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Experimental Moral Philosophy

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Stanford Encyclopedia Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a methodology in the

last decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the larger experimental
of Philosophy philosophy (X-Phi, X) approach. From the beginning, it has been
embroiled in controversy on a number of fronts. Some doubt that it is
philosophy at all. Others acknowledge that it is philosophy but think that it
has produced modest results at best and confusion at worst.

T
1. Introduction
Edward N. Zalta Uri Nodelman Colin Allen R. Lanier Anderson
Principal Editor Senior Editor Associate Editor Faculty Sponsor 1.1 What Counts as an Experiment?
AF
Editorial Board 1.2 Who Conducts the Experimental Investigation?
http://plato.stanford.edu/board.html 1.3 How Directly Must the Experimentation be Related to the
Library of Congress Catalog Data
Philosophy?
ISSN: 1095-5054 1.4 What Counts as Experimental Philosophy, as Opposed to
Psychology?
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3. Character, Wellbeing, and Emotion
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3.1 Character and Virtue
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4. Some Metaethical Issues
Experimental Moral Philosophy
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Copyright 4.1 Moral Disagreement
Don Loeb and Mark Alfano 4.2 Moral Language
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
5.2 Philosophical Problems
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1. Introduction
Before the research program can be evaluated, we should have some
conception of its scope. But controversy surrounds questions about its
boundaries as well. Uncontroversially, the distinction between
experimental and non-experimental philosophy is not identical to the
distinction between a posteriori and a priori philosophy. Experimental
evidence is a proper subset of empirical evidence, which is itself a subset
of a posteriori evidence. Can any more be said?
One reason it is so difficult to specify the boundaries of the program is that
the current surge in interest in experimental philosophy is relatively new.
Another is that practitioners of experimental philosophy are pulled in
opposing directions. On the one hand, there is a desire to see experimental
philosophy as continuous with the history of philosophy, and thus to view
the class broadly. Admirers are likely to think that there is little room for
doubt about the approach's claim to philosophical respectability, arguing
that it is really just an extension of traditional philosophical approaches
going back to Aristotle. He and many others in the philosophical canon
would not have seen an important distinction between science and
philosophy. They were as interested in natural philosophyor science
as in anything else; distinctions among fields of study are relatively
recent phenomena.[1] On the other hand, there is an inclination to think of
the methodology as noveleven revolutionaryand thus to characterize
it more narrowly. When we factor in issues about the scope of moral
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
philosophy in general, things become even more complex. Still, there are a
number of dimensions along which we might wish to understand the field
more or less broadly. Among the most important are:
1.1 What Counts as an Experiment?
Paradigmatic experiments involve randomized assignment to varying
conditions of objects from a representative sample, followed by statistical
comparison of the outcomes for each condition. The variation in
conditions is sometimes called a manipulation. For example, an
experimenter might try to select a representative sample of people,
randomly assign them either to find or not to find a dime in the coin return
of a payphone, and then measure the degree to which they subsequently
help someone they take to be in need.[2] Finding or not finding the dime is
the condition; degree of helpfulness is the outcome variable.
While true experiments follow this procedure, studies allow non-random
assignment to condition. Astronomers, for example, sometimes speak of
natural experiments. Although we are in no position to affect the
motions of heavenly bodies, we can observe them under a variety of
conditions, over long periods of time, and with a variety of instruments.
Likewise, anthropological investigation of different cultures' moral beliefs
and practices is unlikely to involve manipulating variables in the lives of
the cultures' members, but such studies are valuable and empirically
respectable. Still, for various reasons, the evidential value of studies is less
than that of experiments, and indeed, most published research in
experimental philosophy involves true experiments.
Arguably, other modes of inquiry such as historical research should also
be treated as natural and legitimate extensions of paradigmatically
experimental approaches. Indeed, some would treat history itself as a
series of quasi-experiments in which different ways of life produce a
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
variety of outcomes. [3] In all these cases, what matters most is whether
the conclusions of the inquiry are grounded in evidence rising to the
standards set by social and natural science.
The distinction between studies and experiments primarily concerns input
variables. Another distinction has to do with outcome variables. One of
the paradigmatic outcome measures of experimental philosophy is the
survey, 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 social
psychology using the survey paradigm, but it is also subject to trenchant
criticism. Instead of revealing what people think, surveys might establish
what people think they think, what they think the experimenter wants them
to think, what they think other participants think, or just something they
made up because they had to provide a response. This is a worry that
arises for all surveys, but it is especially pertinent in the context of
experimental philosophy because participant responses are often treated as
equivalent to what one would say or even how one would judge. important that the philosopher herself have done the experimental work.
The survey paradigm suffers from other methodological drawbacks as
well. 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 how
they would reason and respond. Surveys provide only tenuous and
indirect evidence about these activities, and so it might behoove
experimental philosophers to employ or devise outcome measures that
would more reliably and directly capture these features of morality.
How closely tied to true experiments must a philosophical investigation
be, then, if it is to count as experimental moral philosophy? According to
the most capacious view, the guiding principle of experimental philosophy
is that when philosophical arguments invoke or make assumptions about
empirical matters, those assumptions should be assessed according to the
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
best natural and social scientific evidence available, and that if such
evidence is not currently available it should where possible be acquired,
either by seeking the help of specialists with the relevant scientific training
or by having well-trained philosophers conduct the research themselves.
Thus, the term, experimental moral philosophy might be replaced by a
phrase like empirically well-informed moral philosophy. While this seems
unobjectionable, there may still be local objections to the scientific
methodology and to the relevance or probative force of empirical research
in particular cases. Some of these are discussed in the concluding section
of this entry.
1.2 Who Conducts the Experimental Investigation?
A good deal of the work in experimental moral philosophy involves
experiments performed by philosophers in pursuit of answers to
philosophical questions. In other cases, philosophers draw on experimental
results produced by social scientists. It is hard to see why it would be
By way of illustration, consider the case of Richard Brandt, the well-
known moral philosopher, who spent time living among the Hopi Native
Americans as an anthropological observer in an effort to understand their
ethical views. During that time, he conducted the empirical investigation
himself (Brandt 1954), but in later work (1998) he called upon a great deal
of research by others, many of whom were social scientists by training, not
philosophers. It seems arbitrary to treat the former work as of a
fundamentally different sort from the latter. Both qualify as fine examples
of empirically well-informed moral philosophy.
Surely what matters, then, is not the identity or affiliation of the
experimenter, but whether the experiment is well-designed, as free of
confounds as possible, sufficiently highly powered[4], carefully
interpreted, informed by the existing literature, and so on. Philosophers
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
can be especially insightful in helping to design experiments that are not
plagued by such problems, partly because one of the capacities cultivated
by philosophical training is the ability to imagine and construct potential
counterexamples and counterarguments. When the conclusions aimed at
are recognizably philosophical, there seems to be little room for doubt that
philosophers should be included in both experimental design and the
interpretation of results. They are likely to improve the operationalization
of the relevant concepts and to better understand the philosophical
implications of the results.
1.3 How Directly Must the Experimentation be Related to the
Philosophy?
Moral philosophers often rely on beliefs about the way the world is, how it
works, and how it got that wayassumptions whose empirical credentials
are impeccable but difficult to reconstruct. In many cases, the justification
for the beliefs is unimportant so long as their justificatory status is well-
established. A philosopher considering the moral permissibility of stem
cell research, for example, ought to understand the nature of these cells,
gestation and embryonic development, the aims of the research projects
employing (or seeking to employ) stem cells, and their prospects for
success. Knowledge about these matters depends in many ways on the
results of scientific experimentation, though perhaps conducted long ago
and without any expectation of philosophical payoff.
Still, in some cases it is important that an experiment aim at answering a
particular question, since this can improve experimental design.
Experiments that merely aim to find out what will happen when tend practices, and institutions we morally ought to adopt should take note of
to be under-theorized, to rely on the wrong distinctions, and even to be
uninterpretable. Well-designed confirmatory experiments make specific
predictions 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
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
context of exploring the hypothesis space, but they are not themselves
evidence. Since confirmatory experiments can provide evidence that is
useful in ethical (or more broadly philosophical) reasoning, philosophers
have an important role to play in their design and interpretation.
1.4 What Counts as Experimental Philosophy, as Opposed to
Psychology?
As is often the case, there are examples at either extreme for which it's
easy to give an answer. Virtually any question in ethics will have an
empirical dimension. Most people would agree that it is impermissible to
torture an animal just for fun and that the reason has something to do with
the pain the animal would experience. No doubt part of our evidence that
the animal would indeed suffer is grounded in experimental or at least
empirical knowledge of animal psychology. But it seems overbroad to
think of this case as arising in experimental moral philosophy or
psychology. Thinking in terms of empirically well-informed moral
philosophy seems to moot the issue of how to characterize a case like this,
and arguably captures the most important motivations underlying the more
common phraseology.
Other cases are more easily classified as belonging to disciplines other
than philosophy. It seems more accurate to think of research showing that
people are much more inclined to be organ donors if donation is the
default position and those wishing not to donate are permitted to opt out
(Gigerenzer 2008, 23) as psychology or sociology rather than
philosophy. But good thinking about the question of what sort of policies,
this evidence.[5] Once again, moving the focus from experimental to
empirically well-informed moral philosophy might be thought to moot the
concern about how to characterize such cases without sacrificing much
that is useful to understanding the various research projects. Indeed, the
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
problem of what counts as experimental moral philosophy is just a
particular application of the vexed (but perhaps unimportant) question of
what counts as philosophy in the first place.
Here is a roadmap for the rest of this entry. Section 2 canvasses
experimental research on moral judgments and intuitions, describing
various programmatic uses to which experimental results have been put,
then turning to specific examples of experimental research on moral
judgment and intuition, including intuitions about intentionality and
responsibility, as well as the so-called linguistic analogy. Section 3
discusses experimental results on thick (i.e., simultaneously descriptive
and normative) topics, including character and virtue, wellbeing, and
emotion and affect. Section 4 discusses questions about moral
disagreement and moral language, both thought to be relevant to the
longstanding debate over moral objectivity. Section 5 considers some
potential objections to experimental moral philosophy.
2. Moral Judgments and Intuitions
As mentioned above, ethics encompasses not only moral judgment but
also moral perception, behavior, feeling, deliberation, reasoning, and so
on. Experimentalists have investigated moral intuition, moral judgments,
moral emotions, and moral behaviors, among other things. The most
thoroughly investigated are moral intuitions,[6] discussed below.
2.1 Two Negative Programs
One project for the experimental ethics of moral judgment, associated with
Stephen Stich and Jonathan Weinberg,[7] is to determine the extent to
which various moral intuitions are shared by philosophers and ordinary
people. As some experimental philosophers are fond of pointing out, many
philosophers appeal to intuitions as evidence or use their content as
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premises in arguments. They often say such things as, as everyone would
agree, p, the common man thinks that p, or simply, intuitively, p. But
would everyone agree that p? Does the common man think that p? Is p
genuinely intuitive? These are empirical questions, and if the early results
documented 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 philosophical
implications remain in dispute, with some thinking that they would
seriously undermine our reliance on moral (or metaethical) intuitions, and
others thinking that they wouldn't matter much at all. At least this much
should be relatively uncontroversial: If the claim intuitively p is meant
to be evidence for p, then philosophers who make such claims should
tread carefully, especially when it matters whether the philosopher's
intuition is as widely shared as the philosopher believes it to be.
A second negative project involves examining the degree to which
moral 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, but
East 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 implications
of this growing body of evidence are hotly disputed, with some arguing
for the unreliability of moral intuitions, and, to the extent that moral
judgments 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 intuitions
are subject to normatively irrelevant situational influences (e.g., order
effects), while Feltz & Cokely (2009) and Knobe (2011) have documented
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correlations between moral intuitions and (presumably) normatively
irrelevant individual differences (e.g., extroversion). Such results, if they
can be replicated and adequately explained, might again warrant
skepticism about moral intuitions, or at least about some classes of
intuitions or intuiters.[9]
2.2 Three Positive Programs
Other philosophers are more sanguine about the upshot of experimental
investigations of moral judgment and intuition. Joshua Knobe, among
others, attempts to use experimental investigations of the determinants of
moral judgments to identify the contours of philosophically interesting
concepts and the mechanisms or processes that underlie moral judgment.
He has famously argued for the pervasive influence of moral
considerations throughout folk psychological concepts (2009, 2010; see
also Pettit & Knobe 2009), claiming, among other things, that the concept
of an intentional action is sensitive to the foreseeable evaluative valence of
the consequences of that action (2003, 2004b, 2006).[10] Such claims
remain extremely controversial at present, with some philosophers
strongly inclined to treat such differences as reflecting performance errors,
widespread though they may be.
Another line of research, associated with Joshua Greene and his
colleagues (2001, 2004, 2008), argues for a dual-system model of moral
judgment. On their view (very crudely), a slower, more deliberative,
system tends to issue in a person's utilitarian-like judgments, whereas a
quicker, more automatic system tends to produce judgments more in line
with a Kantian approach. Which system is engaged by a given moral
reasoning task is determined in part by personal style and in part by
situational factors.[11] Still, even if something like this story is correct, it is
not clear that it reflects in any way on the moral dispute between Kantians
and Utilitarians.
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
A related approach, favored by Chandra Sripada (2011), aims to identify
the features to which intuitions about philosophically important concepts
are sensitive. Sripada thinks that the proper role of experimental
investigations of moral intuitions is not to identify the mechanisms
underlying moral intuitions. Such knowledge, it is claimed, contributes
little of relevance to philosophical theorizing. It is rather to investigate, on
a case by case basis, the features to which people are responding when
they have such intuitions. On this view, people (philosophers included)
can readily identify whether they have a given intuition, but not why they
have it. An example from the debate over determinism (the view that all
our actions are the products of prior causes) and free will: manipulation
cases have been thought to undermine compatibilist intuitionsintuition
supporting the notion that determinism is compatible with the sort of free
will required for moral responsibility (Pereboom 2001). In such cases, an
unwitting victim is described as having been surreptitiously manipulated
into having and reflectively endorsing a motivation to j. Critics of
compatibilism say that such cases satisfy compatibilist criteria for moral
responsibility, and yet, intuitively, the actors are not morally responsible
(Pereboom 2001). Sripada (2011) makes a strong case, however, through
both mediation analysis and structural equation modeling, that to the
extent that people feel the manipulees not to be morally responsible, they
do so because they judge him them in fact not to satisfy the compatibilist
criteria.[12] Thus, by determining which aspects of the case philosophical
intuitions are responding to, it might be possible to resolve otherwise
intractable 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 have
investigated the complex patterns in people's dispositions to make
judgments about moral notions (praiseworthiness, blameworthiness,
responsibility), cognitive attitudes (belief, knowledge, remembering),
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy Don Loeb and Mark Alfano

motivational attitudes (desire, favor, advocacy), and character traits

(compassion, callousness) in the context of violations of and conformity to
various norms (moral, prudential, aesthetic, legal, conventional,
descriptive).[13] In Knobe's original experiment, participants first read a
description of a choice scenario: the protagonist is presented with a
potential policy (aimed at increasing profits) that would result in a side
effect (either harming or helping the environment). Next, the protagonist
explicitly disavows caring about the side effect, and chooses to go ahead
with the policy. The policy results as advertised: both the primary and the
side effect occur. Participants are asked to attribute intentionality or an
attitude (or, in the case of later work by Robinson et al. 2013, a character
trait) to the protagonist. What Knobe found was that participants were
significantly more inclined to indicate that the protagonist had
intentionally brought about the side effect when it was perceived to be bad
(harming the environment) than when it was perceived to be good (helping
the environment). This effect has been replicated dozens of times, and its
Figure 1: Model of Participant Response to X-Phi Vignettes
scope has been greatly expanded from intentionality attributions after
violations of a moral norm to attributions of diverse properties after In this model, the boxes represent entities, the arrows represent causal or
violations of a wide variety of norms. functional processes, and the area in grey represents the mind of the
participant, which is not directly observable but is the target of
The first-order aim of interpreters of this body of evidence is to create a
investigation. In broad strokes, the idea is that a participant first reads the
model that predicts when the attribution asymmetry will crop up. The
text of the vignette and forms a mental model of what happens in the
second-order aims are to explain as systematically as possible why the
story. On the basis of this model (and almost certainly while the vignette is
effect occurs, and to determine the extent to which the attribution
still being read), the participant begins to interpret, i.e., to make both
asymmetry can be considered rational. Figure 1, presented here for the
descriptive and normative judgments about the scenario, especially about
first time, models how participants' responses to this sort of vignette are
the mental states and character traits of the people in it. The participant
produced:
then reads the experimenter's question, forms a mental model of what is
being asked, andbased on her judgments about the scenarioforms an
answer to that question. That answer may then be pragmatically revised
(to avoid unwanted implications, to bring it more into accord with what
the participant thinks the experimenter wants to hear, etc.) and is finally

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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
recorded as an explicit response to a statement about the protagonist's
attitudes (e.g., he brought about the side effect intentionally, graded on a
Likert scale.)[14]
What we know is that vignette texts in which a norm violation is described
tend to produce higher indications of agreement on the Likert scale
responses. What experimental philosophers try to do is to explain this
asymmetry 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 claims
that normative judgments about the action influence otherwise descriptive
judgments about whether it was intentional (or desired, or expected, etc.),
and that, moreover, this input is part of the very conception of
intentionality (desire, belief, etc.). Thus, on the conceptual competence
model, the asymmetry in attributions is a rational expression of the
ordinary conception of intentionality (desire, belief, etc.), which turns out
to have a normative component.[15]
The motivational bias model (Alicke 2008; Nadelhoffer 2004, 2006)
agrees that the asymmetry originates in the judgment stage, and that
normative judgments influence descriptive judgments. However, unlike
the conceptual competence model, it takes this to be a bias rather than an
expression of conceptual competence. Thus, on this model, the asymmetry
in attributions is a distortion of the correct conception of intentionality
(desire, belief, etc.).
The deep self concordance model (Sripada 2010, 2012; Sripada & Konrath
2011) also locates the source of the asymmetry in the judgment stage, but
does not recognize an influence (licit or illicit) of normative judgments on
descriptive judgments. Instead, the model claims that when assessing
intentional action, people not only attend to their representation of a
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
person's surface selfher expectations, means-end beliefs, moment-to-
moment intentions, and conditional desiresbut also to their
representation of the person's deep self, which harbors her sentiments,
values, and core principles. According to the model, when assessing
whether someone intentionally brings about some state of affairs, people
determine (typically unconsciously) whether there exists sufficient
concordance between their representation of the outcome the agent brings
about and what they take to be her deep self. For instance, when the
chairman says he does not care at all about either harming or helping the
environment, 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 the
environment, this is discordant with his anti-environment deep self.
According to the deep self concordance model, then, the asymmetry in
attributions is a reasonable expression of the folk psychological distinction
between the deep and shallow self. (Whether that distinction in turn is
defensible, 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 in
the pragmatic revision stage. According to this model, participants judge
the protagonist not to have acted intentionally in both norm-conforming
and norm-violating cases. However, when it comes time to tell the
experimenter what they think, participants do not want to be taken as
suggesting that the harm-causing protagonist is blameless, so they report
that he acted intentionally. This is a reasonable goal, so according to the
pragmatic revision model, the attribution asymmetry is rational, though
misleading.
According to the deliberation model (Alfano, Beebe, & Robinson 2012;
Robinson, Stey, & Alfano forthcoming; Scaife & Webber forthcoming),
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
the best explanation of the complex patterns of evidence is that the very
first mental stage, the formation of a mental model of the scenario, differs
between norm-violation and norm-conformity vignettes. When the
protagonist is told that a policy he would ordinarily want to pursue
violates a norm, he acquires a reason to deliberate further about what to
do; in contrast, when the protagonist is told that the policy conforms to
some norm, he acquires no such reason. Participants tend to model the
protagonist as deliberating about what to do when and only when a norm
would be violated. Since deliberation leads to the formation of other
mental statessuch as beliefs, desires, and intentionsthis basal
difference between participants' models of what happens in the story flows
through the rest of their interpretation and leads to the attribution
asymmetry. On the deliberation model, then, the attribution asymmetry
originates much earlier than other experimental philosophers suppose, and
is due to rational processes.
Single-factor models such as these are not the only way of explaining the
attribution asymmetry. Mark Phelan and Hagop Sarkissian (2009, p. 179)
find the idea of localizing the source of the asymmetry in a single stage or
variable implausible, claiming that attempts to account for the Knobe
effect by recourse to only one or two variables, though instructive, are
incomplete and overreaching in their ambition. While they do not
propose a more complicated model, it's clear that many could be generated
by 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, &
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
Cushman 2008). There are several points of purported contact:
L1: A child raised in a particular linguistic community almost
inevitably ends up speaking an idiolect of the local language
despite lack of sufficient explicit instruction, lack of extensive
negative feedback for mistakes, and grammatical mistakes by
caretakers.
M1: A child raised in a particular moral community almost
inevitably ends up judging in accordance with an idiolect of the
local moral code despite lack of sufficient explicit instruction, lack
of sufficient negative feedback for moral mistakes, and moral
mistakes by caretakers.
L2: While there is great diversity among natural languages, there
are systematic constraints on possible natural languages.
M2: While there is great diversity among natural moralities, there
are systematic constraints on possible natural moralities.
L3: Language-speakers obey many esoteric rules that they
themselves typically cannot produce or explain, and which some
would not even recognize.
M3: Moral agents judge according to esoteric rules (such as the
doctrine of double effect) that they themselves typically cannot
produce or explain, and which some would not even recognize.
L4: Drawing on a limited vocabulary, a speaker can both produce
and comprehend a potential infinity of linguistic expressions.
M4: Drawing on a limited moral vocabulary, an agent can produce
and evaluate a very large (though perhaps not infinite) class of
action-plans, which are ripe for moral judgment.
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
Pair 1 suggests the poverty of the stimulus argument, according to
which there must be an innate language (morality) faculty because it
would otherwise be next to impossible for children to learn what and as
they do. However, as Prinz (2008) points out, the moral stimulus may be
less penurious than the linguistic stimulus: children are typically punished
for moral violations, whereas their grammatical violations are often
ignored. Nichols, Kumar, & Lopez (unpublished manuscript) lend support
to Prinz's contention with a series of Bayesian moral-norm learning
experiments.
Pair 2 suggests the principles and parameters approach, according to
which, though the exact content of linguistic (moral) rules is not innate,
there are innate rule-schemas, the parameters of which may take only a
few values. The role of environmental factors is to set these parameters.
For instance, the linguistic environment determines whether the child
learns a language in which noun phrases precede verb phrases or vice
versa. Similarly, say proponents of the analogy, there may be a moral rule-
schema according to which members of group G may not be intentionally
harmed unless p, and the moral environment sets the values of G and p. As
with the first point of analogy, philosophers such as Prinz (2008) find this
comparison dubious. Whereas linguistic parameters typically take just one
of two or three values, the moral parameters mentioned above can take
indefinitely many values and seem to admit of diverse exceptions.
Pair 3 suggests that people have knowledge of language (morality) that is
not consciously accessed (and may even be inaccessible to consciousness)
but implicitly represented, such that they produce judgments of
grammatical (moral) permissibility and impermissibility that far outstrip
their own capacities to reflectively identify, explain, or justify. One
potential explanation of this gap is that there is a module for language
(morality) that has proprietary information and processing capacities. Only
the outputs of these capacities are consciously accessible. Whether the
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
module is universal or varies across certain groups of people is a matter
currently in dispute.
Pair 4 suggests the linguistic (moral) essentiality of recursion, which
allows the embedding of type-identical structures within one another to
generate further structures of the same type. For instance, phrases can be
embedded in other phrases to form more complex phrases:
the calico cat the calico cat (that the dog chased) the calico
cat (that the dog [that the breeding conglomerate wanted] chased)
the calico cat (that the dog [that the company {that was
bankrupt} owned] chased)
Moral judgments, likewise, can be embedded in other moral judgments to
produce novel moral judgments (Harman 2008, p. 346). For instance:
It's wrong to x It's wrong to coerce someone to x It's wrong
to persuade someone to coerce someone to x
Such moral embedding has been experimentally investigated by John
Mikhail (2011, pp. 438), who argues on the basis of experiments using
variants on the trolley problem (Foot 1978) that moral judgments are
generated by imposing a deontic structure on one's representation of the
causal and evaluative features of the action under consideration.
As with any analogy, there are points of disanalogy between language and
morality. At least sometimes, moral judgments are corrigible in the face of
argument, whereas grammaticality judgments seem to be less corrigible.
People are often tempted to act contrary to their moral judgments, but not
to their grammaticality judgments. Recursive embedding seems to be able
to generate all of language, whereas recursive embedding may only be
applicable to deontic judgments about actions, and not, for instance, to
judgments about norms, institutions, situations, and character traits.
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
Indeed, it's hard to imagine what recursion would mean for character
traits: does it make sense to think of honesty being embedded in courage
to 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 either
utilitarianism or deontology. The revitalization of virtue ethics led to a
renewed 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, mood elevators (Isen, Clark, & Schwartz 1976; Isen, Shalker, Clark, &
experimental work in psychology, sociology, and neuroscience has been
brought to bear on the empirical grounding of philosophical views in this
area.
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, for
instance, is (among other things) to be disposed to notice occasions for
giving, to construe ambiguous social cues charitably, to desire to give
people things they want, need, or would appreciate, to deliberate well
about what they want, need, or would appreciate, and to act on the basis of
such deliberation. Manifestations of such a disposition are observable and
hence ripe for empirical investigation. Virtue ethicists of the last several
decades have sometimes been optimistic about the distribution of virtue in
the population. Alasdair MacIntyre claims, for example, that without
allusion to the place that justice and injustice, courage and cowardice play
in human life very little will be genuinely explicable (1984, p. 199). Julia
Annas (2011, pp. 810) 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
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
there are in fact many virtuous people.
The philosophical situationists John Doris (1998, 2002) and Gilbert
Harman (1999, 2000a, 2003) were the first to mount an empirical
challenge to the virtue ethical conception of character, arguing on the basis
of evidence from personality and social psychology that the structure of
most people's dispositions does not match the structure of virtues (or
vices). Philosophical situationists contend that the social psychology of the
last century shows that most people are surprisingly susceptible to
seemingly trivial and normatively irrelevant situational influences, such as
Karp 1978; Isen 1987), mood depressors (Apsler 1975; Carlsmith & Gross
1968; Regan 1971; Weyant 1978), presence of bystanders (Latan &
Darley 1968, 1970; Latan & Rodin 1969; Latan & Nida 1981; Schwartz
& Gottlieb 1991), ambient sounds (Matthews & Cannon 1975; Boles &
Haywood 1978; Donnerstein & Wilson 1976), ambient smells (Baron
1997; Baron & Thomley 1994), and ambient light levels (Zhong, Bohns,
& Gino 2010).[16] Individual difference variables typically explain less
than 10% of the variance in people's behavior (Mischel 1968)though, as
Funder & Ozer (1983) point out, situational factors typically explain less
than 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, but
they 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 evidence
is best explained by a theory of mixed global traits, such as the disposition
to (among other things) help because it improves one's mood. Such traits
are global, in the sense that they explain and predict behavior across
situations (someone with such a disposition will, other things being equal,
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
typically help so long as it will maintain her mood), but normatively
mixed, in the sense that they are neither virtues nor vices. Mark Alfano
(2013) goes in a third direction, arguing that virtue and vice attributions
tend to function as self-fulfilling prophecies. People tend to act in
accordance with the traits that are attributed to them, whether the traits are
minor virtues such as tidiness (Miller, Brickman, & Bolen 1975) and
ecology-mindedness (Cornelissen et al. 2006, 2007), major virtues such as
charity (Jensen & Moore 1977), cooperativeness (Grusec, Kuczynski,
Simutis & Rushton 1978), and generosity (Grusec & Redler 1980), or
vices such as cutthroat competitiveness (Grusec, Kuczynski, Simutis &
Rushton 1978). On Alfano's view, when people act in accordance with a
virtue, they often do so not because they possess the trait in question, but
because they think they do or because they know that other people think
they do. He calls such simulations of moral character factitious virtues,
and even suggests that the notion of a virtue should be revised to include
reflexive and social expectations.[18]
It might seem that this criticism misses its mark. After all, virtue ethicists
needn't (and often don't) commit themselves to the claim that almost
everyone is virtuous. Instead, many argue that virtue is the normative goal
of moral development, and that people mostly fail in various ways to reach
that goal. The argument from the fact that most people's dispositions are
not virtues to a rejection of orthodox virtue ethics, then, might be thought
a non sequitur, at least for such views. But empirically-minded critics of
virtue ethics do not stop there. They all have positive views about what
sorts of dispositions people have instead of virtues. These dispositions are
alleged to be so structurally dissimilar from virtues (as traditionally
understood) that it may be psychologically unrealistic to treat (traditional)
virtue as a regulative ideal. What matters, then, is the width of the gap
between the descriptive and the normative, between the (structure of the)
dispositions most people have and the (structure of the) dispositions that
count as virtues.
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
Three leading defenses against this criticism have been offered. Some
virtue ethicists (Badhwar 2009, Kupperman 2009) have conceded that
virtue is extremely rare, but argued that it may still be a useful regulative
ideal. Others (Hurka 2006, Merritt 2000) have attempted to weaken the
concept of virtue in such a way as to enable more people, or at least more
behaviors, to count as virtuous. Still others (Kamtekar 2004, Russell 2009,
Snow 2010, Sreenivasan 2002) have challenged the situationist evidence
or its interpretation. While it remains unclear whether these defenses
succeed, grappling with the situationist challenge has led both defenders
and challengers of virtue ethics to develop more nuanced and empirically
informed views.[19]
3.2 Wellbeing
The study of wellbeing and happiness has recently come into vogue in
both 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 of
distinctions, even if those distinctions end up getting blurred by further
investigation. First, we need to distinguish between a life that goes well
for the one who lives it and a morally good life. It could turn out that these
are extensionally identical, or that one is a necessary condition for the
other, but at first blush they appear to involve different concepts. The
empirical study of wellbeing focuses primarily on lives that are good in
the former sensegood for the person whose life it is. Second, we need to
distinguish between a hedonically good life and an overall good life. As
with the first distinction, it might turn out that a hedonically good life just
is an overall good life, but that would be a discovery, not something we
can simply take for granted.
With these distinctions in hand, there are a number of interesting
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
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 the
final level of pain; furthermore, the duration of the procedure has no
measurable effect on ex post pain ratings (Redelmeier & Kahneman 1996).
What this means is that people's after-the-fact summaries of their hedonic
experiences are not simple integrals with respect to time of momentary
hedonic tone. If the colonoscopy were functionally completed after minute
5, but arbitrarily prolonged for another 5 minutes so that the final level of
pain was less at the end of minute 10 than at the end of minute 5, the
patient would retrospectively evaluate the experience as less painful.
Arguably, this matters for any philosophical theory that treats pleasure as
at least partially constitutive of wellbeing, and it matters a lot if you're
inclined, like Bentham (1789/1961) and Singer (Singer & de Lazari-Radek
forthcoming), to think that pleasure is the only intrinsic good and pain the
only intrinsic ill. How exactly? If the data are to be trusted, philosophers'
substantive claims about wellbeing based on hedonic intuitions might be
thought to miss their mark because such claims are virtually all formulated
in light of ex post evaluation of pleasures and pains. When a philosopher
says that a good life is, to the extent possible, filled with pleasure and
devoid 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) hedonic
tone but (reports of) subjective wellbeing. The most prominent researcher
in this field is Ed Diener,[20] whose Satisfaction with Life Scale asks
participants to agree or disagree with statements such as, I am satisfied
with my life and If I could live my life over, I would change almost
nothing. It might be thought that these questions are more revelatory of
wellbeing than questions about hedonic tone. However, two problems
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
have arisen with respect to this data. The first is that participants'
responses to life satisfaction questionnaires may not be accurate reports of
standing attitudes. Fox & Kahneman (1992), for instance, showed that,
especially in personal domains people seem to value (friends and love
life). What predicts participants' responses is not recent intrapersonal
factors but social comparison. Someone who has just lost a friend but still
thinks of herself as having more friends than her peers will tend to report
higher life satisfaction than someone who has just gained a friend but who
still thinks of himself as having fewer friends than his peers. How could
people be so confused about themselves? The questions in Diener's survey
are hard to answer. What may happen is that respondents use heuristics to
generate their responses, sometimes answering a different but related
question than the one asked. Life satisfaction surveys also seem to be
subject to order effects. For instance, if a participant is asked a global life
satisfaction question and then asked about his romantic life, the correlation
between these questions tends to be low or zero, but if the participant is
asked the dating question first, the correlation tends to be high and
positive (Strack, Martin, & Schwarz 1988).[21]
Another striking result in the literature on subjective wellbeing has to do
with what has come to be known as the set-point. Some early studies
suggested that, though major life events such as winning the lottery or
suffering a severe spinal cord injury have an effect on subjective
wellbeing, the effect wears off over time. People return to a set-point of
(reported) subjective wellbeing (Brickman & Campbell 1971). The
explanation offered for this striking phenomenon is that people adapt to
more or less whatever life throws at them. If the set-point hypothesis is
correct (and if reported subjective wellbeing is a reliable indicator of
actual wellbeing), then moral theories focused on the promotion of
wellbeing would undoubtedly make vastly different recommendations
than they are now thought to. There may be little point in trying to
promote something that is likely to return to a set-point in the end. More
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
recent research, however, has challenged the set-point finding by
establishing the longitudinal impact of at least some important life events,
such as divorce, death of a spouse, unemployment, and disability (Lucas
2007; 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 that
ordinary people are willing to judge a life as good for the one living it only
if it is both full of positive moods and affects, and is virtuous (or at least
not vicious). This result resonates with the empirically-supported views of
Seligman (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. One
especially interesting application is based on what have come to be known
as dual-system models of cognition, reasoning, decision-making, and
behavior. While the exact details of the two systems vary from author to
author, the basic distinction is between what Daniel Kahneman calls
System 1, which is fast, automatic, effortless, potentially unconscious,
often affect-laden, and sometimes incorrigible, and System 2, which is
slow, deliberative, effortful, typically conscious, and associated with the
subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration (2011, pp. 20
21). Whereas System 2 exhibits a degree of functional unity, System 1 is
better conceived as a loose conglomeration of semi-autonomous
dispositions, states, and processes, which can conflict not only with
System 2 but also with each other.
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
If correct, this might well bear on philosophical issues. For example, is
emotionally-driven reasoning in general better or worse than cold,
affectless reasoning? Likewise, we want to know whether moral
judgments are always motivating. In other words, we want to know
whether, insofar as one judges that x is morally right (wrong), it follows
that one isperhaps defeasiblymotivated to x (avoid x-ing). An
affirmative answer is often labeled internalist, whereas a negative
answer is labeled externalist. Emotions are intrinsically motivational, so
if experimental investigation could show that emotion was implicated in
all moral judgments, that could be a point in favor of internalism.[23] On
the other hand, recent empirical/philosophical work on the phenomenon of
sociopathy is sometimes thought to cast doubt on this sort of motivational
internalism.[24]
The dual-system approach has been employed by various investigators,
including Joshua Greene (2008, 2012), Jonathan Haidt (2012; Haidt &
Bjrklund 2008), Joshua Knobe (Inbar et al. 2009), Fiery Cushman
(Cushman & Greene forthcoming), and Daniel Kelly (2011). These
researchers tend to claim that, though people usually associate their true
selves with System 2, System 1 seems to be responsible for most
intuitions, judgments, and behaviors. Haidt in particular has argued for a
social intuitionist model according to which deliberation and reasoning
are 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 characteristic
bodily, affective, motivational, evaluative, and cognitive patterns. For
instance, someone who feels disgusted almost always makes a gaping
facial expression, withdraws slightly from the object of disgust, has a
slight reduction in body temperature and heart rate, and feels a sense of
nausea and the need to cleanse herself. In addition, she is motivated to
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avoid and even expunge the offending object, experiences it as
contaminating and repugnant, becomes more attuned to other disgusting
objects in the immediate environment, is inclined to treat anything that the
object comes in contact with (whether physically or symbolically) as also
disgusting, and is more inclined to make harsh moral judgmentsboth
about the object and in generalwhen confronted with the object
experienced as disgusting. The disgust reaction is nearly impossible to
repress, is easily recognized, andwhen recognizedempathically
induces disgust in the other person.[25] There are certain objects that
almost all normal adults are disgusted by (feces, decaying corpses, rotting
food, spiders, maggots, gross physical deformities). But there is also
considerable intercultural and interpersonal variation beyond these core
objects of disgust, including in some better-studied cases cuisines, sexual
behaviors, out-group members, and violations of social norms.
In a recent book, Kelly (2011) persuasively argues that this seemingly
bizarre combination of features is best explained by two theses. The
universal bodily manifestations of disgust evolved to help humans avoid
ingesting toxins and other harmful substances, while the more cognitive or
symbolic sense of offensiveness and contamination associated with disgust
evolved to help humans avoid diseases and parasites. According to the
entanglement thesis (chapter 2), these initially distinct System 1 responses
became entangled in the course of human evolution and now
systematically co-occur. If you make the gape face, whatever you're
attending to will start to look contaminated; if something disgusts you at a
cognitive level, you will flash a quick gape face. According to the co-opt
thesis (chapter 4), the entangled emotional system for disgust was later
recruited for an entirely distinct purpose: to help mark the boundaries
between 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 (it
acquires new cues extremely easily and empathically, p. 51) and
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
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 a
number of important moral upshots. One consequence, he argues, is
disgust skepticism (p. 139), according to which the combination of
disgust's hair trigger and its ballistic trajectory mean that it is extremely
prone to incorrigible false positives that involve unwarranted feelings of
contamination and even dehumanization. Hence, the fact that something
is 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 emotions
and value. According to fitting-attitude theories (Rnnow-Rasumussen
2011 is a recent example), something is bad if and only if there is reason
to 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 is
bad (good) just in case one would, after reflection and deliberation, hold a
con-attitude (pro-attitude) towards it. According to desire-satisfaction
theories of wellbeing (Heathwood 2006 is a recent example), one's life is
going well to the extent that the events towards which one harbors pro-
attitudes occur, and those towards which one harbors con-attitudes do not
occur. If Kelly's disgust skepticism is on the right track, it looks like it
would be a mistake to lump together all con-attitudes. Perhaps it still
makes sense to connect other con-attitudes, such as indignation, with
moral (non-moral) badness, but it seems unwarranted to connect disgust
with moral (nonmoral) badness, at least directly.[26] Thus, experimental
moral philosophy of the emotions leads to a potential insight into the
evaluative diversity of con-attitudes.
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Another potential upshot of the experimental research derives from the
fact 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 triggers
whether you want to or not, there is no documented way to de-acquire
them, even if one wants to.[27] Together, these points raise worries about
moral responsibility. It's a widely accepted platitude that the less control
one has over one's behavior, the less responsible one is are for that
behavior. At one extreme, if one totally lacks control, many would say that
one is not responsible for what one does. Imagine an individual who acts
badly because he is disgusted: he gapes when he sees two men kissing,
even though he reflectively rejects homophobia; the men see this gape
and, understandably, feel hurt. Would it be appropriate for them to take up
a Strawsonian (1962) reactive attitude towards him, such as indignation?
Would it be appropriate for him to feel a correlative attitude towards
himself, such as guilt or shame? If his flash of disgust had instead been
something that he recognized and endorsed, the answers to these questions
might 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? We
do not attempt to answer this question here, but instead aim to show that,
while experimental moral philosophy of the emotions may provide new
insights, it also raises thorny questions.
4. Some Metaethical Issues
Metaethics steps back from ethics to ask about the nature and function of
morality. Much contemporary metaethics relies on assumptions about the
nature of moral thought in the actual world. Experimental moral
philosophy offers to help us make progress on some of these questions by
securing a firm empirical foundation for the relevant claims or debunking
them where necessary.
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
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 the
neighborhood. 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 be
brought to bear on questions in moral epistemology (critiques of moral
intuitions) as well as questions about moral reasons (the debate over
internalism).[29] Here we focus on some of the most important
applications of experimental moral philosophy thus far to questions about
moral metaphysics and moral language.[30]
4.1 Moral Disagreement
The history of philosophical and social scientific approaches to moral
disagreement provides a striking illustration of the way science in general
can and cannot properly be brought to bear on a question about
metaethics. For many years, students of human nature have been
fascinated with moral differences. Herodotus chronicled a series of bizarre
practices many of which his readers would have found immoral, and
philosophers like Sextus Empiricus attempted to draw philosophical
inferences (in Sextus's case, skeptical ones) from such reports.
Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, Locke, and Montaigne discussed cases
of apparent moral disagreement as well. But the most serious
investigations of moral differences came with the birth of cultural
anthropology as a distinct discipline around the beginning of the 20th
Century, especially under the influence of Finnish philosopher,
sociologist, and anthropologist Edward Westermarck; American
sociologist William Graham Sumner; and American anthropologist Franz
Boas, along with his students including, Ruth Benedict, Melville
Herskovits, and Margaret Mead.
These 20th Century thinkers for the most part advocated what came to be
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known as cultural, ethical, or moral relativism, very roughly the view that
the moral truth depends on the moral beliefs of various groups or
individuals.[31] Despite the empirical credentials of these approaches, the
boundaries and distinctions among the variously named theories were
often vague or imprecise, and the connections between them and the
empirical data were not always very strong or even clear, despite a
genuine debate among the social scientists employing them. By the middle
of the century, philosophers had begun to engage the issues, taking a much
more cautious and nuanced approach to them.[32] Two in particular,
Richard Brandt (1954) and John Ladd (1957), did their own significant
philosophico-anthropological fieldwork among Hopi and Navaho Native
Americans communities, respectively.
Many would credit Brandt and Ladd as godfathers of the contemporary
experimental moral philosophy approach (and Hume and Nietzsche as its
great-godfathers), though it would not pick up steam for decades to come.
Alasdair MacIntyre's A Short History of Ethics (1998), while not based on
experimental research, arguably bears mention as a work in which the
author attempted to treat the history of ethics from a perspective that
combined philosophical discussions with an informed perspective on
history proper, though it was treated by some critics as endorsing moral
relativism (or as downright incoherent). MacIntyre's subsequent work,
along with that of others such as Martha Nussbaum (2001), continued this
trend to view the history of morality through the twin lenses of
philosophical work and empirical scholarship on history proper. J. L.
Mackie drew an anti-realist (he called it skeptical) conclusion about
morality based on abductive inference from vaguely-referenced
anthropological knowledge with a brief but influential discussion of the
argument from relativity in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). A
few years later, naturalist moral realist Nicholas Sturgeon began his
seminal paper, Moral Explanations,(1988) by affirming his respect for
the argument from moral disagreement and his recognition that it could be
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
resolved only through piecemeal and frustratingly indecisive a
posteriori inquiry, sentiments echoed over a decade later by anti-realist
Don Loeb.
Loeb (1998) offered a version of the argument that proceeded by way of
an inference from irresolvable moral disagreement (what Brandt called
fundamental disagreement) to the claim that we lack moral knowledge. If
our apparent knowledge of morality is our best (or even our only) reason
for believing morality to be a realm of fact, than an argument for moral
skepticism is also indirectly an argument for moral anti- realism, he
claimed, since it is not epistemically responsible to believe in things for
which we lack good evidence. The question, he thought, was how much
moral disagreement (and agreement, for that matter) would remain if
various explanatory alternatives were exhausted.[33]
In an important paper, John Doris and Alexandra Plakias (2008) turned
their attention to the question Sturgeon and Loeb had posed, referring to
the alternative explanatory strategies mentioned by Loeb and others as
defusing explanations. Doris and Plakias considered an experiment
suggesting that a so-called culture of honor is much more prevalent in
the southern United States than in the north, and conducted a study
tending to support the claim that East Asians react differently to
magistrate and the mob scenarios (in which a person responsible for
keeping order can do so only by framing a friendless but innocent man)
than do Westerners. In both cases, they argued, no good defusing
explanation for the moral disagreement seems available and thus this
evidence seems to support moral anti- realism. Though the paper is a
splendid example of experimental moral philosophy, bringing social
science and philosophy together in addressing a central question in
metaethics, its authors recognize that these two cases are suggestive but by
no means dispositive and that much more would need to be done to
resolve the kinds of questions they are asking, if the questions are indeed
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
resolvable.[34] While a few efforts at continuing and refining this research
program have begun (Fraser and Hauser, 2010), it is nowhere near
maturity, and philosophical criticisms of the entire project have been
leveled. For example, Andrew Sneddon (2009 argues that disagreements
among ordinary peoplethose who are not moral expertsare
completely irrelevant to metaethics because non-experts lack relevant
information (about normative theory and experimental psychology, for
example) and we do not know whether these people's disagreements
would persist if they were better informed.
4.2 Moral Language
One promising area for further research concerns the longstanding debate
over moral language. In particular, cognitivists (or descriptivists) hold that
ordinary moral sentences are best understood as factual assertions,
expressing propositions that attribute moral properties (such as rightness
or goodness) to things (such as actions or characters). Non-cognitivists
(including their contemporary representatives, the expressivists) hold that
moral language has a fundamentally different function, to express attitudes
or to issue commands, for example. All sides agree that a good
understanding of moral language will almost certainly contain an element
of 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 the
subject. A proper understanding of moral language must be grounded in
the 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 questions
about moral objectivity and the nature of morality. If moral language is
not fact-asserting (or is incoherently both fact-asserting and something
incompatible with that) then there is, in a way, nothing to be a realist
about. Don Loeb (2008) calls this sort of argument pulling a
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
metaphysical rabbit out of a semantic hat.[35] In this spirit, Loeb has
recently argued that both sides may have claim to part of the truth,
suggesting that the best analysis of the terms in the moral vocabulary (and
the concepts for which they stand) might well be incoherent, combining
non-negotiable[36] but inconsistent elements. Loeb notes that on
virtually any reasonable theory of language, meaning and reference are at
least partly determined by the semantic intentions and commitments of
ordinary speakers, suitably adjusted to account for performance errors and
other deviations. Thus, the issue is one requiring sophisticated and
philosophically informed social science, directed at determining the
semantic intentions and commitments of ordinary moral thinkers, not
armchair reasoning in which only two possibilities are considered.
Yet, remarkably, the debate over moral language has been carried on for
almost a century in a kind of empirical vacuum. Instead of gathering
scientific evidence, philosophers have relied almost exclusively on their
own linguistic and substantive intuitions and on the assumption that they
already possess a good understanding of ordinary moral thought and
talk.[37]
This makes moral language ripe for treatment by experimental moral
philosophers and their colleagues in linguistics and psychology. To date
there has been little research focused directly on these questions by
philosophers, as opposed to semanticists not pursuing philosophical
questions. No doubt scientific inquiry in this area is fraught with difficulty
and will require collaboration among philosophers and social scientists.
But that does not make it any less important that it be conducted, nor make
it any more reasonable to treat seat-of-the-pants judgments by
philosophers as adequate.
Fortunately, a new line of research by philosophically inclined
psychologists has emerged, and it seems highly relevant to these
Spring 2014 Edition 35
 Experimental Moral Philosophy
questions. If ordinary language users have an implicit metaethical
commitment, it is likely that this commitment would be reflected in the
meaning of the words in their moral vocabularies. Thus, one way to
discover what the words in the moral vocabulary are used to domake
factual assertions or something else--is to uncover people's implicit
metaethical commitments. A promising line of research, beginning with
Darley and Goodwin's important paper (2008), and continued by James
Beebe (forthcoming) and others (Wright et al. 2013; Campbell & Kumar
2012; Goodwin & Darley 2010; and Sarkissian et al. 2011) aims to shed
light on these very questions. So far, the results are quite mixed. People
seem to treat some moral questions as questions of fact, and others as not
matters of fact. Whether there is any principled way to explain these
variations, and whether that would shed light on the debate over moral
language, remains to be seen.
5. Criticisms of Experimental Moral Philosophy
Experimental moral philosophy far outstrips what we've been able to
cover here and many issues and areas of productive research have barely
been touched upon. For example, experimental evidence is relevant to
moral questions in bioethics, such as euthanasia, abortion, genetic
screening, and placebogenic interventions. Likewise, experiments in
behavioral economics and cognitive psychology are being employed in
asking moral questions about public policy. We neglect these issues only
because of lack of space. In the few words remaining, we explore some
potential criticisms of experimental philosophy.
5.1 Problems with Experimental Design and Interpretation
As a young field, experimental philosophy suffers from various problems
with experimental design and interpretation. These are not insurmountable
problems, and they are problems faced by related fields, such as social
36 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
psychology, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics.
One issue that has recently come to the fore is the problem of
replication.[38] Statistical analysis is not deductive inference, and the mere
fact that statistical analysis yields a positive result does not guarantee that
anything has been discovered. Typically, an experimental result is treated
as real if its p-value is at most .05, but such a value just indicates the
probability that the observation in question would have been made if the
null hypothesis were true. It is not the probability that the null hypothesis
is false given the observation.[39] So, even when statistical analysis
indicates that the null hypothesis is to be rejected, that indication can be
fallacious. Moreover, when multiple hypotheses are tested, the chance of
fallaciously rejecting the null hypothesis at least once rises exponentially.
We should expect other failures of replication because of a bias built into
the system of funding experimentation and publishing results. The
proportion of published false-positives is much higher for unexpected and
unpredicted results than for expected and predicted results. Since
experimentalists are reluctant to report (and even discouraged by journal
editors and referees from reporting) null results (i.e., results where the p-
value is at least .05), for every published, unexpected result there may be
any 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 by
another research group. If a result cannot be replicated, it is probably a
mirage. Such mirages have turned up to a disturbing extent recently, as
Daniel Kahneman has famously pointed out (Yong 2012). Kahneman
proposed a daisy chain of replication, where no result in psychology
would be published until it had been successfully replicated by another
prominent lab. This proposal has not yet been (and may never be)
instituted, but it has raised the problem of replication to salience, and a
Spring 2014 Edition 37
 Experimental Moral Philosophy
related project has taken off. The reproducibility project in psychology
aims to establish the extent to which prominent, published results can be
replicated.[40] Experimental philosophers have followed suit with their
own replication project.[41]
A related issue with experimental design and interpretation has to do with
fishing expeditions. An experiment is sometimes pejoratively referred to
as a fishing expedition if no specific predictions are advanced prior to data
collection, 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 make
them nearly unfalsifiable. This problem is exacerbated when no guiding
positive heuristic is offered to explain observed patterns (Alfano &
Robinson forthcoming).
Another worry is that simultaneously testing many intuition-probes leads
to overconfidence. If one were to test two random samples of people with
several intuition-probes, the odds are that one would find some differences
in their intuitionseven some statistically significant differences. We saw
that a false-positive rate of 5% is often deemed acceptable, and that means
that in as many as one out of twenty cases, the test indicates that the
pattern of responses did not come from chance when in fact it did. The
probability of at least one false positive when making multiple
comparisons rises exponentially: P(false positive) = 1.95n, where n is the
number of hypotheses tested simultaneously. This is known as the
experimentwise error rate.[42]
One way to establish that a result is real is to see whether the experiment
has a respectable effect size. The most common measure of effect size is
Cohen's d, which is the ratio of the difference in means between
conditions to the standard deviation of the relevant variable. So, for
example, a d of 1.0 would indicate that a manipulation moved the mean of
38 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
the experimental condition an entire standard deviation away from the
mean of the control condition, a huge effect. Unfortunately, effect sizes
have, 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 scales
are often treated as if they were cardinal scales. The widely used Likert
scales, for example, are ordinal: the difference between a response of 0
and a response of 2 cannot be assumed to be the same size as the
difference between a response of 2 and a response of 4. Only if a scale is
cardinal can such an assumption be made (indeed, that's what it means for
a scale to be cardinal), yet this mistake is not uncommon.
5.2 Philosophical Problems
One might object, however, that the real problem with experimental
philosophy is not that science is hard but that science is irrelevant. Real
moral philosophy, whatever that is, is in principle unaffected by empirical
or experimental results.
One might base the argument for the irrelevance of experimental moral
philosophy on the is-ought dichotomy. Whatever science turns up about
what is, the argument would go, it cannot turn up anything about what
ought to be. Arguably, however experimental evidence can helpat a
minimumto establish what is possible, necessary, and impossible.[43] If
it can do that, it can at least constrain normative views, assuming the
ought-implies-can principle to be true. What is not possible is not morally
required, for example. Furthermore, if there are thick moral properties
such as character, virtue, or wellbeing then it is possible to investigate at
least some normative issues empiricallyby investigating these thick
properties, just as experimental moral philosophers have been doing.
We need to proceed cautiously here. No one doubts that what we ought to
Spring 2014 Edition 39
 Experimental Moral Philosophy
do depends on how things are non-morally. For example, the moral claim
that a given man deserves to be punished presupposes the non-moral fact
that he committed the crime. It should come as no surprise, then, that
experimental evidence might be relevant in this way to morality. Whether
experimental evidence is relevant to discovering the fundamental moral
principlesthose meant to be put into action one way or another
depending on how the world is non-morallyis still subject to debate.
Another version of this argument says that fundamental moral
philosophical principle are, if true at all, necessarily true, and that
empirical research can establish at best only contingent truths.[44] But if
fundamental moral theories are necessary, then they are necessary for
creatures like us. And one thing that empirical investigation can do is to
help establish what sorts of creatures we are. Imagination needs material
to work with. When one sits in one's armchair, imagining a hypothetical
scenario, one makes a whole host of assumptions about what people are
like, how psychological processes work, and so on. These assumptions can
be empirically well or poorly informed. It's hard to see why anyone could
doubt that being well-informed is to be preferred. Likewise it's hard to see
how anyone could doubt the relevance of experimental evidence to better
grounding our empirical assumptions, in this case our assumptions
relevant to moral philosophy. Exactly how experimentalor more
broadly, empiricalevidence is relevant, and how relevant it is, are at
present hotly contested matters.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank James Beebe, Gunnar Bjrnsson, Wesley Buckwalter,
Roxanne DesForges, John Doris, Gilbert Harman, Dan Haybron, Chris
Heathwood, Antti Kauppinen, Daniel Kelly, Joshua Knobe, Clayton
Littlejohn, 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 for
helpful 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 wrote
of experiments of living (1977, 260261).
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
4. Statistical power is the probability that a test will reject the null
hypothesis (the statement that the conditions of the experiment do not
differ) when the null hypothesis is false. It is therefore 1 minus the
probability of a Type II error (failure to detect a relationship despite the
reality of the relationship). Statistical power increases as the sample size
grows.
5. There is a good deal of exciting new work on questions often
characterized as matters of public policy, but which have important moral
dimensions. See, among others, Sunstein & Thaler (2008), Sunstein
(2013), Gigerenzer & Muir Gray (2011), and Conly (2012). Also see the
work 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 is
fraught. Here, we treat moral intuitions as moral seemings and moral
judgments 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 of
experimental results such as these on philosophers' reliance on moral
intuitions 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 an
alternative dual-process model for moral (and non-moral reasoning), as
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has Daniel Kahneman (2011). For more on dual-system approaches see
Section 3.3, below.
12. Mediation analysis attempts to determine whether one variable (the
predictor) affects a second variable (the outcome) by influencing a third,
mediating variable (Baron & Kenny 1986). Structural equation modeling
allows the analyst to assess and compare various models relating
predictors, 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 then
asked to agree or disagree with it on a numeric scale. Commonly, scales
run from 1 to 7, 1 to 5, 3 to 3, or 2 to 2. Almost always, the endpoints
are labeled strongly disagree and strongly agree. Quite often, the
midpoint is labeled neither agree nor disagree. Sometimes other points
on the scale are labeled as well.
15. The idea that seemingly predictive and explanatory concepts might
also have a normative component is not entirely original with Knobe;
Bernard Williams (1985, p. 129) pointed out that virtues and vices have
such a dual nature.
16. Owen Flanagan (1991) considered some of the same evidence before
Doris and Harman, but he was reluctant to draw the pessimistic
conclusions they did about virtue ethics.
17. When it comes to explaining variance in behavior, the basic idea is
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
that the statistical analysis of experimental results yields a correlation
between a personality variable (such as extroversion) and a behavioral
variable (such as an act of helping). Correlations range from 1 to +1. A
correlation of 0 means that the individual variable is of literally no use in
predicting the behavioral outcome; a correlation of 1 means that the
individual variable is a perfect positive predictor; a correlation of 1
means that the individual variable is a perfect negative predictor. Actual
correlations tend to be between .3 and +.3. The amount of variance
explained by a given predictor variable is the square of the correlation
between that variable and the behavior in question. So, for instance, if
extroversion is correlated with helping behavior at .25, then extroversion
explains 6.25% of the variance in helping behavior. Although this is only
one, rather simplistic, measure of explanatory power, personality variables
do 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 critique
could be handled by offloading some of the responsibility for virtue onto
the social environment in something like this way.
19. One might hope that philosophical reflection on ethics would promote
moral behavior. Eric Schwitzgebel has recently begun to investigate
whether professional ethicists behave better morally than their non-ethicist
philosophical peers, and claims that, on most measures, the two groups are
indistinguishable (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 that
chronically accessible information is a much better predictor of life
satisfaction responses than temporarily accessible information, such as
how many dates one went on last week.
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22. See Haybron (2008).
23. See Nichols (2002; 2004, ch. 5.)
24. See Kennett (2006), Roskies (2003), and Shoemaker (2011). See
Strandberg & Bjrklund (2013) for a different sort of experimentally-
motivated argument against internalism. See also Buckwalter & Turri
(unpublished manuscript) for an argument that internalism and externalism
draw on distinct folk notions of belief. Some doubt the relevance of
empirical considerations to the debate over internalism in ethics, arguing
that since internalism claims a necessary or conceptual link between moral
judgments and motivation, externalism is compatible with any merely
contingent 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 disgust
are not fitting attitudes upon which to ground wellbeing, they could say.
And similar arguments could perhaps be deployed on behalf of the other
metaethical views mentioned above. Even so, experimental moral
philosophy could play a useful role, helping us to identify suspect
experiences of disgust.
27. There does seem to be some potential for fine-tuning, however (Rozin
2008; Case et al. 2006).
28. 1) Moral Metaphysics: Is morality a realm of fact? 2) Moral
Semantics: What is the function of moral language? How are moral terms
to be defined? 3) Moral Reasons: Why be moral? What is the connection
between moral principles and reasons for action, or between moral
judgments and motivations to act in accord with them? What, indeed, are
reasons for action and are they all grounded in our desires? 4) Moral
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
Epistemology. How (if at all) is moral knowledge possible? Is there such a
thing as good moral reasoning and if so, what are its precepts?
29. These may themselves be relevant to questions in category 1, moral
metaphysics. The categories are somewhat vague, admit of a good deal of
overlap, and are by no means exhaustive, but they will serve our purpose
here.
30. We also leave aside important issues related to the evolution of
morality (see, e.g., Trivers, 1971, and Cosmides and Tooby, 2013), itself
the basis for an important challenge to moral realist (and other) views. The
latter, 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 of
moral relativism. For example, John Cook (1999) and Richard Schweder
(2012) take empirical evidence concerning apparent moral disagreement
seriously.
33. Other philosophers notably recognizing the relevance of empirical
inquiry to the argument from moral disagreement include Michele Moody
Adams (1997), Francis Snare (1980 and 1984), and William Tolhurst
(1987).
34. For a fuller discussion see the article in this encyclopedia by Stich and
Doris, Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches, Section 6.
35. Ayer (1936), who makes a similar argument, would have eschewed
labeling the conclusion of such an argument as metaphysical, since he
thought the issue of moral objectivity couldn't be articulated in a
meaningful way. (Ayer used the word metaphysical in a very different
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 Experimental Moral Philosophy
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-cavalier
attitude toward empirical investigation of moral language: I am
sometimes askedin a tone that suggests that the question is a major
objectionwhy, if conceptual analysis is concerned to elucidate what
governs our classificatory practice, don't I advocate doing serious opinion
polls 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 of
students is doing their own bit of fieldwork, and we all know the answer
they get in the vast majority of cases. (3637.)
38. The scandal over replication has (rightly or wrongly) assumed such
proportions recently that John Doris has taken to calling it, Repligate.
39. There is also an ongoing controversy surrounding null-hypothesis
significance testing (NHST). In a nutshell, the problem is that a p-value is
a conditional probability, but not the conditional probability that one
might expect. A p-value is the probability that the result in hand would
have been observed given the null hypothesis, i.e., given that nothing
interesting is happening (no positive correlations, no negative correlations,
no interaction effects, and so on). This is sometimes inverted by sloppy
researchers and interpreters, who gloss the p-value as the probability of the
null hypothesis given the observation. Symbolically, the difference is
between P(observation | null) and P(null | observation). The latter, more
desirable, conditional probability can be estimated using Bayesian
statistical analysis, but seldom is (and there are controversies surrounding
Bayesian analysis, especially the arbitrariness of prior probabilities). For
an introduction to these problems, see Abelson (1997), Cohen (1994), and
Wagenmakers et al. (2012).
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Don Loeb and Mark Alfano
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, Peter
Austin, 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. For
instance, using the same statistical techniques favored by many
experimental philosophers one would be led to conclude that Gemini are
30% more likely to be alcoholics (p < 0.02), Scorpios have an 80% higher
risk of developing leukemia (p < 0.05), and Virgo women suffer 40%
more from excessive vomiting during pregnancy (p < 0.04). These are
presumably 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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