Letting the World In: Empirical Approaches to Ethics

In a landmark summary and review of “fin de siècle” moral philosophy, published in the final decade of the 20^th century, three major theorists in the field – Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard and Peter Railton – lamented the fact that “too many moral philosophers and commentators on moral philosophy — we do not exempt ourselves — have been content to invent their psychology or anthropology from scratch”. While welcoming the advent of empirically and historically informed approaches to the subject, they noted that “any real revolution in ethics stemming from the infusion of a more empirically informed understanding of psychology, anthropology, or history must hurry if it is to arrive in time to be part of fin de siècle ethics”. While the revolution that they anticipated did not arrive quite as quickly as hoped, the first decade of the 21^st century did finally bring about a change, in the general direction that they had called for. While some moral philosophers continue to see themselves as legislators in the kingdom of ends, engaged in a purely normative project, this view has increasingly come under pressure from those who find in the growing empirical literature on morality, not only a challenge to many preconceived philosophical notions, but also material for fruitful new approaches to a multitude of time-honoured philosophical problems. Of course, to talk about “empirically and historically” informed approaches to moral philosophy must not be taken to imply any sort of unified vision or approach. The social sciences are divided into rival schools of thought just as philosophy is. There is a mountain of theory and data, much of it relevant to our understanding of morality, but coming from different domains of inquiry, and in some cases involving contradictory theoretical commitments. There are of course the staples of 20^th century social science, areas that have been well-recognized fields of study for several decades: Anthropological ethnography remains an incredibly rich source of material for philosophers interested in cultural pluralism. Empirical research on child development has for several decades provided a wealth of information, particularly about the relationship between social cognition and moral emotions. Personality theory in psychology (including also studies in abnormal psychology) has attempted to operationalize many of our folk-psychological ideas about character. And of course evolutionary theory has provided the overarching set of constraints under which any naturalistic theory of morality must be developed. Beyond this, the late 20^th century saw several developments in the human sciences that significantly increased the volume of philosophically relevant work being done, particularly in the area of moral psychology. Probably the most important developments were the result of the so-called “cognitive revolution” in psychology, where the taboo imposed by behaviourism on the investigation of mental states was lifted, and psychologists began to investigate seriously all aspects of cognition, including moral judgment and reasoning. The result was an extraordinary expansion in our understanding of judgment and decision-making, cognitive bias, intuition, memory, executive control and will-power, to name just a few areas. At the same time, significant developments in evolutionary theory, largely the consequence of the development and application of the tools of evolutionary game theory, led to a sharpening in our understanding of several issues crucial to our understanding of morality (inclusive fitness, group selection, culture-gene co-evolution, etc.). And finally the development and application of more powerful statistical methods led to significant progress in the area of personality theory, allowing that speciality to leave behind its psychoanalytic origins and to become a theoretically freestanding domain of social-scientific inquiry. My objective here is not to provide a systematic overview of these trends, …