Experiments in Ethics (Flexner Lectures) - Hardcover

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674026098 ISBN 13: 9780674026094

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2008

Synopsis

In the past few decades, scientists of human nature - including experimental and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary theorists, and behavioural economists - have explored the way we arrive at moral judgments. They have called into question commonplaces about character and offered troubling explanations for various moral intuitions. Research like this may help explain what, in fact, we do and feel. But can it tell us what we ought to do or feel? In "Experiments in Ethics", the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how the new empirical moral psychology relates to the age-old project of philosophical ethics.Some moral theorists hold that the realm of morality must be autonomous of the sciences; others maintain that science undermines the authority of moral reasons. Appiah elaborates a vision of naturalism that resists both temptations. He traces an intellectual genealogy of the burgeoning discipline of "experimental philosophy," provides a balanced, lucid account of the work being done in this controversial and increasingly influential field, and offers a fresh way of thinking about ethics in the classical tradition.Appiah urges that the relation between empirical research and morality, now so often antagonistic, should be seen in terms of dialogue, not contest. And he shows how experimental philosophy, far from being something new, is actually as old as philosophy itself. Beyond illuminating debates about the connection between psychology and ethics, intuition and theory, his book helps us to rethink the very nature of the philosophical enterprise.

About this title

Review

"Appiah's project is to bring economics, psychology and philosophy back together; to
reconstitute the moral sciences. His style is chatty and erudite, full of stories and
literary references."
-- - Natalie Gold, Times Higher Education, 27 March 2008

"In Experiments with Ethics, [Appiah] reviews a sample of the most intriguing
experiments through which scientists have sought the mechanics of our moral minds.
[This book] is erudite, concise and engagingly written." -- - Nick Bostrom, Nature, 29/05/08

"[A] beautifully written book [...] Appiah packs a chewy heft of scholarly nuance
away in the footnotes, and the text sparkles with jokes [...]"
-- - Steven Poole, Guardian, 2 February 2008

"A fascinating and erudite characterisation of philosophy as a discipline that only 'calved off' from psychology around the beginning of the twentieth century".
-- Times Literary Supplement, 6 March 2009

Review

"A fascinating and erudite characterisation of philosophy as a discipline that only 'calved off' from psychology around the beginning of the twentieth century".

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0674026098
• ISBN 13: 9780674026094
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 236