Describing Experiments in Ethics “as a book that should matter to us all,” Labyrinth bookstore owner Dorothea von Moltke introduced its author, Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, at a book talk at the Nassau Street bookstore last Thursday.
He, in turn, proffered a compliment by observing that although the group sitting before him was not the most numerous crowd he had ever talked to, it was,”per capita, probably the most distinguished audience I’ve ever addressed.”
The book grew out of four Flexner Lectures Mr. Appiah delivered in 2005 at Bryn Mawr College, which was, he said, a “pretty scary” enterprise, noting that Isaiah Berlin was among his predecessors there. Since his topic, experimental philosophy, subsumes several disciplines, including politics, economics, and psychology, the book did not turn out to be as comprehensive as he originally planned and as a result, he said, he is currently working on a more historical treatment of the subject. The fact that the subject has a history is not insignificant, he noted. Many people think that the interdisciplinarity of experimental ethics is characteristic of a very new field. It is not, he emphasized, pointing to the inclusion of economics and experimental philosophy in the Cambridge University “moral sciences” program he took in the 1980s, and mentioning practitioners like William James who already bridged several disciplines in his work over a century ago.
Experimental philosophy has been described as the use of experimental psychology to probe the way people make decisions and how these results inform philosophical debates. Mr. Appiah cited the work of his former student, Joshua Knobe, now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who asked college students: if a businessman interested only in profits knowingly harms the environment, should we say he did so intentionally? The students answered yes. Yet if the same businessman knowingly helped the environment while making “pots of money,” they said no.
“The Fat Man” conundrum, familiar to a number of audience members, is a similar, “what if” poser. In one hypothetical scenario, most people say they are comfortable with the notion of throwing a switch that would result in the death of one man in order to save five others on a runaway trolley. The same people are usually reluctant, however, to throw a fat man in front of the same trolley to stop it and again, save five lives. Why? “We are very strange. Much stranger than we realize,” he said, adding that he has “given up” trying to find simple explanations for people’s behavior. In another experiment he described, a hypnotist left subjects with the suggestion that they would become nauseous at the mention of a certain word. During a subsequent description of something not particularly threatening that used the word, they experienced a sense of something being “amiss.” Mr. Appiah expressed his own uncertainty about the source of such intuitions.
Mr. Appiah joined the Princeton faculty in 2002. His interests include philosophy of mind and language, and political philosophy. He also writes about African and African-American literary and cultural studies. His book, In My Father’s House, published in 1992, concerns the shaping of contemporary African cultural life. He recently introduced Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, at the culminating “Princeton Reads” event. Mr. Appiah’s other books include Assertion and Conditionals, For Truth in Semantics, and The Ethics of Identity and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, winner of the 2007 Arthur Ross Award of the council on Foreign Relations.