Kwame Anthony Appiah - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Experimental moral psychology

How new is experimental philoso-
phy?1 Wasn’t Descartes, whose “me-
chanical philosophy” aimed to overturn
Aristotelianism, really an experimental
philosopher? After all, much of his at-
tention was devoted to geometry and
optics, and for a period he was revered
among scholars as, principally, a sort
of mathematical physicist. (That’s why
the one reference to him educated peo-
ple mostly know is in talk of the “Car-
tesian” coordinates he helped invent.)
He also spent much time and energy dis-
secting cows and other animals. Only
later was he repositioned as, centrally, a
theorist of mind and knowledge, whose
primary concern had to do with the jus-
ti½cation of belief. In The Passions of the
Soul (1649), Descartes aimed to solve
what we now think of as the canonical-
ly philosophical puzzle about the rela-
tion between the soul and the body by
way of an empirical hypothesis about
the role of the pineal gland. Without
the pineal–as Nicolaus Steno pointed
out in 1669–Descartes has no story of
how mind and body are functionally
integrated.2

I don’t want to overstate the case:
before the disciplinary rise of modern
philosophy, one can readily trace dis-

tinctions–between, say, reason and ex-
perience, speculation and experiment–
that seem cognate to our way of orga-
nizing knowledge. Descartes gives us
hope when he refers to “½rst philoso-
phy,” and he famously maintained that
“all philosophy is like a tree, of which
the roots are metaphysics, the trunk is
physics, and the branches, which grow
from this trunk, are all of the other sci-
ences, which is to say medicine, me-
chanics, and morals.”3 Yet even here
we can see that his taxonomy isn’t quite
ours: morals, to us a division of philoso-
phy, is to Descartes a practical endeavor
on a par with medicine.

By the next century, the growing pres-

tige of experimentation was apparent
everywhere. The encyclopedist D’Alem-
bert praised Locke for reducing meta-
physics to what it should be: la physique
expérimentale de l’âme–the experimental
science of the spirit. And Hume subtitled
his great Treatise of Human Nature, as we
don’t always remind ourselves, Being an
Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Meth-
od of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. The
point is not just that the canonical phi-
losophers belong as much to the histo-
ry of what we now call psychology as
to the genealogy of philosophy. It is that
the “metaphysical” and the psychologi-
cal claims are, insofar as we insist on dis-

Dædalus Summer 2009

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

tinguishing them, profoundly interde-
pendent. Their proper place as ancestors
of both modern disciplines is reflected
in the fact that many of the claims they
make about the mind–including those
claims that are thought to be of current
philosophical relevance–are founded in
empirical observation, even if they are
not often founded in experiment. They
depend on stories about the actual do-
ings of actual people, on claims about
how humanity actually is. Hume’s Histo-
ry of England–½ve volumes of empiri-
cal information, elegantly organized–
has rightly been seen as expressing phil-
osophical ideas about morality and poli-
tics and the human mind.

Intellectual historian Knud Haakon-
ssen has argued that our modern con-
ception of the discipline is presaged in
the epistemological preoccupations of
Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant.4 But
Reid himself was emphatic in his suspi-
cion of mere conjecture. Every real dis-
covery, he says, is arrived at by “patient
observation, by accurate experiments, or
by conclusions drawn by strict reason-
ing from observation and experiments,
and such discoveries have always tend-
ed to refute, but not to con½rm, the the-
ories and hypotheses which ingenious
men had invented.”5

As for Kant, it is anything but histori-
cally anomalous that the professor from
Königsberg, to whom we owe the ana-
lytic-synthetic distinction, worked avid-
ly on both sides of the putative divide.
Herder admired Kant ½rst of all for his
lectures on geography. The founder of
“critical philosophy” elaborated theo-
ries of the winds and of the earth’s ro-
tation, and dispensed advice about the
training of the young. “Games with balls
are among the best for children,” he
wrote. (“How did he know?” you might
wonder.)6 Kant possessed the resources
for a conceptual partition between what

we think of as philosophy and psychol-
ogy, but not a vocational one. He was
preoccupied with the professionaliza-
tion of philosophy, but not with avoid-
ing the empirical world. To historians
of psychology, Hume and Kant both ½g-
ure large; and some hold that contrast-
ing Humean and Kantian traditions in
scienti½c psychology continue to this
day: as a measurement-driven experi-
mental psychology on the one hand,
and the schemas of cognitive science
on the other.

One thing we humanists must do is
remind ourselves always of the continu-
ities of our intellectual traditions, even
when we are trying to produce some-
thing new. When talking about recent
experimental philosophy, it is impor-
tant, I think, to start by remembering
that we are continuing a long tradition.

There are at least two rather different

ways in which experiment is currently
being brought to bear in moral philoso-
phy. One way–which I associate with
the work of Joshua Knobe–continues
the project of conceptual analysis, as
in Knobe’s well-known work on inten-
tion. Here experiment ½gures in exactly
the way that Austin and Wittgenstein
would have thought mad or impertinent.
If conceptual analysis is the analysis of
“our” concepts, then shouldn’t one see
how “we” (or representative samples
of us) actually mobilize concepts in our
talk? One of the most interesting things
that disciplined and responsible experi-
ments on usage reveal is that the real
world contains scads of folk (like the
students we meet in our introductory
classes) who simply aren’t inclined to
say the things that Austin or Wittgen-
stein would have supposed all compe-
tent speakers should say.

In Knobe’s most famous experiment,
subjects were asked to consider two sce-

Experimen-
tal moral
psychology

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Dædalus Summer 2009

Kwame
Anthony
Appiah
on being
human

narios. In the ½rst, the chairman of a
company is asked to approve a new pro-
gram that will increase pro½ts and also
help the environment. “I don’t care at
all about helping the environment,” the
chairman replies. “I just want to make as
much pro½t as I can. Let’s start the new
program.” So the program is launched
and the environment is helped. The
second story is identical–except that
the program will hurt the environment.
Once again, the chairman is indifferent
to the environment, and the program
is launched in order to increase pro½ts,
with the expected results. When Knobe
presented these scenarios to subjects
in a controlled experiment, he found
that when the program helped the en-
vironment, only 23 percent agreed that
the chairman had “helped the environ-
ment intentionally.” When the program
harmed the environment, though, 82
percent agreed that the chairman had
“harmed the environment intentional-
ly.” This pattern recurred when various
other scenarios were tested.7

One striking feature of this result–
irrelevant to Knobe’s main point, but
important nevertheless–is that rough-
ly one in ½ve people in each case had
apparently managed to grow up with
very different intuitions from the rest of
us. Both intuitions have their advocates.
And it seems to me that the right answer
isn’t a matter of a head count. This work
would be valuable and suggestive even if
it skipped the actual experiments. (“It
would be natural to say,” Knobe might
have written, “that the chairman in one
situation had harmed the environment
intentionally, whereas . . . .”) The experi-
mental evidence enforces a useful mod-
esty about how much weight to give
one’s personal hunches, even when
they’re shared by the guy in the next
of½ce.

But, as I say, there’s a second sort of

experimental philosophy. The para-
digm here might be Josh Greene’s work
in moral psychology, in which he and
his colleagues have studied the fmri
images of the brains of people thinking
through so-called trolley cases, in which
people are asked what they think the
right thing is to do when a trolley, whose
driver is unconscious, is bearing down
on a group of people on a track. In a typ-
ical trolley case, you are offered the op-
tion of diverting the trolley from a track
where it will kill six people to another
track where it will kill only one. In the
past, philosophers have used these sce-
narios to ask questions about how we
make moral choices. But Greene’s ex-
periments look at more than patterns of
response to scenarios, more even than
statistics about concept use. Greene is
not just carrying out with a sample of
speakers the thought-experiments that
might once have been done by the phi-
losopher in her armchair. Rather, he is
looking, too, at evidence about the neu-
ral or psychological processes that un-
derlie our responses.8

One thing we can say about this work

is that it is really only an extension of
something that we have been doing for
a long time anyway; it’s just the further
pursuit of the philosophy of–in this
case, moral–psychology. Philosophers
in cognitive science have been doing
this sort of thing for a very long while.
They’ve been looking at work in exper-
imental psychology to see what it sug-
gests about how our minds work, and
they’ve sometimes suggested experi-
ments and hung around while they
were being done. And one reason that
many of the canonical philosophers
½gure also in the histories of psychol-
ogy is that, though they may have had
fewer instruments and less rigorous
methods, they were often relying on

Dædalus Summer 2009

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

empirical propositions about the mind
and its brain all along.

It seems to me, however, that we risk

losses along with the gains to be had
from the work of experimental philos-
ophy, unless we hold onto what is best
in the traditions of conceptual analy-
sis. One problem with methods, like
all tools, is that they can lead us to focus
too little attention on the problems with
which they cannot help. If you have a
hammer, as they say, everything can be-
gin to look like a nail. I think that hap-
pened with the development of the trol-
ley paradigm in moral philosophy–long
before it was connected with experimen-
tal moral psychology, in the days when
trolley intuitions were pursued exclu-
sively in the armchair. An experimental
moral philosophy attentive solely to the
neurophysiology of the ways we think
through trolley problems would give us
a distorted picture of our ethical lives.
A few decades ago, Edmund Pincoffs

pointed out the historical novelty of
what he called “quandary ethics,” ask-
ing hard questions about the disciplin-
ary distortions it had engendered.9
Quandary ethics, as the name suggests,
took the central problem of moral life
to be the resolution of quandaries about
what to do. One of its favorite methods
was to examine stylized scenarios, like
the trolley problem, and ½gure out what
we should do and why.

I am not always a foe of quandaries;

but, especially when we’re trying to
come to grips with the larger subject
of eudaimonia–the question of what it
is for a human life to go well–students
of the moral sciences, including the ex-
perimental philosophers, should recog-
nize how stark the limitations of quan-
daries are. To turn to them for guidance
in the arena of ethics, conceived at its
broadest, is like trying to ½nd your way
around at night with a laser pointer.

Consider this one dif½culty: in all of
those trolley cases, the options are given
in the description of the situation. But
in the real world, situations are not bun-
dled together with options. Instead, the
act of framing–describing a situation,
and thus determining that there’s a de-
cision to be made–is itself a moral task.
It’s often the moral task. Learning how
to recognize what is and isn’t an option
is part of our ethical development. For
example, part of the point of the strin-
gency of the prohibition against murder,
Anscombe once observed, was “that you
are not to be tempted by fear or hope of conse-
quences.”10 So a proper response to situ-
ations like these would be to look, ½rst,
for other options. To understand what’s
wrong with murder is, in part, to be
disinclined to take killing people as an
option. If we want to learn about nor-
mative life from stories, I suspect that
the most helpful ones are going to come
from movies, novels, and the like, in
which characters have to understand
and respond to complex situations, not
just pick options in an sat-style multi-
ple-choice problem. In life, the chal-
lenge is not so much to ½gure out how
best to play the game; the challenge is
to ½gure out what game you’re playing.
I offer this brief objection not because

this argument is inaccessible to the ex-
perimental moral philosopher. Indeed
–as I began by insisting–the dif½cul-
ties with quandary ethics long antedate
recent experimental moral psycholo-
gy. My point is a different one: that in
thinking about what we learn from the
experiments about ethical life, un-exper-
imental philosophy is still very much in
order. Nothing I have said about quan-
daries depends on any experimental evi-
dence.

So far, then, just a caution. The arm-

chair remains an important research

Experimen-
tal moral
psychology

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Dædalus Summer 2009

Kwame
Anthony
Appiah
on being
human

tool, and work done in armchairs re-
mains central to our subject–as, of
course, it does to most: mathematics
is not the only way to turn coffee into
theories. And so, let me end with a
brief sketch of just one case where it
seems to me experimental psycholo-
gy has been extremely helpful in think-
ing about our moral lives. It has to do
with some lessons of social psychology;
and my account here will draw heavily
on John Doris’s excellent book Lack of
Character.

Social psychologists are mostly “situ-
ationists”: they claim (this is a ½rst stab
at a de½nition) that a lot of what people
do is best explained not by traits of char-
acter, but by systematic human tenden-
cies to respond to features of their situa-
tions that nobody previously thought to
be crucial at all.11 They think that some-
one who is, say, reliably honest in one
kind of situation will often be reliably
dishonest in another. They’d be unsur-
prised, for example, that Oskar Schind-
ler was mercenary, arrogant, hypocriti-
cal, calculating, and vain sometimes . . .
but not always; and that his courage
and compassion could be elicited in
some contexts but not in others.

Now, to ascribe a virtue to someone
is, among other things, to say that she
tends to do what the virtue requires in
contexts where it is appropriate.12 An
honest person will resist the temptations
to dishonesty posed by situations where,
say, a lie will bring advantage, or failing
to return a lost wallet will allow one to
buy something one needs. Indeed, our
natural inclination, faced with some-
one who does something helpful or kind
–or, for that matter, something hostile
or thoughtless–is to suppose that these
acts flow from their character, where
character is understood as a trait that is
consistent across situations and, there-
fore, insensitive to differences in the

agent’s environment, especially small
ones. But situationists cite experiments
suggesting that small–and morally irrel-
evant–changes in the situation will lead
a person who acted honestly in one con-
text to do what is dishonest in another.
In the past thirty years or so, psy-
chological evidence for situationism
has been accumulating. Back in 1972,
Alice M. Isen and Paula Levin found
that, if you dropped your papers out-
side a phone booth in a shopping mall,
you were far more likely to be helped
by someone who had just had the good
fortune of ½nding a dime waiting for
him in the return slot. A year later,
John Darley and Daniel Batson discov-
ered (in perhaps the most famous of
these experiments) that Princeton sem-
inary students, even those who had just
been reflecting on the Gospel account
of the Good Samaritan, were much less
likely to stop to help someone “slumped
in a doorway, apparently in some sort of
distress,” if they’d been told that they
were late for an appointment. More re-
cently, Robert Baron and Jill Thomley
showed that you were more likely to
get change for a dollar outside a fra-
grant bakery shop than standing near
a “neutral-smelling dry-goods store.”13
Many of these effects are extremely
powerful: huge differences in behavior
flow from differences in circumstances
that seem of little or no normative con-
sequence. Putting the dime in the slot
in that shopping mall raised the propor-
tion of those who helped pick up the
papers from one out of twenty-½ve to
six out of seven–that is, from almost
no one to almost everyone. Seminari-
ans in a hurry are six times less likely
to stop like a Good Samaritan.14 Mind-
ful of these examples, you should sure-
ly be a little less con½dent that “she’s
helpful” is a good explanation next time
someone stops to assist you in picking

Dædalus Summer 2009

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

up your papers, especially if you’re out-
side a bakery!

I am not going to worry about wheth-
er we can give an account of the results
that better comports with our common
sense about why people, ourselves in-
cluded, do what they do. The question
I want to ask is, why should ethical the-
ory care about these claims at all?

Suppose I give you change because

(in part) I just got a whiff of my favor-
ite pastry. Of course, if I had a settled
policy of never giving change, even that
pleasant aroma wouldn’t help. So there
are other things about me–the sorts of
things we would normally assess moral-
ly–that are relevant to what I have done.
But let’s suppose that, other things be-
ing equal, if I hadn’t had the whiff, I’d
have ignored your plaintive plea to stop
and change your dollar for the parking
meter. Pleased by the ambient aroma,
I was inclined to do what, according to
the virtue theorist, a kind or helpful or
thoughtful person–a virtuous person–
would do; and I acted on that inclina-
tion. A typical virtue theorist will think
I have done the right thing because it is
the kind thing (and there are no counter-
vailing moral demands on me). But, on
the situationist account, I don’t act out
of the virtue of kindness. Does this act
accrue to my ethical credit? Do I de-
serve praise in this circumstance or not?
Have I or haven’t I made my life better
by doing a good thing?

A situationist might encourage us to
praise someone who does what is right
or good–what a virtuous person would
do–whether or not they did it out of a
virtuous disposition, but only for instru-
mental reasons. After all, psychological
theory also suggests that praise, which
is a form of reward, is likely to reinforce
the behavior. (What behavior? Presum-
ably not helpfulness, but being helpful

when you’re in a good mood.) For we
tend to think that helping people in
these circumstances, whatever the
reason, is a good thing.15

But the virtue ethicist cannot be
content that one acts as if virtue ethics
is true. And we can all agree that the
more evidence there is that a person’s
conduct is responsive to a morally irrel-
evant feature of the situation, the less
praiseworthy it is. If these psychologi-
cal claims are right, very often when
we credit people with compassion, as
a character trait, we’re wrong: they’re
just in a good mood. And if hardly any-
one is virtuous in the way that virtue
ethics conceives of it, isn’t the doc-
trine’s appeal eroded? Given that we
are so sensitive to circumstances and
so unaware of that fact, isn’t it going
to be wondrously dif½cult to develop
compassion, say, as a character trait?
We can’t keep track of all the cues and
variables that may prove critical to our
compassionate responses: presumably
the presence or absence of the smell of
baking is just one among thousands of
contextual factors that will have their
way with us. How, if this is so, can I
make myself disposed to do or to feel
the right thing? I have no voluntary
control on how aromas affect me. I
cannot be sure that I will have a free
dime show up whenever it would be
a ½ne thing to be helpful.

There are some philosophers, among

them the aforementioned John Doris,
who take the social-science literature
about character and conduct to pose a
serious and perhaps lethal challenge to
the virtue ethicist’s worldview. For one
thing, our virtue theorist faces an epis-
temological dif½culty if there are no ac-
tually virtuous people. As in all spheres
of thought, so in moral deliberation:
we sometimes need to think not only

Experimen-
tal moral
psychology

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Dædalus Summer 2009

Kwame
Anthony
Appiah
on being
human

about what the right answer is, but also
about how we discover what the right
answers are. Rosalind Hursthouse, in
her book On Virtue Ethics, has argued:

1) The right thing to do is what a virtu-
ous agent would do in the circum-
stances.

2) A virtuous person is one who has and

exercises the virtues.

3) A virtue is a character trait that a per-
son needs in order to have eudaimonia,
in order to live a good life.16

No interesting version of virtue ethics
holds that doing the right thing is all
that matters; we should want to be
the kind of person who does the right
thing for the right reasons.

Still, Hursthouse and others insist
that virtue ethics isn’t entirely “agent-
centered,” rather than “act-centered”;
it can also specify what the right thing
to do is–namely, what a virtuous per-
son would do. How are we to follow
that advice? If we were fully virtuous,
we would ½nd ourselves disposed to
think, act, and feel the right things.
But we are not. If we knew someone
who was virtuous, we could see what
she would do, I suppose. Given the de-
pressing situationist reality, however,
maybe no actual human being really is
(fully) virtuous. And even if a few peo-
ple did get to be virtuous against all the
odds, we would have to have some way
of identifying them, before we could
see what they would do. So we would
need, ½rst, to know what a good life
looks like, and then we would need to
be able to tell, presumably by reflecting
on actual and imaginary cases, whether
having a certain disposition is required
for a life to be good–and required not
in some instrumental way, as nourish-
ment is required for any life at all, but
intrinsically.

Dædalus Summer 2009

If experimental psychology shows
that people cannot have the sorts of
character traits that the virtue theorist
has identi½ed as required for eudaimonia,
there are only two possibilities: she has
identi½ed the wrong character traits, or
we cannot have worthwhile lives. Virtue
theory now faces a dilemma. The prob-
lem for the idea that we have gotten the
wrong virtues is a problem of method.
For virtue theory of the sort inspired by
Anscombe, we must discover what the
virtues are by reflection on concepts.
We can, in principle, reflect on which
of the stable dispositions that psychol-
ogy suggests might be possible–being
helpful when we are in a good mood,
say–are constitutive of a worthwhile
life; or which–being unhelpful when
we aren’t buoyed up by pleasant aro-
mas–detract from a life’s value. But
to concede that is to accept that we’ll
need to do the experimental moral psy-
chology before we can ask the right nor-
mative questions. On this horn of the
dilemma, virtue theory will ½nd itself
required to take up with the very em-
pirical psychology it so often disdains.
On the other horn of the dilemma,
the prospect that we cannot have worth-
while lives makes normative ethics mo-
tivationally irrelevant. What is the point
of doing what a virtuous person would
do if I can’t be virtuous? Once more,
whether I can be virtuous is obviously
an empirical question. Once more, then,
psychology seems clearly apropos.

Still, we should not overstate the threat

that situationism poses. The situation-
ist account doesn’t, for example, under-
mine the claim that it would be better
if we were compassionate people, with a
persistent, multitrack disposition to acts
of kindness. Philosophical accounts of
the character ideal of compassion, the
conception of it as a virtue, need make

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

no special assumptions about how easy
or widespread this deep disposition is.
Acquiring virtue, Aristotle already knew,
is hard; it is something that takes many
years and most people don’t make it.
These experiments might con½rm the
suspicion that compassionate men and
women are rare, in part because becom-
ing compassionate is dif½cult. But dif½-
cult is not the same as impossible; and
perhaps we can ascend the gradient of
these virtues only through aspiring to
the full-fledged ideal. Nor would the
ideal be defeated by a situationist who
busily set about showing that people
whom we take to exemplify compas-
sion–the Buddha, Christ, Mother The-
resa–were creatures of environments
that were particularly rich in the condi-
tions that (according to situationists)
elicit kindly acts.

Finally, we could easily imagine a per-

son who, on the virtue ethicists’ view,
was in some measure compassionate,
and who actually welcomed the psy-
chologists’ research. Reading about
these experiments will only remind
her that she will often be tempted to
avoid doing what she ought to do. So
these results may help her realize the
virtue of compassion. Each time she
sees someone who needs help when
she’s hurrying to a meeting, she’ll re-
member those Princeton seminarians
and tell herself that, after all, she’s not
in that much of a hurry; that the others
can wait. The research, for her, provides
a sort of perceptual correction akin to
the legend you see burned onto your
car’s rearview mirror: objects may be
closer than they appear. Thanks for the
tip, she says. To think that these psy-
chological claims by themselves under-
mine the normative idea that compas-
sion is a virtue is just a mistake.

We might also notice what the situa-
tionist research doesn’t show. It doesn’t

tell us anything about those seminarians
(a healthy 10 percent) who were helpful
even when rushing to an appointment;
perhaps that subpopulation really did
have a stable tendency to be helpful–
or, for all we know, to be heedless of the
time and careless about appointments.
(Nor can we yet say how the seminar-
ians would have compared with, say,
members of the local Ayn Rand socie-
ty.) There could, consistent with the evi-
dence, be a sprinkling of saints among
us. Some will dispute whether the dispo-
sitions interrogated by social psycholo-
gy can be identi½ed with the normative
conception of character traits elaborated
by the classical virtue theorists.17 And,
of course, the situationist hypothesis is
only that, in explaining behavior, we’re
inclined to overestimate disposition and
underestimate situation. It doesn’t claim
that dispositions don’t exist.

None of these caveats wholly blunts
the situationist point that the virtues,
as virtue ethicists conceive them, seem
exceedingly hard to develop, which must
leave most of us bereft of eudaimonia. But
virtue ethics is hardly alone in assigning
a role to elusive ideals. Our models of ra-
tionality are also shot through with such
norms. Recall the nineteenth-century
hope that, in the formula, logic might be
reduced to a “physics of thought.” What
succeeded that project was an approach
captured in another formula, according
to which logic is, in effect, an “ethics of
thought.”18 It tells us not how we do rea-
son, but how we ought to reason. And
it points toward one way of responding
to the question we have posed to the vir-
tue ethicist: how might we human be-
ings take seriously an ideal that human
beings must fall so far short of?

If you have been following debates

about the role of ideals in cognitive psy-
chology, you might think the answer is

Experimen-
tal moral
psychology

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Dædalus Summer 2009

Kwame
Anthony
Appiah
on being
human

to treat claims about virtues as moral
heuristics. But there are many dif½cul-
ties, I think, for this view.19 Here is one:
for faithful Aristotelians, this whole ap-
proach, in which we seek moral heu-
ristics that will guide us imperfect crea-
tures to do what a virtuous person would
do, is bound to look very peculiar. Vir-
tue ethics wants us to aim at becoming a
good person, not just at maximizing the
chance that we will do what a good per-
son would do. The contrast with famil-
iar cognitive heuristics is striking.
For cognitive heuristics are, so to
speak, twice dipped in means-end ra-
tionality. First, the right outcome is de-
½ned by what someone equipped with
ideal means-end rationality, someone
possessed of in½nite cognitive resources,
would do. Second, we then apply means-
end rationality to determine how peo-
ple with limited cognitive resources can
maximize their chances of doing what’s
right according to the ½rst test. When
we try to concoct a heuristic of virtue,
we must start, analogously, by de½ning
the right outcome as what someone ide-
ally virtuous would do. Since we’re not
ideally virtuous, the heuristics model
now introduces means-end rationali-
ty to maximize your chance of doing
what’s right by the ½rst test. The trou-
ble is, of course, that virtue ethics re-
quires that we aim at the good for rea-
sons that aren’t reducible to means-end
rationality. With the cognitive heuristic,
what matters is the outcome. But if vir-
tue ethics tells you that outcomes aren’t
the only thing that matters, then you
cannot assess heuristics by means-end
rationality–that is, by looking at the
probability that they will produce cer-
tain outcomes.

To be sure, the fact that virtues

are meant to be constitutive of a life of
eudaimonia–so that they are traits nec-
essary to make our lives worthwhile–

is consistent with the view that a virtu-
ous person’s life will have good effects
as well. Perhaps a life of virtue will be
an enjoyable life, too: Aristotle certain-
ly thought that a fully virtuous person
would take pleasure in the exercise of
virtue. But the value of the virtues does
not come just from the good results of
virtuous acts or from the enjoyment
that virtue produces; it is intrinsic, not
instrumental. A virtuous life is good be-
cause of what a virtuous person is, not
just because of what she does.

We can distinguish, then, between
having a virtue and being disposed to do
the virtuous act over a wide range of circum-
stances. We can distinguish, in particu-
lar, being an honest person, someone who
has that virtue as the virtue ethicist con-
ceives of it, and being someone who, across
a wide range of circumstances, behaves as
an honest person would. Suppose honesty
matters in my life because it promotes
reliability and thereby helps me support
the flourishing of others. If that were
so, I might explore some alternative pos-
sibilities by which I might refrain from
deceiving others. Perhaps someone has
developed a Bad Liar pill, which will im-
pair my capacity for successful decep-
tion; or perhaps our town has collec-
tively decided to add the drug to the
water supply, as a moral counterpart
to fluoridation. Equivalently, we could
try to heighten our ability to detect de-
ception. Either strategy amounts to a
similar trade-in: a scenario in which
I strive to be honest in all situations is
exchanged for a scenario in which I can
usually be relied upon not to deceive
others.

It would be a mistake to deny the in-
strumental signi½cance of honesty; but
doesn’t our moral common sense recoil
at the idea that honesty matters only be-
cause of this instrumental signi½cance?
(There’s a question for Knobe to pur-

100

Dædalus Summer 2009

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

sue.) Denying that signi½cance courts
moral narcissism; but reducing hon-
esty’s importance to that instrumen-
tal signi½cance threatens to replace the
ethical subject with the object of social
engineering. In all events, my aim is not
to ½ne-tune the dictum that an action
is right if it’s what a virtuous person
would do. I have only tried to illustrate
how alien that dictum is to what made
the eudaemonist tradition appealing in
the ½rst place.

I have no doubt, then, that we are learn-

ing things worth learning from all sorts
of experimental philosophy. I have no
doubt, too, that it is a bad idea, if you
are interested in the sorts of questions
these philosophers (and their friends in
psychology and economics) are address-
ing, to ignore their work. There is even
good reason, as I have argued, to think of
what they are doing as much more con-
tinuous with the past practices of major
philosophers than the paradigm of con-

ceptual (or, I might add, phenomenolog-
ical) analysis would suggest. But it re-
mains the case that responding to the
experiments requires the sort of careful
examination of arguments, the making
of distinctions, the reflection on unac-
tualized possibilities that are also a part
of the tradition and can be found in–to
construct a deliberately eclectic list–
Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz,
Hume, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Husserl,
James, Russell, and Sartre. The enthusi-
asts for the experiments should insist
that the armchair would be a much less
interesting and productive place if they
were not going about their business, too.
I agree; I have been agreeing all along.
Indeed, insofar as method is concerned,
I have only this modest pluralist sugges-
tion: that we would do well to sustain
a variety of traditions of reflection on
questions that matter to us. Unless you
already know all of the answers, you
don’t know for sure which questions
are worth asking.

Experimen-
tal moral
psychology

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

ENDNOTES
1 This essay is based on material from my book Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2008).
2 See Nicolaus Steno, Lecture on the Anatomy of the Brain, introduction by Gustav Scherz
(Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, Arnold Busck, 1965), 12 et seq.
3 René Descartes, (1647) “Lettre-Préface de l’édition française des Principes”; available at
http://www.ac-nice.fr/philo/textes/Descartes-LettrePreface.htm.
4 Knud Haakonssen, “The Idea of Early Modern Philosophy,” in Teaching New Histories of
Philosophy, ed. Jerry Schneewind (Princeton: University Center for Human Values, 2004),
108.
5 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay I., iii, “Of hypothesis,” in
The Works of Thomas Reid, vol. I (New York: Published by N. Bangs and T. Mason, for
the Methodist Episcopal Church, J. and J. Harper Printers, 1822), 367–368.
6 Kant on Education, trans. Annette Churton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1960), 61.
7 Joshua Knobe, “The Concept of Intentional Action: A Case Study in the Uses of Folk Psy-
chology,” Philosophical Studies 130 (2006): 203–231.

Dædalus Summer 2009

101

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3

Kwame
Anthony
Appiah
on being
human

8 Joshua D. Greene, R. Brian Sommerville, Leigh E. Nystrom, John M. Darley, Jonathan D.
Cohen, “An fmri Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment,” Science
293 (5537) (2001): 2105–2108.
9 Edmund Pincoffs, “Quandary Ethics,” Mind 80 (1971): 552–571; see also his Quandaries
and Virtues: Against Reductivism in Ethics (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986).
10 G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958); reprinted in

G. E. M. Anscombe, Ethics, Religion, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1981), 34.

11 See Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple

University Press, 1991).

12 John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 2002), 16–19.

13 Alice M. Isen and Paula F. Levin, “The Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and

Kindness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21 (1972): 384–388; John M. Darley
and C. Daniel Batson, “‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Disposi-
tional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973):
100–108; Kenneth E. Matthews and Lance K. Cannon, “Environmental Noise Level as a
Determinant of Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (1975):
571–577; Robert A. Baron and Jill Thomley, “A Whiff of Reality: Positive Affect as a Po-
tential Mediator of the Effects of Pleasant Fragrances on Task Performance and Helping,”
Environment and Behavior 26 (1994): 766–784. All are cited in Doris, Lack of Character,
30–34, 181.

14 And people are about one tenth as likely to help someone behind a curtain who has had
what sounds like an accident if there’s someone else standing by who does nothing; Bibb
Latane and Judith Rodin, “A Lady in Distress: Inhibiting Effects of Friends and Strangers
on Bystander Intervention,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 5 (1969): 189–202, as
cited in Doris, Lack of Character.

15 Of course, its being good because it helps doesn’t mean it isn’t bad overall: suppose you’re
a nasty person who offers change only because you know you’re being watched by some-
one who has promised to give you ½fty bucks if you ever do anything generous. That’s
blameworthy: you’re trying to fake generosity.

16 Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). “Virtue
Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2003 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta;
available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2003/entries/ethics-virtue/.

17 See, for example, Julia Annas, “Virtue Ethics and Social Psychology,” A Priori 2 (2003):
20–59; and Rachana Kamtekar, “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our
Character,” Ethics 114 (2004): 458–491, which, however, acknowledges, at 461, that “vir-
tue ethics can bene½t from considering the particular situational factors that social psy-
chology suggests have a profound influence on behavior.”

18 Theodor Lipps, (1880) Die Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie und die Wundt’sche Logik I. (The task
of epistemology and Wundtian logic I.), Philosophische Monatshefte, 16, 529–539; cited in
Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to
William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 188.

19 For more of them, see my Experiments in Ethics, chap. 4.

102

Dædalus Summer 2009

D
o
w
n
o
a
d
e
d

f
r
o
m
h

t
t

:
/
/

d
i
r
e
c
t
.

i
t
.

e
d
u
d
a
e
d
a
r
t
i
c
e
–
p
d

f
/

1
3
8
3
9
2
1
8
2
9
6
9
2
d
a
e
d
2
0
0
9
1
3
8
3
9
2
p
d

b
y
g
u
e
s
t

o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Download pdf