attribution asymmetryoriginates much earlier than other experimental philosophers suppose, andis due to rational processes.

Single-factor models such as these are not the only way of explaining theattribution asymmetry. Mark Phelan and Hagop Sarkissian (2009, p. 179)find the idea of localizing the source of the asymmetry in a single stage orvariable implausible, claiming that “attempts to account for the Knobeeffect by recourse to only one or two variables, though instructive, areincomplete and overreaching in their ambition.” While they do notpropose a more complicated model, it's clear that many could be generatedby permuting the existing single-factor models.

2.4 Another Example: The Linguistic Analogy

John Rawls (1971) famously suggested that Noam Chomsky's (1965)generative linguistics might provide a helpful analogy for moral theorists—an analogy explored by Gilbert Harman (2000b, 2007, 2008, 2011;Roedder & Harman 2010), Susan Dwyer (1999, 2009), and John Mikhail(2007, 2008, 2011), among others (Hauser 2006; Hauser, Young, &



Cushman 2008). There are several points of purported contact:

L1: A child raised in a particular linguistic community almostinevitably ends up speaking an idiolect of the local languagedespite lack of sufficient explicit instruction, lack of extensivenegative feedback for mistakes, and grammatical mistakes bycaretakers.

M1: A child raised in a particular moral community almostinevitably ends up judging in accordance with an idiolect of thelocal moral code despite lack of sufficient explicit instruction, lackof sufficient negative feedback for moral mistakes, and moralmistakes by caretakers.

L2: While there is great diversity among natural languages, thereare systematic constraints on possible natural languages.

M2: While there is great diversity among natural moralities, thereare systematic constraints on possible natural moralities.

L3: Language-speakers obey many esoteric rules that theythemselves typically cannot produce or explain, and which somewould not even recognize.

M3: Moral agents judge according to esoteric rules (such as thedoctrine of double effect) that they themselves typically cannotproduce or explain, and which some would not even recognize.

L4: Drawing on a limited vocabulary, a speaker can both produceand comprehend a potential infinity of linguistic expressions.

M4: Drawing on a limited moral vocabulary, an agent can produceand evaluate a very large (though perhaps not infinite) class ofaction-plans, which are ripe for moral judgment.



Pair 1 suggests the “poverty of the stimulus” argument, according towhich there must be an innate language (morality) faculty because itwould otherwise be next to impossible for children to learn what and asthey do. However, as Prinz (2008) points out, the moral stimulus may beless penurious than the linguistic stimulus: children are typically punishedfor moral violations, whereas their grammatical violations are oftenignored. Nichols, Kumar, & Lopez (unpublished manuscript) lend supportto Prinz's contention with a series of Bayesian moral-norm learningexperiments.

Pair 2 suggests the “principles and parameters” approach, according towhich, though the exact content of linguistic (moral) rules is not innate,there are innate rule-schemas, the parameters of which may take only afew values. The role of environmental factors is to set these parameters.For instance, the linguistic environment determines whether the childlearns a language in which noun phrases precede verb phrases or viceversa. Similarly, say proponents of the analogy, there may be a moral rule-schema according to which members of group G may not be intentionallyharmed unless p, and the moral environment sets the values of G and p. Aswith the first point of analogy, philosophers such as Prinz (2008) find thiscomparison dubious. Whereas linguistic parameters typically take just oneof two or three values, the moral parameters mentioned above can takeindefinitely many values and seem to admit of diverse exceptions.

Pair 3 suggests that people have knowledge of language (morality) that isnot consciously accessed (and may even be inaccessible to consciousness)but implicitly represented, such that they produce judgments ofgrammatical (moral) permissibility and impermissibility that far outstriptheir own capacities to reflectively identify, explain, or justify. Onepotential explanation of this gap is that there is a “module” for language(morality) that has proprietary information and processing capacities. Onlythe outputs of these capacities are consciously accessible. Whether the



module is universal or varies across certain groups of people is a mattercurrently in dispute.

Pair 4 suggests the linguistic (moral) essentiality of recursion, whichallows the embedding of type-identical structures within one another togenerate further structures of the same type. For instance, phrases can beembedded in other phrases to form more complex phrases:

Moral judgments, likewise, can be embedded in other moral judgments toproduce novel moral judgments (Harman 2008, p. 346). For instance:

Such moral embedding has been experimentally investigated by JohnMikhail (2011, pp. 43–8), who argues on the basis of experiments usingvariants on the “trolley problem” (Foot 1978) that moral judgments aregenerated by imposing a deontic structure on one's representation of thecausal and evaluative features of the action under consideration.

As with any analogy, there are points of disanalogy between language andmorality. At least sometimes, moral judgments are corrigible in the face ofargument, whereas grammaticality judgments seem to be less corrigible.People are often tempted to act contrary to their moral judgments, but notto their grammaticality judgments. Recursive embedding seems to be ableto generate all of language, whereas recursive embedding may only beapplicable to deontic judgments about actions, and not, for instance, tojudgments about norms, institutions, situations, and character traits.

the calico cat → the calico cat (that the dog chased) → the calicocat (that the dog [that the breeding conglomerate wanted] chased)→ the calico cat (that the dog [that the company {that wasbankrupt} owned] chased)

It's wrong to x → It's wrong to coerce someone to x → It's wrongto persuade someone to coerce someone to x



Indeed, it's hard to imagine what recursion would mean for charactertraits: does it make sense to think of honesty being embedded in courageto generate a new trait? If it does, what would that trait be?

3. Character, Wellbeing, and Emotion

Until the 1950s, modern moral philosophy had largely focused on eitherutilitarianism or deontology. The revitalization of virtue ethics led to arenewed interest in virtues and vices (e.g., honesty, generosity, fairness,dishonesty, stinginess, unfairness), in eudaimonia (often translated as‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’), and in the emotions. In recent decades,experimental work in psychology, sociology, and neuroscience has beenbrought to bear on the empirical grounding of philosophical views in thisarea.

3.1 Character and Virtue

A virtue is a complex disposition comprising sub-dispositions to notice,construe, think, desire, and act in characteristic ways. To be generous, forinstance, is (among other things) to be disposed to notice occasions forgiving, to construe ambiguous social cues charitably, to desire to givepeople things they want, need, or would appreciate, to deliberate wellabout what they want, need, or would appreciate, and to act on the basis ofsuch deliberation. Manifestations of such a disposition are observable andhence ripe for empirical investigation. Virtue ethicists of the last severaldecades have sometimes been optimistic about the distribution of virtue inthe population. Alasdair MacIntyre claims, for example, that “withoutallusion to the place that justice and injustice, courage and cowardice playin human life very little will be genuinely explicable” (1984, p. 199). JuliaAnnas (2011, pp. 8–10) claims that “by the time we reflect about virtues,we already have some.” Linda Zagzebski (2010) provides an“exemplarist” semantics for virtue terms that only gets off the ground if



there are in fact many virtuous people.

The philosophical situationists John Doris (1998, 2002) and GilbertHarman (1999, 2000a, 2003) were the first to mount an empiricalchallenge to the virtue ethical conception of character, arguing on the basisof evidence from personality and social psychology that the structure ofmost people's dispositions does not match the structure of virtues (orvices). Philosophical situationists contend that the social psychology of thelast century shows that most people are surprisingly susceptible toseemingly trivial and normatively irrelevant situational influences, such asmood elevators (Isen, Clark, & Schwartz 1976; Isen, Shalker, Clark, &Karp 1978; Isen 1987), mood depressors (Apsler 1975; Carlsmith & Gross1968; Regan 1971; Weyant 1978), presence of bystanders (Latané &Darley 1968, 1970; Latané & Rodin 1969; Latané & Nida 1981; Schwartz& Gottlieb 1991), ambient sounds (Matthews & Cannon 1975; Boles &Haywood 1978; Donnerstein & Wilson 1976), ambient smells (Baron1997; Baron & Thomley 1994), and ambient light levels (Zhong, Bohns,& Gino 2010).[16] Individual difference variables typically explain lessthan 10% of the variance in people's behavior (Mischel 1968)—though, asFunder & Ozer (1983) point out, situational factors typically explain lessthan 16%.[17]

According to Doris (2002), the best explanation of this lack of cross-situational consistency is that the great majority of people have local,rather than global, traits: they are not honest, courageous, or greedy, butthey may be honest-while-in-a-good-mood, courageous-while-sailing-in-rough-weather-with-friends, and greedy-unless-watched-by-fellow-parishioners. In contrast, Christian Miller (2013, 2014) thinks the evidenceis best explained by a theory of mixed global traits, such as the dispositionto (among other things) help because it improves one's mood. Such traitsare global, in the sense that they explain and predict behavior acrosssituations (someone with such a disposition will, other things being equal,



typically help so long as it will maintain her mood), but normativelymixed, in the sense that they are neither virtues nor vices. Mark Alfano(2013) goes in a third direction, arguing that virtue and vice attributionstend to function as self-fulfilling prophecies. People tend to act inaccordance with the traits that are attributed to them, whether the traits areminor virtues such as tidiness (Miller, Brickman, & Bolen 1975) andecology-mindedness (Cornelissen et al. 2006, 2007), major virtues such ascharity (Jensen & Moore 1977), cooperativeness (Grusec, Kuczynski,Simutis & Rushton 1978), and generosity (Grusec & Redler 1980), orvices such as cutthroat competitiveness (Grusec, Kuczynski, Simutis &Rushton 1978). On Alfano's view, when people act in accordance with avirtue, they often do so not because they possess the trait in question, butbecause they think they do or because they know that other people thinkthey do. He calls such simulations of moral character factitious virtues,and even suggests that the notion of a virtue should be revised to includereflexive and social expectations.[18]

It might seem that this criticism misses its mark. After all, virtue ethicistsneedn't (and often don't) commit themselves to the claim that almosteveryone is virtuous. Instead, many argue that virtue is the normative goalof moral development, and that people mostly fail in various ways to reachthat goal. The argument from the fact that most people's dispositions arenot virtues to a rejection of orthodox virtue ethics, then, might be thoughta non sequitur, at least for such views. But empirically-minded critics ofvirtue ethics do not stop there. They all have positive views about whatsorts of dispositions people have instead of virtues. These dispositions arealleged to be so structurally dissimilar from virtues (as traditionallyunderstood) that it may be psychologically unrealistic to treat (traditional)virtue as a regulative ideal. What matters, then, is the width of the gapbetween the descriptive and the normative, between the (structure of the)dispositions most people have and the (structure of the) dispositions thatcount as virtues.



Three leading defenses against this criticism have been offered. Somevirtue ethicists (Badhwar 2009, Kupperman 2009) have conceded thatvirtue is extremely rare, but argued that it may still be a useful regulativeideal. Others (Hurka 2006, Merritt 2000) have attempted to weaken theconcept of virtue in such a way as to enable more people, or at least morebehaviors, to count as virtuous. Still others (Kamtekar 2004, Russell 2009,Snow 2010, Sreenivasan 2002) have challenged the situationist evidenceor its interpretation. While it remains unclear whether these defensessucceed, grappling with the situationist challenge has led both defendersand challengers of virtue ethics to develop more nuanced and empiricallyinformed views.[19]

3.2 Wellbeing

The study of wellbeing and happiness has recently come into vogue inboth psychology (Kahneman, Diener, & Schwartz 2003; Seligman 2011)and philosophy (Haybron 2008), including experimental philosophy(Braddock 2010; Phillips, Misenheimer, & Knobe 2011; Phillips, Nyholm,& Liao forthcoming). It is helpful in this context to draw a pair ofdistinctions, even if those distinctions end up getting blurred by furtherinvestigation. First, we need to distinguish between a life that goes wellfor the one who lives it and a morally good life. It could turn out that theseare extensionally identical, or that one is a necessary condition for theother, but at first blush they appear to involve different concepts. Theempirical study of wellbeing focuses primarily on lives that are good inthe former sense—good for the person whose life it is. Second, we need todistinguish between a hedonically good life and an overall good life. Aswith the first distinction, it might turn out that a hedonically good life justis an overall good life, but that would be a discovery, not something wecan simply take for granted.

With these distinctions in hand, there are a number of interesting



experimental results to consider. First, in the realm of hedonic evaluation,there are marked divergences between the aggregate sums of in-the-moment pleasures and pains and ex post memories of pleasures and pains.For example, the remembered level of pain of a colonoscopy is well-predicted by the average of the worst momentary level of pain and thefinal level of pain; furthermore, the duration of the procedure has nomeasurable effect on ex post pain ratings (Redelmeier & Kahneman 1996).What this means is that people's after-the-fact summaries of their hedonicexperiences are not simple integrals with respect to time of momentaryhedonic tone. If the colonoscopy were functionally completed after minute5, but arbitrarily prolonged for another 5 minutes so that the final level ofpain was less at the end of minute 10 than at the end of minute 5, thepatient would retrospectively evaluate the experience as less painful.Arguably, this matters for any philosophical theory that treats pleasure asat least partially constitutive of wellbeing, and it matters a lot if you'reinclined, like Bentham (1789/1961) and Singer (Singer & de Lazari-Radekforthcoming), to think that pleasure is the only intrinsic good and pain theonly intrinsic ill. How exactly? If the data are to be trusted, philosophers'substantive claims about wellbeing based on hedonic intuitions might bethought to miss their mark because such claims are virtually all formulatedin light of ex post evaluation of pleasures and pains. When a philosophersays that a good life is, to the extent possible, filled with pleasure anddevoid of pain, and therefore that this way of life constitutes wellbeing,she may be thinking of pleasures and pains in a biased way.

A second interesting set of results has to do not with (reports of) hedonictone but (reports of) subjective wellbeing. The most prominent researcherin this field is Ed Diener,[20] whose Satisfaction with Life Scale asksparticipants to agree or disagree with statements such as, “I am satisfiedwith my life” and “If I could live my life over, I would change almostnothing.” It might be thought that these questions are more revelatory ofwellbeing than questions about hedonic tone. However, two problems



have arisen with respect to this data. The first is that participants'responses to life satisfaction questionnaires may not be accurate reports ofstanding attitudes. Fox & Kahneman (1992), for instance, showed that,especially in personal domains people seem to value (friends and lovelife). What predicts participants' responses is not recent intrapersonalfactors but social comparison. Someone who has just lost a friend but stillthinks of herself as having more friends than her peers will tend to reporthigher life satisfaction than someone who has just gained a friend but whostill thinks of himself as having fewer friends than his peers. How couldpeople be so confused about themselves? The questions in Diener's surveyare hard to answer. What may happen is that respondents use heuristics togenerate their responses, sometimes answering a different but relatedquestion than the one asked. Life satisfaction surveys also seem to besubject to order effects. For instance, if a participant is asked a global lifesatisfaction question and then asked about his romantic life, the correlationbetween these questions tends to be low or zero, but if the participant isasked the dating question first, the correlation tends to be high andpositive (Strack, Martin, & Schwarz 1988).[21]

Another striking result in the literature on subjective wellbeing has to dowith what has come to be known as the set-point. Some early studiessuggested that, though major life events such as winning the lottery orsuffering a severe spinal cord injury have an effect on subjectivewellbeing, the effect wears off over time. People return to a set-point of(reported) subjective wellbeing (Brickman & Campbell 1971). Theexplanation offered for this striking phenomenon is that people adapt tomore or less whatever life throws at them. If the set-point hypothesis iscorrect (and if reported subjective wellbeing is a reliable indicator ofactual wellbeing), then moral theories focused on the promotion ofwellbeing would undoubtedly make vastly different recommendationsthan they are now thought to. There may be little point in trying topromote something that is likely to return to a set-point in the end. More



recent research, however, has challenged the set-point finding byestablishing the longitudinal impact of at least some important life events,such as divorce, death of a spouse, unemployment, and disability (Lucas2007; Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, & Diener 2003).

One final interesting set of results centers on the idea of virtue as a pre-requisite for wellbeing. If the results of Braddock (2010), Phillips,Misenheimer, & Knobe (2011), and Phillips, Nyholm, & Liao(forthcoming) withstand scrutiny and replication, it would seem thatordinary people are willing to judge a life as good for the one living it onlyif it is both full of positive moods and affects, and is virtuous (or at leastnot vicious). This result resonates with the empirically-supported views ofSeligman (2011) that happiness contingently turns out to be best-achievable in a life that includes both a good deal of positive emotion[22]

and the exercise of both moral and intellectual virtues.

3.3 Emotion and Affect

Experimental inquiries into morality and emotion overlap in myriad,distantly-related ways, only a few of which can be discussed here. Oneespecially interesting application is based on what have come to be knownas dual-system models of cognition, reasoning, decision-making, andbehavior. While the exact details of the two systems vary from author toauthor, the basic distinction is between what Daniel Kahneman callsSystem 1, which is fast, automatic, effortless, potentially unconscious,often affect-laden, and sometimes incorrigible, and System 2, which isslow, deliberative, effortful, typically conscious, and associated with thesubjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration (2011, pp. 20–21). Whereas System 2 exhibits a degree of functional unity, System 1 isbetter conceived as a loose conglomeration of semi-autonomousdispositions, states, and processes, which can conflict not only withSystem 2 but also with each other.



If correct, this might well bear on philosophical issues. For example, isemotionally-driven reasoning in general better or worse than “cold,”affectless reasoning? Likewise, we want to know whether moraljudgments are always motivating. In other words, we want to knowwhether, insofar as one judges that x is morally right (wrong), it followsthat one is—perhaps defeasibly—motivated to x (avoid x-ing). Anaffirmative answer is often labeled “internalist,” whereas a negativeanswer is labeled “externalist.” Emotions are intrinsically motivational, soif experimental investigation could show that emotion was implicated inall moral judgments, that could be a point in favor of internalism.[23] Onthe other hand, recent empirical/philosophical work on the phenomenon ofsociopathy is sometimes thought to cast doubt on this sort of motivationalinternalism.[24]

The dual-system approach has been employed by various investigators,including Joshua Greene (2008, 2012), Jonathan Haidt (2012; Haidt &Björklund 2008), Joshua Knobe (Inbar et al. 2009), Fiery Cushman(Cushman & Greene forthcoming), and Daniel Kelly (2011). Theseresearchers tend to claim that, though people usually associate their “trueselves” with System 2, System 1 seems to be responsible for mostintuitions, judgments, and behaviors. Haidt in particular has argued for a“social intuitionist” model according to which deliberation and reasoningare almost always post hoc rationalizations of System 1 cognition, affect,and behavior.

One process that relies heavily on System 1 is disgust. This emotion,which seems to be unique to human animals, involves characteristicbodily, affective, motivational, evaluative, and cognitive patterns. Forinstance, someone who feels disgusted almost always makes a gapingfacial expression, withdraws slightly from the object of disgust, has aslight reduction in body temperature and heart rate, and feels a sense ofnausea and the need to cleanse herself. In addition, she is motivated to



avoid and even expunge the offending object, experiences it ascontaminating and repugnant, becomes more attuned to other disgustingobjects in the immediate environment, is inclined to treat anything that theobject comes in contact with (whether physically or symbolically) as alsodisgusting, and is more inclined to make harsh moral judgments—bothabout the object and in general—when confronted with the objectexperienced as disgusting. The disgust reaction is nearly impossible torepress, is easily recognized, and—when recognized—empathicallyinduces disgust in the other person.[25] There are certain objects thatalmost all normal adults are disgusted by (feces, decaying corpses, rottingfood, spiders, maggots, gross physical deformities). But there is alsoconsiderable intercultural and interpersonal variation beyond these coreobjects of disgust, including in some better-studied cases cuisines, sexualbehaviors, out-group members, and violations of social norms.

In a recent book, Kelly (2011) persuasively argues that this seeminglybizarre combination of features is best explained by two theses. Theuniversal bodily manifestations of disgust evolved to help humans avoidingesting toxins and other harmful substances, while the more cognitive orsymbolic sense of offensiveness and contamination associated with disgustevolved to help humans avoid diseases and parasites. According to theentanglement thesis (chapter 2), these initially distinct System 1 responsesbecame entangled in the course of human evolution and nowsystematically co-occur. If you make the gape face, whatever you'reattending to will start to look contaminated; if something disgusts you at acognitive level, you will flash a quick gape face. According to the co-optthesis (chapter 4), the entangled emotional system for disgust was laterrecruited for an entirely distinct purpose: to help mark the boundariesbetween in-group and out-group, and thus to motivate cooperation with in-group members, punishment of in-group defectors, and exclusion of out-group members. Because the disgust reaction is both on a “hair trigger” (itacquires new cues extremely easily and empathically, p. 51) and



“ballistic” (once set in motion, it is nearly impossible to halt or reverse, p.72), it was ripe to be co-opted in this way.

If Kelly's account of disgust is on the right track, it seems to have anumber of important moral upshots. One consequence, he argues, is“disgust skepticism” (p. 139), according to which the combination ofdisgust's hair trigger and its ballistic trajectory mean that it is extremelyprone to incorrigible false positives that involve unwarranted feelings ofcontamination and even dehumanization. Hence, “the fact that somethingis disgusting is not even remotely a reliable indicator of moral foul play”but is instead “irrelevant to moral justification” (p. 148).

Furthermore, many theories of value incorporate a link between emotionsand value. According to fitting-attitude theories (Rönnow-Rasumussen2011 is a recent example), something is bad if and only if there is reasonto take a con-attitude (e.g., dislike, aversion, anger, hatred, disgust,contempt) towards it, and good if and only if there is reason to take a pro-attitude (e.g., liking, love, respect, pride, awe, gratitude) towards it.According to response-dependence theories (Prinz 2007), something isbad (good) just in case one would, after reflection and deliberation, hold acon-attitude (pro-attitude) towards it. According to desire-satisfactiontheories of wellbeing (Heathwood 2006 is a recent example), one's life isgoing well to the extent that the events towards which one harbors pro-attitudes occur, and those towards which one harbors con-attitudes do notoccur. If Kelly's disgust skepticism is on the right track, it looks like itwould be a mistake to lump together all con-attitudes. Perhaps it stillmakes sense to connect other con-attitudes, such as indignation, withmoral (non-moral) badness, but it seems unwarranted to connect disgustwith moral (nonmoral) badness, at least directly.[26] Thus, experimentalmoral philosophy of the emotions leads to a potential insight into theevaluative diversity of con-attitudes.



Another potential upshot of the experimental research derives from thefact that disgust belongs firmly in System 1: it is fast, automatic,effortless, potentially unconscious, affect-laden, and nearly incorrigible.Moreover, while it is exceedingly easy to acquire new disgust triggerswhether you want to or not, there is no documented way to de-acquirethem, even if one wants to.[27] Together, these points raise worries aboutmoral responsibility. It's a widely accepted platitude that the less controlone has over one's behavior, the less responsible one is are for thatbehavior. At one extreme, if one totally lacks control, many would say thatone is not responsible for what one does. Imagine an individual who actsbadly because he is disgusted: he gapes when he sees two men kissing,even though he reflectively rejects homophobia; the men see this gapeand, understandably, feel hurt. Would it be appropriate for them to take upa Strawsonian (1962) reactive attitude towards him, such as indignation?Would it be appropriate for him to feel a correlative attitude towardshimself, such as guilt or shame? If his flash of disgust had instead beensomething that he recognized and endorsed, the answers to these questionsmight be simpler, but what are we to say about the case where someone is,as it were, stuck with a disgust trigger that he would rather be rid of? Wedo not attempt to answer this question here, but instead aim to show that,while experimental moral philosophy of the emotions may provide newinsights, it also raises thorny questions.

4. Some Metaethical Issues

Metaethics steps back from ethics to ask about the nature and function ofmorality. Much contemporary metaethics relies on assumptions about thenature of moral thought in the actual world. Experimental moralphilosophy offers to help us make progress on some of these questions bysecuring a firm empirical foundation for the relevant claims or debunkingthem where necessary.



Traditional metaethics can be seen to focus on at least four sets of issues,the relations among them, and a number of other issues in theneighborhood. The issues arise in the areas of 1) Moral Metaphysics, 2)Moral Semantics, 3) Moral Reasons, and 4) Moral Epistemology.[28]

We've mentioned ways in which experimental moral philosophy can bebrought to bear on questions in moral epistemology (critiques of moralintuitions) as well as questions about moral reasons (the debate overinternalism).[29] Here we focus on some of the most importantapplications of experimental moral philosophy thus far to questions aboutmoral metaphysics and moral language.[30]

4.1 Moral Disagreement

The history of philosophical and social scientific approaches to moraldisagreement provides a striking illustration of the way science in generalcan and cannot properly be brought to bear on a question aboutmetaethics. For many years, students of human nature have beenfascinated with moral differences. Herodotus chronicled a series of bizarrepractices many of which his readers would have found immoral, andphilosophers like Sextus Empiricus attempted to draw philosophicalinferences (in Sextus's case, skeptical ones) from such reports.Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, Locke, and Montaigne discussed casesof apparent moral disagreement as well. But the most seriousinvestigations of moral differences came with the birth of culturalanthropology as a distinct discipline around the beginning of the 20th

Century, especially under the influence of Finnish philosopher,sociologist, and anthropologist Edward Westermarck; Americansociologist William Graham Sumner; and American anthropologist FranzBoas, along with his students including, Ruth Benedict, MelvilleHerskovits, and Margaret Mead.

These 20th Century thinkers for the most part advocated what came to be



known as cultural, ethical, or moral relativism, very roughly the view thatthe moral truth depends on the moral beliefs of various groups orindividuals.[31] Despite the empirical credentials of these approaches, theboundaries and distinctions among the variously named theories wereoften vague or imprecise, and the connections between them and theempirical data were not always very strong or even clear, despite agenuine debate among the social scientists employing them. By the middleof the century, philosophers had begun to engage the issues, taking a muchmore cautious and nuanced approach to them.[32] Two in particular,Richard Brandt (1954) and John Ladd (1957), did their own significantphilosophico-anthropological fieldwork among Hopi and Navaho NativeAmericans communities, respectively.

Many would credit Brandt and Ladd as godfathers of the contemporaryexperimental moral philosophy approach (and Hume and Nietzsche as itsgreat-godfathers), though it would not pick up steam for decades to come.Alasdair MacIntyre's A Short History of Ethics (1998), while not based onexperimental research, arguably bears mention as a work in which theauthor attempted to treat the history of ethics from a perspective thatcombined philosophical discussions with an informed perspective onhistory proper, though it was treated by some critics as endorsing moralrelativism (or as downright incoherent). MacIntyre's subsequent work,along with that of others such as Martha Nussbaum (2001), continued thistrend to view the history of morality through the twin lenses ofphilosophical work and empirical scholarship on history proper. J. L.Mackie drew an anti-realist (he called it skeptical) conclusion aboutmorality based on abductive inference from vaguely-referencedanthropological knowledge with a brief but influential discussion of “theargument from relativity” in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). Afew years later, naturalist moral realist Nicholas Sturgeon began hisseminal paper, “Moral Explanations,”(1988) by affirming his respect forthe argument from moral disagreement and his recognition that it could be



resolved only through “piecemeal” and “frustratingly indecisive” aposteriori inquiry, sentiments echoed over a decade later by anti-realistDon Loeb.

Loeb (1998) offered a version of the argument that proceeded by way ofan inference from irresolvable moral disagreement (what Brandt calledfundamental disagreement) to the claim that we lack moral knowledge. Ifour apparent knowledge of morality is our best (or even our only) reasonfor believing morality to be a realm of fact, than an argument for moralskepticism is also indirectly an argument for moral anti- realism, heclaimed, since it is not epistemically responsible to believe in things forwhich we lack good evidence. The question, he thought, was how muchmoral disagreement (and agreement, for that matter) would remain ifvarious explanatory alternatives were exhausted.[33]

In an important paper, John Doris and Alexandra Plakias (2008) turnedtheir attention to the question Sturgeon and Loeb had posed, referring tothe alternative explanatory strategies mentioned by Loeb and others asdefusing explanations. Doris and Plakias considered an experimentsuggesting that a so-called “culture of honor” is much more prevalent inthe southern United States than in the north, and conducted a studytending to support the claim that East Asians react differently to“magistrate and the mob” scenarios (in which a person responsible forkeeping order can do so only by framing a friendless but innocent man)than do Westerners. In both cases, they argued, no good defusingexplanation for the moral disagreement seems available and thus thisevidence seems to support moral anti- realism. Though the paper is asplendid example of experimental moral philosophy, bringing socialscience and philosophy together in addressing a central question inmetaethics, its authors recognize that these two cases are suggestive but byno means dispositive and that much more would need to be done toresolve the kinds of questions they are asking, if the questions are indeed



resolvable.[34] While a few efforts at continuing and refining this researchprogram have begun (Fraser and Hauser, 2010), it is nowhere nearmaturity, and philosophical criticisms of the entire project have beenleveled. For example, Andrew Sneddon (2009 argues that disagreementsamong ordinary people—those who are not “moral experts”—arecompletely irrelevant to metaethics because non-experts lack relevantinformation (about normative theory and experimental psychology, forexample) and we do not know whether these people's disagreementswould persist if they were better informed.

4.2 Moral Language

One promising area for further research concerns the longstanding debateover moral language. In particular, cognitivists (or descriptivists) hold thatordinary moral sentences are best understood as factual assertions,expressing propositions that attribute moral properties (such as rightnessor goodness) to things (such as actions or characters). Non-cognitivists(including their contemporary representatives, the expressivists) hold thatmoral language has a fundamentally different function, to express attitudesor to issue commands, for example. All sides agree that a goodunderstanding of moral language will almost certainly contain an elementof reform and will not capture every idiosyncratic use of that language.But it is also agreed that reform can go too far, so far as to change thesubject. A proper understanding of moral language must be grounded inthe moral practices and intentions of actual speakers, though not, perhaps,in their beliefs about their practices and intentions.

Understanding moral language might be relevant to resolving questionsabout moral objectivity and the nature of morality. If moral language isnot fact-asserting (or is incoherently both fact-asserting and somethingincompatible with that) then there is, in a way, nothing to be a realistabout. Don Loeb (2008) calls this sort of argument “pulling a



metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat.”[35] In this spirit, Loeb hasrecently argued that both sides may have claim to part of the truth,suggesting that the best analysis of the terms in the moral vocabulary (andthe concepts for which they stand) might well be incoherent, combining“non-negotiable”[36] but inconsistent elements. Loeb notes that onvirtually any reasonable theory of language, meaning and reference are atleast partly determined by the semantic intentions and commitments ofordinary speakers, suitably adjusted to account for performance errors andother deviations. Thus, the issue is one requiring sophisticated andphilosophically informed social science, directed at determining thesemantic intentions and commitments of ordinary moral thinkers, notarmchair reasoning in which only two possibilities are considered.

Yet, remarkably, the debate over moral language has been carried on foralmost a century in a kind of empirical vacuum. Instead of gatheringscientific evidence, philosophers have relied almost exclusively on theirown linguistic and substantive intuitions and on the assumption that theyalready possess a good understanding of ordinary moral thought andtalk.[37]

This makes moral language ripe for treatment by experimental moralphilosophers and their colleagues in linguistics and psychology. To datethere has been little research focused directly on these questions byphilosophers, as opposed to semanticists not pursuing philosophicalquestions. No doubt scientific inquiry in this area is fraught with difficultyand will require collaboration among philosophers and social scientists.But that does not make it any less important that it be conducted, nor makeit any more reasonable to treat seat-of-the-pants judgments byphilosophers as adequate.

Fortunately, a new line of research by philosophically inclinedpsychologists has emerged, and it seems highly relevant to these



questions. If ordinary language users have an implicit metaethicalcommitment, it is likely that this commitment would be reflected in themeaning of the words in their moral vocabularies. Thus, one way todiscover what the words in the moral vocabulary are used to do—makefactual assertions or something else--is to uncover people's implicitmetaethical commitments. A promising line of research, beginning withDarley and Goodwin's important paper (2008), and continued by JamesBeebe (forthcoming) and others (Wright et al. 2013; Campbell & Kumar2012; Goodwin & Darley 2010; and Sarkissian et al. 2011) aims to shedlight on these very questions. So far, the results are quite mixed. Peopleseem to treat some moral questions as questions of fact, and others as notmatters of fact. Whether there is any principled way to explain thesevariations, and whether that would shed light on the debate over morallanguage, remains to be seen.

5. Criticisms of Experimental Moral Philosophy

Experimental moral philosophy far outstrips what we've been able tocover here and many issues and areas of productive research have barelybeen touched upon. For example, experimental evidence is relevant tomoral questions in bioethics, such as euthanasia, abortion, geneticscreening, and placebogenic interventions. Likewise, experiments inbehavioral economics and cognitive psychology are being employed inasking moral questions about public policy. We neglect these issues onlybecause of lack of space. In the few words remaining, we explore somepotential criticisms of experimental philosophy.

5.1 Problems with Experimental Design and Interpretation

As a young field, experimental philosophy suffers from various problemswith experimental design and interpretation. These are not insurmountableproblems, and they are problems faced by related fields, such as social



psychology, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics.

One issue that has recently come to the fore is the problem ofreplication.[38] Statistical analysis is not deductive inference, and the merefact that statistical analysis yields a positive result does not guarantee thatanything has been discovered. Typically, an experimental result is treatedas “real” if its p-value is at most .05, but such a value just indicates theprobability that the observation in question would have been made if thenull hypothesis were true. It is not the probability that the null hypothesisis false given the observation.[39] So, even when statistical analysisindicates that the null hypothesis is to be rejected, that indication can befallacious. Moreover, when multiple hypotheses are tested, the chance offallaciously rejecting the null hypothesis at least once rises exponentially.

We should expect other failures of replication because of a bias built intothe system of funding experimentation and publishing results. Theproportion of published false-positives is much higher for unexpected andunpredicted results than for expected and predicted results. Sinceexperimentalists are reluctant to report (and even discouraged by journaleditors and referees from reporting) null results (i.e., results where the p-value is at least .05), for every published, unexpected result there may beany number of unpublished, unexpected non-results. Thus, unexpected,published results are more likely than might appear to be false positives.

The best way to tell is for the experiment to be replicated – preferably byanother research group. If a result cannot be replicated, it is probably amirage. Such mirages have turned up to a disturbing extent recently, asDaniel Kahneman has famously pointed out (Yong 2012). Kahnemanproposed a “daisy chain” of replication, where no result in psychologywould be published until it had been successfully replicated by anotherprominent lab. This proposal has not yet been (and may never be)instituted, but it has raised the problem of replication to salience, and a



related project has taken off. The reproducibility project in psychologyaims to establish the extent to which prominent, published results can bereplicated.[40] Experimental philosophers have followed suit with theirown replication project.[41]

A related issue with experimental design and interpretation has to do with“fishing expeditions.” An experiment is sometimes pejoratively referred toas a fishing expedition if no specific predictions are advanced prior to datacollection, especially when multiple hypotheses are tested. Likewise,critics argue that researchers such as Weinberg, Nichols, & Stich (2008)have put forward hypotheses that are formulated so vaguely as to makethem nearly unfalsifiable. This problem is exacerbated when no guidingpositive heuristic is offered to explain observed patterns (Alfano &Robinson forthcoming).

Another worry is that simultaneously testing many intuition-probes leadsto overconfidence. If one were to test two random samples of people withseveral intuition-probes, the odds are that one would find some differencesin their intuitions—even some statistically significant differences. We sawthat a false-positive rate of 5% is often deemed acceptable, and that meansthat in as many as one out of twenty cases, the test indicates that thepattern of responses did not come from chance when in fact it did. Theprobability of at least one false positive when making multiplecomparisons rises exponentially: P(false positive) = 1−.95n, where n is thenumber of hypotheses tested simultaneously. This is known as theexperimentwise error rate.[42]

One way to establish that a result is real is to see whether the experimenthas a respectable effect size. The most common measure of effect size isCohen's d, which is the ratio of the difference in means betweenconditions to the standard deviation of the relevant variable. So, forexample, a d of 1.0 would indicate that a manipulation moved the mean of



the experimental condition an entire standard deviation away from themean of the control condition, a huge effect. Unfortunately, effect sizeshave, until recently, rarely been reported in experimental philosophy,though that appears to be changing.

One final problem to note with experimental design is that ordinal scalesare often treated as if they were cardinal scales. The widely used Likertscales, for example, are ordinal: the difference between a response of 0and a response of 2 cannot be assumed to be the same “size” as thedifference between a response of 2 and a response of 4. Only if a scale iscardinal can such an assumption be made (indeed, that's what it means fora scale to be cardinal), yet this mistake is not uncommon.

5.2 Philosophical Problems

One might object, however, that the real problem with experimentalphilosophy is not that science is hard but that science is irrelevant. “Real”moral philosophy, whatever that is, is in principle unaffected by empiricalor experimental results.

One might base the argument for the irrelevance of experimental moralphilosophy on the is-ought dichotomy. Whatever science turns up aboutwhat is, the argument would go, it cannot turn up anything about whatought to be. Arguably, however experimental evidence can help—at aminimum—to establish what is possible, necessary, and impossible.[43] Ifit can do that, it can at least constrain normative views, assuming theought-implies-can principle to be true. What is not possible is not morallyrequired, for example. Furthermore, if there are thick moral propertiessuch as character, virtue, or wellbeing then it is possible to investigate atleast some normative issues empirically—by investigating these thickproperties, just as experimental moral philosophers have been doing.

We need to proceed cautiously here. No one doubts that what we ought to



do depends on how things are non-morally. For example, the moral claimthat a given man deserves to be punished presupposes the non-moral factthat he committed the crime. It should come as no surprise, then, thatexperimental evidence might be relevant in this way to morality. Whetherexperimental evidence is relevant to discovering the fundamental moralprinciples—those meant to be put into action one way or anotherdepending on how the world is non-morally—is still subject to debate.

Another version of this argument says that fundamental moralphilosophical principle are, if true at all, necessarily true, and thatempirical research can establish at best only contingent truths.[44] But iffundamental moral theories are necessary, then they are necessary forcreatures like us. And one thing that empirical investigation can do is tohelp establish what sorts of creatures we are. Imagination needs materialto work with. When one sits in one's armchair, imagining a hypotheticalscenario, one makes a whole host of assumptions about what people arelike, how psychological processes work, and so on. These assumptions canbe empirically well or poorly informed. It's hard to see why anyone coulddoubt that being well-informed is to be preferred. Likewise it's hard to seehow anyone could doubt the relevance of experimental evidence to bettergrounding our empirical assumptions, in this case our assumptionsrelevant to moral philosophy. Exactly how experimental—or morebroadly, empirical—evidence is relevant, and how relevant it is, are atpresent hotly contested matters.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank James Beebe, Gunnar Björnsson, Wesley Buckwalter,Roxanne DesForges, John Doris, Gilbert Harman, Dan Haybron, ChrisHeathwood, Antti Kauppinen, Daniel Kelly, Joshua Knobe, ClaytonLittlejohn, Edouard Machery, Josh May, John Mikhail, Christian Miller,Sven Nyholm, Brian Robinson, Chandra Sripada, and Carissa Veliz,several anonymous referees, and the editors of this encyclopedia forhelpful comments and suggestions.

Notes to Experimental Moral Philosophy

1. As Quine is said to have put it, “The universe is no university.”

2. Isen & Levin (1972).

3. John Stuart Mill (1977) had something like this in mind when he wroteof “experiments of living” (1977, 260–261).

Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers, with linksto its database.



4. Statistical power is the probability that a test will reject the nullhypothesis (the statement that the conditions of the experiment do notdiffer) when the null hypothesis is false. It is therefore 1 minus theprobability of a Type II error (failure to detect a relationship despite thereality of the relationship). Statistical power increases as the sample sizegrows.

5. There is a good deal of exciting new work on questions oftencharacterized as matters of public policy, but which have important moraldimensions. See, among others, Sunstein & Thaler (2008), Sunstein(2013), Gigerenzer & Muir Gray (2011), and Conly (2012). Also see thework of behavioral economists such as George Lowenstein (Kriss,Loewenstein, Wang, and Weber, 2011; Cain, Loewenstein, and Moore,2011).

6. The distinction between moral intuitions and moral judgments isfraught. Here, we treat moral intuitions as moral seemings and moraljudgments as moral beliefs.

7. See Doris & Stich (2006) and Stich & Weinberg (2001).

8. For incisive criticisms of this claim, see Banerjee, Huebner, & Hauser(2010), Sytsma & Livengood (2011), and Lam (2010).

9. Others prominently expressing concern about the bearing ofexperimental results such as these on philosophers' reliance on moralintuitions include, Kwame Anthony Appiah (2008) and Peter Singer(2005).

10. This and related research is discussed in more detail in subsection 2.3.

11. Fiery Cushman and Liane Young (2009, 2011) have developed analternative dual-process model for moral (and non-moral reasoning), as



has Daniel Kahneman (2011). For more on dual-system approaches seeSection 3.3, below.

12. Mediation analysis attempts to determine whether one variable (thepredictor) affects a second variable (the outcome) by influencing a third,mediating variable (Baron & Kenny 1986). Structural equation modelingallows the analyst to assess and compare various models relatingpredictors, outcomes, mediators, and moderators (Kline 2005).

13. See Nadelhoffer (2004, 2006); Knobe & Mendlow (2004); Knobe(2004a, 2004b, 2007); Pettit & Knobe (2009); Tannenbaum, Ditto, &Pizarro (2007); Beebe & Buckwalter (2010), Beebe & Jensen (2012);Beebe (forthcoming); Alfano, Beebe, & Robinson (2012); Robinson, Stey,& Alfano (2013).

14. Such scales are named for their inventor, Rensis Likert (1932,pronounced “LICK-urt”). The participant is presented a statement and thenasked to agree or disagree with it on a numeric scale. Commonly, scalesrun from 1 to 7, 1 to 5, −3 to 3, or −2 to 2. Almost always, the endpointsare labeled ‘strongly disagree’ and ‘strongly agree’. Quite often, themidpoint is labeled ‘neither agree nor disagree’. Sometimes other pointson the scale are labeled as well.

15. The idea that seemingly predictive and explanatory concepts mightalso have a normative component is not entirely original with Knobe;Bernard Williams (1985, p. 129) pointed out that virtues and vices havesuch a dual nature.

16. Owen Flanagan (1991) considered some of the same evidence beforeDoris and Harman, but he was reluctant to draw the pessimisticconclusions they did about virtue ethics.

17. When it comes to explaining variance in behavior, the basic idea is



that the statistical analysis of experimental results yields a correlationbetween a personality variable (such as extroversion) and a behavioralvariable (such as an act of helping). Correlations range from −1 to +1. Acorrelation of 0 means that the individual variable is of literally no use inpredicting the behavioral outcome; a correlation of 1 means that theindividual variable is a perfect positive predictor; a correlation of −1means that the individual variable is a perfect negative predictor. Actualcorrelations tend to be between −.3 and +.3. The amount of varianceexplained by a given predictor variable is the square of the correlationbetween that variable and the behavior in question. So, for instance, ifextroversion is correlated with helping behavior at .25, then extroversionexplains 6.25% of the variance in helping behavior. Although this is onlyone, rather simplistic, measure of explanatory power, personality variablesdo not look better on other measures, such as Cohen's d, h2, or partial-h2.

18. Merritt (2000) was the first to suggest that the situationist critiquecould be handled by offloading some of the responsibility for virtue ontothe social environment in something like this way.

19. One might hope that philosophical reflection on ethics would promotemoral behavior. Eric Schwitzgebel has recently begun to investigatewhether professional ethicists behave better morally than their non-ethicistphilosophical peers, and claims that, on most measures, the two groups areindistinguishable (Schwitzgebel 2009; Schwitzgebel & Rust 2010;Schwitzgebel et al. 2011).

20. See, for instance, Diener, Scollon, & Lucas (2003).

21. See Schimmack & Oishi (2005) for a critical reply, which argues thatchronically accessible information is a much better predictor of lifesatisfaction responses than temporarily accessible information, such ashow many dates one went on last week.



22. See Haybron (2008).

23. See Nichols (2002; 2004, ch. 5.)

24. See Kennett (2006), Roskies (2003), and Shoemaker (2011). SeeStrandberg & Björklund (2013) for a different sort of experimentally-motivated argument against internalism. See also Buckwalter & Turri(unpublished manuscript) for an argument that internalism and externalismdraw on distinct folk notions of belief. Some doubt the relevance ofempirical considerations to the debate over internalism in ethics, arguingthat since internalism claims a necessary or conceptual link between moraljudgments and motivation, externalism is compatible with any merelycontingent connection.

25. See May (forthcoming) for a criticism of these findings, and Kelly(2011, especially chapter 1) for a comprehensive literature review.

26. Fitting attitude theorists needn't deny this. Some experiences of disgustare not fitting attitudes upon which to ground wellbeing, they could say.And similar arguments could perhaps be deployed on behalf of the othermetaethical views mentioned above. Even so, experimental moralphilosophy could play a useful role, helping us to identify suspectexperiences of disgust.

27. There does seem to be some potential for fine-tuning, however (Rozin2008; Case et al. 2006).

28. 1) Moral Metaphysics: Is morality a realm of fact? 2) MoralSemantics: What is the function of moral language? How are moral termsto be defined? 3) Moral Reasons: Why be moral? What is the connectionbetween moral principles and reasons for action, or between moraljudgments and motivations to act in accord with them? What, indeed, arereasons for action and are they all grounded in our desires? 4) Moral



Epistemology. How (if at all) is moral knowledge possible? Is there such athing as good moral reasoning and if so, what are its precepts?

29. These may themselves be relevant to questions in category 1, moralmetaphysics. The categories are somewhat vague, admit of a good deal ofoverlap, and are by no means exhaustive, but they will serve our purposehere.

30. We also leave aside important issues related to the evolution ofmorality (see, e.g., Trivers, 1971, and Cosmides and Tooby, 2013), itselfthe basis for an important challenge to moral realist (and other) views. Thelatter, evolutionary debunking arguments, are discussed in the entries,“Morality and Evolutionary Biology” and “Moral Epistemology”.

31. See Kluckholn (1959) and Benedict (1959).

32. Moral disagreement is still often cited in philosophical discussions ofmoral relativism. For example, John Cook (1999) and Richard Schweder(2012) take empirical evidence concerning apparent moral disagreementseriously.

33. Other philosophers notably recognizing the relevance of empiricalinquiry to the argument from moral disagreement include Michele MoodyAdams (1997), Francis Snare (1980 and 1984), and William Tolhurst(1987).

34. For a fuller discussion see the article in this encyclopedia by Stich andDoris, Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches, Section 6.

35. Ayer (1936), who makes a similar argument, would have eschewedlabeling the conclusion of such an argument as metaphysical, since hethought the issue of moral objectivity couldn't be articulated in ameaningful way. (Ayer used the word ‘metaphysical’ in a very different



sense than we do here.)

36. This is Stich and Weinberg's (2001) term.

37. Frank Jackson (1998) displays what some might think is a too-cavalierattitude toward empirical investigation of moral language: “I amsometimes asked—in a tone that suggests that the question is a majorobjection—why, if conceptual analysis is concerned to elucidate whatgoverns our classificatory practice, don't I advocate doing serious opinionpolls on people's responses to various cases? My answer is that I do—when it is necessary. Everyone who presents the Gettier cases to a class ofstudents is doing their own bit of fieldwork, and we all know the answerthey get in the vast majority of cases.” (36–37.)

38. The scandal over replication has (rightly or wrongly) assumed suchproportions recently that John Doris has taken to calling it, “Repligate”.

39. There is also an ongoing controversy surrounding null-hypothesissignificance testing (NHST). In a nutshell, the problem is that a p-value isa conditional probability, but not the conditional probability that onemight expect. A p-value is the probability that the result in hand wouldhave been observed given the null hypothesis, i.e., given that nothinginteresting is happening (no positive correlations, no negative correlations,no interaction effects, and so on). This is sometimes inverted by sloppyresearchers and interpreters, who gloss the p-value as the probability of thenull hypothesis given the observation. Symbolically, the difference isbetween P(observation | null) and P(null | observation). The latter, moredesirable, conditional probability can be estimated using Bayesianstatistical analysis, but seldom is (and there are controversies surroundingBayesian analysis, especially the arbitrariness of prior probabilities). Foran introduction to these problems, see Abelson (1997), Cohen (1994), andWagenmakers et al. (2012).



40. http://www.openscienceframework.org/project/EZcUj/wiki/home

41.http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/xphipage/Experimental%20Philosophy-Replications.html

42. In a recent critique of this kind of fallacious statistical thinking, PeterAustin, Muhammad Mamdani, David Juurlink, and Janet Hux (2006)describe statistical arguments purporting to show that Canadian patients'astrological signs were often correlated with their pathologies. Forinstance, using the same statistical techniques favored by manyexperimental philosophers one would be led to conclude that Gemini are30% more likely to be alcoholics (p < 0.02), Scorpios have an 80% higherrisk of developing leukemia (p < 0.05), and Virgo women suffer 40%more from excessive vomiting during pregnancy (p < 0.04). These arepresumably statistical anomalies, not indicators of genuine health risks.

43. If something is actual, for example, then it is also possible.

44. We are here indebted to Chris Heathwood.

Copyright © 2014 by the authors Don Loeb and Mark Alfano



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