Download Experiments in Ethics, Kwame Anthony Appiah, 2008, Harvard

In his interesting and witty book, Experiments in Ethics (2008, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 274 pages, $22.95 hardback), Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that ethicists
would do well to not turn a cold shoulder to the empirical sciences; that many of the insights into
human behavior gained through contemporary psychological research have important
philosophical implications. And he may very well be right – but you don’t have to be a
philosopher to find Appiah’s book worth reading. It has important implications for educators
and psychologists as well, especially those interested in moral development.
How do we become morally good people? Appiah discusses two main issues relevant to
this question: character development and the moral sentiments.1 According to the Aristotelian
ideal of moral virtue, the virtuous person is a person who possesses a reliable disposition to do
the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. That is, he/she possesses good moral
character. The problem with this view, Appiah argues (as have many before him), is that a
whole host of empirical research conducted over the last century strongly suggests that most
people don’t possess such character. Indeed, these studies have revealed people’s ethical
behavior – e.g., their willingness to stop to help someone in need – to be alarmingly variable,
susceptible to the influence of seemingly irrelevant situational factors such as whether they had
just found a dime in a phone booth, whether they were late to give a lecture (on, ironically, the
Good Samaritan), or whether the person in need was located in a pleasant-smelling (or, to his/her
bad luck, a noisy or foul-smelling) area.
Of course, as Appiah rightly points out, this research doesn’t show that people cannot (in
principle) possess good moral character. Indeed, the findings are completely consistent with the
Chapter 3 is titled “The Case Against Intuition”, but Appiah’s discussion moves without distinction between moral
intuitions, sentiments, dispositions, and attitudes. While I disagree with this approach – these strike me as
importantly distinct states that require separate treatment – Appiah’s discussion is in no way unique in this regard. I
will take Appiah’s target in this chapter to most frequently be something along the lines of moral sentiment.
1
view that most virtue ethicists (and moral educators alike) presumably hold: namely, that
becoming virtuous is hard work. Good moral character takes lots of time, effort, and experience
to develop. But, whether or not we want to adopt the line that some people can (and do) develop
good moral character, for Appiah the take home message of this wealth of empirical research is
that situational factors play a substantial role in the development and expression of good moral
behavior – much more of a role than was previously realized (or, perhaps, that we’d care to
admit). And this, he thinks, has implications for moral education. The empirical findings, he
writes, “…rightly directs us to focus on institutions, on creating circumstances that are conducive
to virtue. Virtue theorists have sometimes directed us toward an excessively inward model of
self-development; situationism returns us to the world in which our selves take shape.” (71)
What about our moral sentiments? For most of us, certain things (e.g. bludgeoning an
innocent child to death) immediately strike us as morally unacceptable and repugnant. We feel
strongly repelled from such activities. Don’t such sentiments serve as a reliable guide in our
everyday moral lives, steering us towards good behavior and away from bad? Regrettably, says
Appiah, it isn’t clear that they do – in fact, research points quite strongly towards the contrary.
In the moral domain, people’s judgments (ostensibly generated by the very moral
intuitions/sentiments in question) are highly susceptible to framing effects, to heightened affect
(such as disgust), and are often stubbornly resistant to change even in the face of clear and
compelling reasons to do so. And there is good reason to suppose that the bulk of these moral
sentiments have an evolutionary basis, evolving more for their ability to facilitate survival in a
complex social setting than for the ability to accurately identify or track moral truth.
The moral of Appiah’s story is, in a nutshell, that we human beings come equipped with
stubborn and potentially inaccurate moral sentiments that, in our efforts to become morally good
people, may ultimately work against us as much as for us. And to make matters worse, our
judgments and behaviors are highly susceptible to morally irrelevant situational influences. Yet,
despite this depressing conclusion, Appiah remains optimistic. “Even if there are deep [and
undesirable] behavioral tendencies in our nature that have evolutionary explanations,” he writes,
“they will not be engaged in every possible environment. The more we learn about how the
feelings that shape our acts are triggered, the more we can adjust the environment to make sure
they aren’t.” What is more, he goes on, “…many tendencies of our nature evolved to produce
behavior that we can endorse. Discovering what triggers these tendencies can allow us to make
desirable behavior more frequent, too.” (124)
It’s simply a matter, it would seem, of shifting our focus – away from the education of
individuals and towards the structuring of the historical, cultural, and situational contexts that
influence them (how better to get a heart-shaped cookie, after all, then to put your cookie dough
into a heart-shaped mold?). I worry, though, that Appiah’s suggestion runs aground on the same
jagged rocks with which he earlier sank virtue ethics. How, he asks, are non-virtuous people
supposed to figure out what virtue actually looks like when there are no virtuous people around
to emulate? Similarly, I wonder how we can be expected to somehow structure the world so as
to elicit genuinely moral behavior when we ourselves are entrenched in an error-prone,
evolution-driven moral dogma. How, exactly, are we supposed to know if and when we are
getting it right?
Regrettably, Appiah’s discussion largely dodges this thorny issue. Nonetheless, his book
remains a lively summation of two important debates – namely, what role empirical research
should play in ethical theory and what conclusions, if any, we should draw from the empirical
data. And that, in itself, makes it worth the read.
Jennifer Cole Wright
Department of Psychology
College of Charleston
57 Coming St.
Charleston, SC 29424
[email protected]