Experimental Ethics Toward an Empirical Moral Philosophy

Academic philosophy has experienced a major upheaval in the last decade. Venturous young philosophers, psychologists, and economists have begun to challenge the traditional stance that philosophy is an undertaking best pursued from the safety and calm of an arm-chair. Instead, they took the gloves off and brought philosophical questions to the experimental laboratory.

This volume sets the stage for the development of a consistent theoretical framework for one of the branches of Experimental Philosophy: the empirical study of human moral reasoning, that is, Experimental Ethics.

To this end it assembles contributions from philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists, economists, and sociologists active in this lively and growing field of research. These elaborate and substantiated works will enable its readers to immerse themselves into Experimental Ethics' history, its current topics and future perspectives, its methodology, and the criticism it is subject to.

Christoph Luetge is Full Professor of Business Ethics, Technische Universität München, Germany

Hannes Rusch is a Research Associate in Behavioral Economics (JLU Giessen) and Business Ethics, Technische Universität München, Germany

Matthias Uhl is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Business Ethics, Technische Universität München, Germany

List of Contributors
PART I : EXPERIMENTAL MORAL PHILOSOPHY?
1. Introduction: Towards an Empirical Moral Philosophy; C. Lütge, M. Uhl and H. Rusch
2. Experimental Philosophy; K.A. Appiah
3. Chances, Problems and Limits of Experimental Ethics; C. Lütge
4. A Brief History of Experimental Ethics; N. Dworazik and H. Rusch
PART II: APPLIED EXPERIMENTAL ETHICS: CASE STUDIES
Introduction
5. The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Role of the Philosopher; E. Schwitzgebel
6. Explaining the Knobe Effect; V. Wagner
7. Trolleys and Double Effect in Experimental Ethics; E. Di Nucci
8. Utilitarianism, the Difference Principle, or Else? An Experimental Analysis of the Impact of Social Immobility on the Democratic Election of Distributive Rules; S. Wolf and A. Lenger
9. Value Assignments in Experimental Environmental Ethics; U. Frey
PART III: ON METHODOLOGY
Introduction
10. Implicit Morality – A Methodological Survey; N. Strominger et al
11. How to Gauge Moral Intuitions? Prospects for a New Methodology; M. Bruder and A. Tanyi
12. Descriptive and Pragmatic Levels of Empirical Ethics; A. Bunge and A. Skulmowski
13. Robust Intuitions, Experimental Ethics and Experimental Economics: Bringing Reflective Equilibrium into the Lab; F. Aguiar et al
PART IV: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS
Introduction
14. Experimental Philosophy is Useful – But not in a Specific Way; J. Rosenthal
15. Intuitions, Experiments, and Armchairs; N. Mukerji
PART V: FUTURE PERSPECTIVES
Introduction
16. Large-scale Social Experiments in Experimental Ethics; J.F. Müller
17. Philosophy as the Behaviorist Views It?; H. Rusch
18. Outlook
Index