Experiments in Ethics (review)

Experiments in Ethics is a notable philosophical offering in several respects: 1) the empirical approach to ethics is shaking up the analytic paradigm, 2) Appiah’s overview includes much of the most important and interesting work being done in the empirical vein, and 3) Appiah is among the best writers publishing philosophy today.

Through much of its history, philosophy ranged freely between conceptual and empirical methods. But as Appiah’s introduction explains, in the modern period the continuity between factual and conceptual disciplines was undermined. An empiricist himself, Hume distinguished moral claims and factual claims, driving a wedge between ethics and psychology that would often be mistaken for a barrier. Despite his own scientific expertise, Kant argued for a priori philosophical foundations against Hume’s global empiricism, opening a methodological and disciplinary gap. Despite the ascending influence of empiricism during the nineteenth century, Husserl and Frege kept the notion of a purely conceptual philosophical analysis alive, an impulse which metamorphosed into linguistic analysis in the early twentieth century. For a priorists and formalists, eschewing “psychologism” for the autonomy of ethics was a philosophical shibboleth.

Philosophy’s analytic flight from empiricism to autonomous conceptualism paralleled neo-classical economics, whose formalisms were based on the a priori “economic man” conception of rational self-interest-maximization. As recent psychological studies have shown, however, philosophers and economists ignored real behavior and the variety of moral intuitions at their peril. Quine famously challenged the a priori/empirical separation at the midcentury, and soon philosophers and psychologists were again in dialogue. Experiments in Ethics is an elegant introduction to this renewed dialogue of moral psychology and moral philosophy.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the reaction against abstract principles took the form of a reawakened interest in virtue ethics and moral psychology. “The Case against Character” examines some of the research that challenges the autonomy of ethics with psychological facts. It shows, for instance, that human personalities are more ethically heterogeneous than some appeals to character have assumed. Everyone knows that characters change with situations, and such flexibility has often been associated with a lack of integrity. But a careful analysis of virtue shows that the good of virtues can be very situation-dependent, regarding both the moral demands of circumstances as well as the usefulness of circumstances for supporting the virtues.

“The Case against Intuition” develops a similar line against simplistic appeals to moral intuitions. Traditional ethicists have often hoped that certain intuitions about goods, morals, and their priorities were self-evident, and thus in no further need of justification. Moderns and postmoderns have been more ready to ask, “Self-evident to whom?” Appiah explores this theoretical obstacle invoking recent research that shows how moral intuitions can be influenced by morally irrelevant circumstances of context and biology.

“The Varieties of Moral Experience” explores evidence that some of our moral emotions are deeply rooted in human nature. At the cost of considerable controversy, evolutionary psychologists have been major supporters of this use of empirical ethics. One of their contentions is that moral reactions are modular, i.e., organized into basic patterns adaptively oriented toward common situations. Appiah considers several candidates for such patterns: compassion, reciprocity, hierarchy, purity, and outsiders/insiders. Far from rigidly determining behavior, however, these responses are like raw materials to be further adapted to specific situations. The philosopher’s challenge in this is not to reconcile freedom and determinism, but rather to explain how deliberation can put these generalized reactions to the best use.

The book’s first chapter ends by asking, “Can ethics be naturalized?” “The Ends of Ethics” considers the implications of the new empiricism for ethical naturalism. On this question, Appiah is less interested in meta-ethical semantics of realism or cognitivism than in subverting the autonomy of ethics. It is the ideal of autonomy, Appiah suggests, that explains the endless fascination of ethical philosophers with hard cases (the “quandary” approach), as if analyzing hard cases carefully enough should discover the best or right outcome. The naturalism of empirical study, Appiah...