More Experiments in Ethics

8/13/2019 More Experiments in Ethics

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ORIGINAL PAPER

More Experiments in Ethics

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Received: 2 February 2010 /Accepted: 18 March 2010 /Published online: 13 April 2010# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This paper responds to the four critiques of

my book Experiments in Ethics published in this

issue. The main theme I take up is how we should

understand the relation between psychology and

philosophy. Young and Saxe believe that bottom

line evaluative judgments dont depend on facts. I

argue for a different view, according to which our

evaluative and non-evaluative judgments must cohere

in a way that makes it rational, sometimes, to abandon

even what looks like a basic evaluative judgment

because we have changed our minds about the facts.This leads me to qualify Tiberiuss claim that our

moral judgments always derive, in part, from funda-

mental evaluative justificatory stopping points,

arguing that even these can themselves be adjusted

in the light of scientific understanding. Weinberg and

Wang object to my use of Kants distinction between

the perspective of the senses and the perspective of

the understanding, because they identify it with a

distinction between scientific and philosophical

worlds. I argue that a distinction of perspectives isnt

a distinction between worlds and that, in any case, thedistinction is not between science and ethics. Finally,

in responding to Macherys objections to a couple of

my proposals, I return to the suggestion that a

coherentist epistemology is required to deal with the

relations between science and ethics.

Keywords Automaticity . Autonomy of ethics .

Coherentism . Foundationalism . Hume . Kant. Incest.

Naturalism . Moral anti-realism . Moral realism

Let me begin by saying how gratifying it is that

Experiments in Ethics has helped elicit four such

interesting responses. One of my main aims in writing

the book was precisely to draw attention to the rangeand interest of the work going on at the interface of

moral philosophy and the social sciences. I think

these papers, with their diversity of issues, disciplin-

ary backgrounds and methods, reflect the vigor of the

intellectual life of what the moral sciences (as I

suggested we might call them once more) today. So

let me say something about some of my agreements

and disagreements with each paper before making a

few concluding remarks at the end. I begin with

Young and Saxes paper. But in the course of

discussing it, as you will see, I will come acrossissues that reappear in my discussion of the others.

Young and Saxe on Mental States and Attributions

of Blame

I learned a great deal from Liane Young and Rebecca

Saxes discussion of the role of the agents mental

states in normal moral assessments of blameworthi-

Neuroethics (2010) 3:233242

DOI 10.1007/s12152-010-9062-8

K. A. Appiah (*)

Department of Philosophy and University

Center for Human Values, Princeton University,

Princeton, NJ, USA

e-mail: [email protected]


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ness. Among the conclusions they draw from their

own experimental work is this: when someone acts in

the belief they will harm someone else but, in fact,

causes no harm, they are regarded as more blame-

worthy than someone who acts in the belief that they

will not harm someone but, in fact, causes harm. This

fits with an old idea in moral philosophyoneexpressed, perhaps, in the first sentence of Kants

Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Moralswhere he

says that a good will is the only unqualifiedly good

thing in the world. Kant puts the point emphatically in

a famous passage on the next page:

A good will is not good because of what it

effects or accomplishes, Even if, by a special

disfavor of fortune or by the niggardly provision

of a step motherly nature, this will should

wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose

then, like a jewel, it would still shine byitself, as something that has its full worth in

itself [1].

Many people have pointed out that, though a good

will is, no doubt, a good thing, what happens in the

world matters, too. It is bad when what I did leads to

harm to another whether or not Iam bad for having

acted in the way that had this bad consequence. And

our actual responses to situations that involve what

Bernard Williams dubbed moral luck suggest that

we sometimes evaluate people in ways that depend onwhether or not they achieved their aims: we appear to

treat murder as more blameworthy than attempted

murder, even when the difference between the two is

the result of a gust of wind that blows an arrow off

target [2]. Still, Saxe and Young are surely right that

we evaluate people, in large measure, on the basis of

the mental states with which and on which they act.

I am not quite sure how I managed to give them

the impression that I wanted to deny this. You might

think, after reading their paper, that I dont discuss the

relevance of internal states other than character tomoral evaluation. But the discussion of intention in

the section on Folk Psychology Unplugged in

chapter 3 is exactly about that. Its true that I dont

say much about the question how thoughts about the

beliefs and desires of agents figure in moral evalua-

tion. I hadnt thought there was work in experimental

psychology that challenged standard philosophical

views on this question. If Id been aware of their

own very interesting work on this topic, I might

indeed have taken this issue up: except that, as they

themselves argue, nothing in their work undermines

standard moral common sense. Their work is consis-

tent with thoughts that are routine both in informal

moral discussion and in moral philosophy: that in

deciding how culpable someone is we need to

consider both what they thought they were doingand what they were aiming to do; that it is, other

things being equal, worse to act with malice towards

others than to act without malice; and so on.

I take their own work to show many important

things: first, that, in normal adults, the right temporo-

parietal junction (RTPJ) is active when we are

analyzing of the role of states such as belief, desire

and intention in the actions of others; second, that

normal adults do indeed make moral evaluations of

agents blameworthiness in ways that give great weight

to various aspects of what the agent believed, intendedand desired; and third, that one feature of Asperger

Syndrome is an imperfect development of this capac-

ity, which appears quite late in normal development.

The second of these conclusions is one that will be

welcome to many moral philosophers, because it

shows that people are doing something like what

moral philosophy suggests they should do. Most

philosophers who have thought about holding people

responsible for their acts recently think that in

deciding what agents can be held responsible for we

need to bear in mind their beliefs about the situationin which they were acting, the aims with which they

acted, as well as (something that Young and Saxe

dont discuss in their paper) what they ought to have

known or aimed at. That the normal functioning of

the RTPJa part of the brain that appears to be used

for analyzing states of intention, belief and desireis

crucial to standard attributions of responsibility is, as

they point out, quite consistent, as a result, with what

most philosophers already believe.

One thing in the way they describe their work seems

to me, from a philosophers point of view, a littlemisleading. They move too easily, I think, between talk

of belief and desire and talk of what is intentional and

accidental, without explicitly invoking the idea of

intention, and without noting that the vocabulary we

use in these areas is notoriously slippery.1 The word

intentionoccurs only once in their paper, in the phrase

1 See, for example, J. L. Austin [3].

234 K.A. Appiah


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mental states (e.g. intention).2 Perhaps the word

desireis vague enough in ordinary usage to cover not

just what we want to do but also what we intend to do,

but these seem to me to be different questions; and

different in ways that are morally important.

Consider the scenario with Bill, Frank and Susan,

they describe from Woolfolk, Doris and Darley:

In one variation of the story, their plane is

hijacked by a gang of ruthless kidnappers who

surround the passengers with machine guns,

and order Bill to shoot Frank in the head;

otherwise, they will shoot Bill, Frank, and the

other passengers. Bill recognizes the opportuni-

ty to kill his wifes lover and get away with it.

He wants to kill Frank and does so. In another

variation: Bill forgives Frank and Susan and is

horrified when the situation arises but complies

with the kidnappersdemand to kill Frank.

In this case it seems to me natural to say that the

issue is really desire and not intention: in both

scenarios Bill acts with the intention to kill Frank

and, what is not exactly the same thing, he kills Frank

intentionallybut in the second he does so, as one

might say, against his desires. So it is the presence of

the wish that he didnt have to kill Frank, even though

he doesnt act on it, that provides some degree of

excuse for Bills behavior.

In their own scenario, however, in which Grace

accidentally poisons a friend because she quite

reasonably assumes that a white substance in a

container labeled sugar is sugar (and not the toxic

substance it actually is) what matters is that she had

no intention of harming her friend, not just that she

didnt want to. Even if she had desired to harm her

friendand even though this would be a bad desire to

haveit wouldnt have made the death any more

blameworthy. Grace would be a bad person for having

this desire, but she wouldnt be any more culpable for

the death.3 So we need to keep clear the distinction

between whether we think the agent is blameworthy

and whether she has desires she shouldnt have,

whatever we think of the consequences of her act.

Here is a place where the hope, which I expressed

inExperiments in Ethics,that there might be a fruitful

passage of ideas between philosophy and psychology

might be realized, if psychologists took up experi-mental work that explored scenarios which distin-

guished between the roles of intention and desire in

inculpation and exculpation more explicitly.

When it comes to the view that Young and Saxe

express about the relations between science and

philosophy in this area, Im afraid I think things are

not as simple as they claim. Their picture is this. There

are bottom line evaluative judgments that dont

depend on factsand so can neither be supported nor

undermined by science. This is a picture that suggests a

broadly Humean moral epistemology: we have basicevaluative commitments, ends which derive from the

will, and facts are relevant because they are relevant to

identifying means to those ends. On their view there

are, so to speak, axioms, moral foundations on which

we build. I am doubtful of this picture.

Consider two examples they offer ofbottom-line

moral thoughts:

M: mental states matter to moral evaluations,

IN: incest is wrong.

The place of claims like these in our moralthinking strikes me as better understood on a

coherentist than on a foundationalist view. Precisely

because our moral thought is not a system with

axioms that we cannot doubt, but more like a network

of claims that we seek to bring into coherence,

scientific evidence could, I think, be relevant to each

of these claims.

Take M. One possible view in cognitive psychology

is a form of eliminativism about belief, intention and

desire: a theory on which there are no such states.4 This

philosophical view is motivated by a great deal ofscientific evidence. If it were true, the mental states

that are supposed to matter to moral evaluations would

notor, if you like, would not reallyexist. So M

does have factual presuppositions; or, more precisely,

our ability to use M in our moral lives depends on

certain eliminativist theories being false. I dont know

4 See, e.g., P. M. Churchland [5].

3Of course, youd actually have to do the experiments to find

out whether most people carved up the territory as I have (and

as, I suspect, many other philosophers naturally would). Then

youd have to decide who was right.

2 The distance between the way we use the word intentional-

ly and our concept of intention is one theme of the literature

that grows out of Joshua Knobes paper [4], which is a

significant landmark in the recent turn to experimental

philosophy I discuss in the book.

More Experiments in Ethics 235


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how I would react if I thought eliminativism was right:

but Im not sure that I would conclude that I should

give up moral evaluation.

IN is also rationally sensitive to empirical fact.

While I cannot produce a particularly plausible

hypothetical here, there are surely rather unlikely

scientific theories whose truth would turn around theclaim that incest was always wrong. Suppose, for

example, it turned out that there were certain mental

disorders that could be eradicated in some people, if

they engaged in incest. (Not just if they thought they

had engaged in incest; suppose the genetic relatedness

of the parties is part of the causal mechanism.) John

Haidts arguments to dumbfound those who think

incest is wrong tend to involve showing them that

certain arguments against incest have false premises.

So he focused on undermining arguments against

incest. The main argument in favor of incest heinvited people to consider was, in essence, that people

should be free to do together what they both want to

do, provided it harms no one else. Since we are used

to the idea that sexual morality is not just about

whether you harm others, many people find this

argument unconvincing.

But offered the consideration that someone who

was severely mental ill could be cured by sex with a

willing sibling (and in no other way we know of),

someone might reasonably come to the view thatin

these circumstancesincest was permissible. Natu-rally, they could hold on to the view that incest was

bad in itself but permissible if it had enough positive

countervailing consequences. Deciding whether a

scientific claim had led them to modify their bottom

line moral judgment in this sort of case would require

us to settle on an exact formulation of the judgment.

But notice that I am not taking IN to mean that every

act of incest is impermissible: that claim would

simply be refuted by the existence of cases where

incest was the best option.

Defenders of IN as a bottom-line judgment mightconstrue it in a variety of ways. Here is one: the fact that

an act is an act of incest provides a moral reason not to

engage in it. On this view, our response to the sorts of

hypotheses I just mentioned shows only that such a (so-

called)pro tanto reason to avoid acts of incest can be

over-ridden by other features of the act. We can still

believe that being-an-act-of incest is a wrong-making

feature, even when other features either undermine or

out-weigh the force of this feature. My claim,

however, is that sufficient scientific evidence about

incest (including, perhaps, evidence about how our

judgment that it ispro tantowrong was formed) could

lead us reasonably to abandon the pro tanto judgment

altogether. Indeed, I see no reason to think that there is

any formulation of IN that it is plausible to ascribe to

actual moral thinkers, which couldnt be affected inthis sort of way by scientific evidence of some

imaginable (if highly unlikely) sort.5

Part of the reason I believe this is that I grew up in

two places with different notions of incest. In the

Akan culture of Asante, where my father was born,

sex with the children of your fathers sister, far from

being incestuous, is regarded as a sort of ideal. I grew

up calling my fathers sisters daughter my wife.

Sex with your mothers sisters child is the worst kind

of incest, on the other hand; as bad as sex with your

own uterine sibling. Since these are just two kinds offirst-cousin, so far as people in England, where my

mother was from, are concerned, my English relatives

would have found this distinction quite baffling.

(Perhaps you do, too.)

One way to make sense of this way of thinking is

to understand the picture of how a human being is

made that underlies it.6 People are supposed to be

composed of three significant elements. A body,

which is made out of your mothers blood, and two

kinds of spirit-like elements: thesunsumand thekra.7

Yoursunsumcomes from your father and accounts for

6 For further philosophical exploration of Akan conceptions see

Safro Kwame [6].

5 Neil Levy, in comments on the first draft of this paper, urged

me to make my views here clearer. I had the good fortune to

hear a talk by Arudra Burra, a graduate student here at

Princeton, while I was thinking about how to do so, in which

he gave a very careful treatment of similar issues about whether

lying is pro tanto wrong. He argues it isnt. (I say more about

pro tanto reasons in the section on Seeing Reason in Chapter

3 of Experiments in Ethics.) Some might respond that in

picking the incest example I made the case too easy for myself,

because they think that the bottom-line judgments are moregeneral (causing pain is wrong) or more particular (doing this

here and now is wrong). I realize that one will need different

arguments to persuade people of different philosophical

positions of the need to make factual and normative claims

cohere.

7 I say blood because the word thats used is the same as the

word for the red stuff that runs in your veins. Obviously,

though, this is a conception of blood that will differ from the

one held by most readers of this article.

236 K.A. Appiah


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many aspects of your personality. It is your sunsum

whose experiences produce dreams, because it can

leave your body when you are asleep. (Yourkra, on the

other hand, never leaves you until you die: it is a sort

of life force.) On this theory, as you will quickly see, I

and my mothers sisters children share the same

blood. My fathers sisters children share bloodwith him and with their mother, but not with me. So

incest here is sex with a close blood-relative.

The pattern of incest-avoidance that I described

coheres in an obvious way with this picture of the

nature of the human being. Absent this picture, I think

it is quite natural to feel less drawn to the pattern of

incest-avoidance. It would be reasonable to deny that

this picture of the human being was scientific: but

science could persuade you that it was incorrect.8 So

here is a case where, so it seems to me, anyone can

understand why learning a piece of science might leadyou to modify a commitment like IN (construed as a

pro tanto judgment).

So I continue to think that we have to take the sorts

of matters that science explores into account, even

when we are thinking about very central moral beliefs.

Let me say, finally, that there are two places where

Young and Saxe seem to misunderstand something I

wrote. First, they say, Appiah never acknowledges

that there may be a moral fact of the matter. Thats

not quite true. What I did was explicitly declare that I

wasnt going to take sides on the issue of moralrealism in the book. Heres what I wrote: I suspect

that a preoccupation with whether moral sentences are

fact-stating or truth-apt is, in some measure, an

artifact of the exaggerated authority that the philoso-

phy of languagemy own sub-disciplinary alma

materhas enjoyed for much of the postwar era.

And I shall endeavor to treat without prejudice realists

and quasi-realists and anti-realists [7]. My view is

that whether you say youre a realist or not, you can

accommodate the needed distinction between what is

morally true and what people think is morally true;that is you can construct a notion of moral error with

or without metaphysical realism.

The second, and perhaps more consequential,

misunderstanding, is that, pace Young and Saxe, I

do not favor virtue ethics. I did defend one

consequence of virtue ethics, which is the view that

it matters not just what we do but who we are. My

discussion of character, however, was meant to

suggest that the notion of who we are implicit inmuch virtue ethics was misguided. Who we are is not

a matter of character, I argued, as conceived of either

in common sense of most virtue ethics. The most

important moral significance of the truth of situation-

ism in social psychology, I think, is that we should

focus on shaping peoples circumstances in such a

way as not to place them in the sorts of situations

where humans tend to behave badly. One obvious

example of a relevant piece of social psychology is

Zimbardos experimental work simulating prison

conditions: his work has obvious implications forthe social organization of real prisons (lessons, which,

as he has pointed it out, were entirely ignored at Abu

Ghraib, to the everlasting shame of our country) [8].

Tiberius on the Autonomy of Ethics

I agree very much with very much of what Valerie

Tiberius says, including her claim that my articulation

of what I meant by the autonomy of ethics could have

been clearer. And I am attracted to her account ofwhat is true and false in the claim that ethics is

autonomous of the sciences. I am especially attracted

to her clear articulation of four things that ethicists

can usefully do, each of which can be better done if

we keep an eye on the best scientific understanding:

i) apply anthropology, psychology, and other social

sciences to ethical problems.

ii) modify traditional conceptions of the good life

(or traditional theories of morality) in light of

new empirical findings.

iii) draw out the implications of the commitments

we already have.

iv) advocate certain commitments, portraying them

in a way that makes them attractive or compelling

to those who do not recognize them as their own.

But let me suggest some complications to a view

that I think, as I say, is broadly correct.

The first complication I have in mindand it is

one that is not inconsistent with anything Tiberius

8 How reasonable it is to regard the view as unlike a scientific

one is actually a complex issue: see K. Anthony Appiah

Invisible Entities.Rev: Patterns of Thought in Africa and the

West by Robin Horton Times Literary Supplement (July 2

1993): 7.



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actually saysis that we need to be clear about the

role of what she calls fundamental justificatory

stopping points. Tiberius says (echoing an observa-

tion of Young and Saxes Ive already discussed):

when we reflective creatures ask for a justification,

what we need is an answer that already counts as a

reason for us (and again, not necessarily an ethicalreason). A justificatory stopping point must therefore

be something we are already committed to that is not

in question. So, there is a sense in which ethics retains

its autonomy.But the force of this argument depends

on a proper understanding of what it means to be

committed already. At any time, my justificatory

stopping points will, indeed, be fixed. As my

scientific understanding of what human beings and

our world are like grows, however, those stopping

points may shift. It is indeed true, thenat each

momentthat, as Tiberius says, [j]ustification stopsnot at a body of facts, but at a pattern of normative

commitments that cant be improved uponat that

moment. But I believe that one of the things that can

improve a pattern of normative commitments is its

fitting better with a total picture, informed by the

sciences, of what we human beings are like.

Whatever this fitting better means, it is not a

matter of mere logical consistency. Consistency can

seem demanding enough at times, but it will not be

enough to guarantee the right sort of coherence.

(Consider the example of Asante attitudes to incest Igave earlier: theres nothing logically inconsistent in

continuing to believe the traditional pattern of incest-

avoidance is right while giving up the belief that your

body comes from your mothers blood.) So the

form of coherentism that I want to gesture at is one in

which our normative commitments and our picture of

the world are being adjusted to one another as time

goes on.

Now we cannot entertain our total picture in a

single reflective moment and much of the time our

thinking will be very local within the vast web of ourideas. That is one perfectly good reason for organiz-

ing our inquiries into fields, so that within, say,

psychology, the implications for our moral lives of

our psychological understanding is not at the center of

attention; just as m uch of the tim e in m or al

philosophy we wont need to focus on the detailed

psychological presuppositions of our arguments. I

accept the need for a division of intellectual labor,

which has been a crucial part of the great epistemic

leaps of the last few centuries. But I want to insist that

even though we need to divide up these tasks, they

are all, in the end, connected.

This is evident in the fact that science, especially

social science, will naturally use language with

embedded normative commitments. Political scien-

tists seek evidence about whether democracies aremore or less likely to fight wars than authoritarian

states. Anthropologists discuss conceptions of incest

in relation to kinship structures. Psychologists explore

the question whether psychopaths experience guilt.

The concepts of democracy, incest and guilt are moral

concepts. Their presence in a thought engages moral

commitments.

Many people appear to believe that when these

concepts are invoked in the sciences, the scientific

content of the claims can be identified by replacing

the normative terms with some non-normative termson which they supervene. This thought is supported

by some forms of metaphysical naturalism, which see

normative properties as constructed out of non-

normative properties by the addition, so to speak, of a

normative commitment. (In the simplest sort of

model, incest is composed of the non-moral

concept of sexual relations with near kin and a

con-attitude.)

Even supposing this is the right metaphysical

picture, however, that is no reason to think that our

normative commitments play no epistemological rolein allowing us to identify the extension of normative

predicates. (In the simplest model, the extension of

As near kin in the concept of incest will depend in

part on whether we find ourselves with a con-attitude,

all things considered, to sexual relations between A

and some person.) To grasp and use the concept of

kindness it is not sufficient, of course, to be able to

specify its extension in the actual world, since grasp

of the concept entails a capacity to think about

possible acts of kindness as well. But I see no reason

to think that our capacity simply to identify actualacts of kindness is independent of our grasp of what is

normatively appropriate. If we need to recognize

moral norms in order to grasp moral concepts, then

understanding these scientific claims presupposes a

grasp of moral norms.

The relations between our normative thought and

the sciences thus go both ways. Without moral

understandinggrasp of moral conceptswe cannot

understand certain scientific claims, just as, without

238 K.A. Appiah


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the sorts of knowledge produced by the sciences, we

cannot act upon our moral ideas.

Weinberg and Wang on Naturalism

Jonathan Weinberg and Ellie Wang do a good job ofresisting my failure to endorse a more enthusiastically

naturalistic perspective. So let me declare myself

happy to accept their notion of a naturalism of

plenitude: stocking our ontological pantry with

strange and wondrous ingredients never dreamt of in

armchair philosophy. They do a good job, too, in

their discussion of character, of showing how some

psychological literature that I didnt discuss could

allow one to fill out the picture of the human person

in ways that would allow us to keep more of the

insights of virtue ethics than I allowed. The generaloutlines here I accept, even if I might want to disagree

with a few details. This is exactly the sort of fruitful

engagement between moral thought and psychology

that I believe is most valuable.

But I am unconvinced by their unwillingness to

accept my use of a distinction between perspectives, a

distinction that I borrowed, with modifications, from

Kant. The major modification is that I wanted to stick

with a distinction of perspectives and not to go on to a

distinction between worlds. Weingberg and Wang

want to deny me this modification. It is a distinc-tion, they write, etymologically at least, between

two separate worlds, and it is not made clear in

Appiahs book just how, once this distinction is in

place, we are to recover that continuity between

sciences world and philosophys.

I dont think I grasp why the metaphor of a stance

leads to a distinction between worlds. The etymolog-

ical point applies to Kants choice of terminology: the

Sinnenwelt, the Verstandeswelt. That is true. But I

consistently stuck to talk of stances and perspectives

in order to underline my defection from this feature ofKants thought. A stance (etymologically) is a way of

standing; a perspective what you see from one place

you might stand. Both metaphors are meant to suggest

that there is one world being looked at in different

ways.

Furthermore, the perspectives in question are not a

philosophical perspective and a scientific one, but one

in which we look at the world as agents and one in

which we look at it as objects. Kant invoked this

difference of perspectives to try to explain how one

could still approach the world as an agent if one

believed (as he did) that ones body was an object

embedded in a system governed by causal laws. His

insight, I believe, was this: you cant approach a

decision with the thought, Im a causal object so

what happens next is fixed by causal laws. What tosay here is, I think, one of the hardest questions in

metaphysics. But I dont think that you can eliminate

the gap between these perspectives by observing that

there is only one world. I think that Weinberg and

Wang agree with me about this, because they say:

Perhaps we can find a way of viewing the world as

possessing both explanations and justifications all at

once, in one-but-not-entirely-unified perspective.

They are recognizing here exactly the impossibility

of pulling Kants two perspectives into one.

I think Kant was right, too, to link the differencebetween the perspective we adopt as agents and a

purely naturalistic perspective to a distinction be-

tween reasons and causes (or justifications and

explanations, as Weingberg and Wang put it). Facing

the world as an agent, I find reasons to do and think

and feel things imposed upon me, so to speak, in

my experience. Naturalism can mean many differ-

ent things. But if it entails a picture of the world in

which there are no reasons, then I do not see how you

can be a naturalist. If, on the other hand, like

Weinberg and Wang (and me) you accept that thereare both explanations and justifications, you have to

accept, with Tiberius (and me), that there are

justificatory stopping points that are not themselves

given by the causal structure of the world.

The integration of science and ethics we are all

defending is focused, more specifically, on bringing

together what I called the moral sciences with

philosophical reflection on how we make a success

of our lives. But there are other sciences. And the

physical sciences are hard to integrate with the moral

sciences (let alone with ethics) for many reasons. Oneis that the best contemporary physics arguably does

without a notion of causation altogether. Another is

that we have no notion at all how to integrate, say,

psychology with physics, because their vocabularies

are so remote from one another.

You might observe that the integration of psychol-

ogy with economics is not in terribly good shape

either. The micro-foundations of economics that were

worked out through the use of game theory and



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decision theory relied on a picture of human psychol-

ogy that was thin to the point of evanescence. But we

have some new ideas today about how to bring

psychology and economics closer together, as behav-

ioral economists enrich the psychological micro-

foundations of economics. This is not a reduction of

economics to psychology, as reduction was conceivedby the received view of scientific theory and

explanation we inherited from positivism; but it is

consistent with the wider aim of the unification of our

various pictures of the world.

In this sense, though, physics, on the one hand, and

psychology and the moral sciences on the other,

remain totally unintegrated. For while neuroscience

uses tools, like fMR imaging, that depend on recent

physics, nothing of significance for psychology

depends on details of physical theory.

I bring this up to underline a point I made earlier:much modern intellectual progress is the result of an

intellectual division of labor. Psychology proceeds

better without worrying about exactly how the latest

models of cognition, say, fit with the latest under-

standing of fundamental physics. Even enthusiasts for

integration like Weinberg and Wang must agree that,

at any moment in the history of human understanding,

there will be limits to where integration can profitably

be pursued. In finding those limits it will not be

helpful to appeal to the idea of naturalism or to the

idea that there is only world.

Macherys Naturalism of Deprivation

Weinberg and Wang accuse me of working primarily

with a naturalism of deprivation: the naturalists job

is to pop the metaphysicians balloon, and keep her feet

planted back on (empirically) solid grounds. I am

going to try to work hard to eliminate this habit of

mind. But if they are looking for others to convert, I

think they need look no further than Edouard Machery.Machery assembles a good deal of psychological

evidence against two projects that I endorsed in my

book, aiming to pop a couple of my ethical balloons.

The first of those balloons is my view that it

matters, as I put it, who we are. As I mentioned in

discussing Young and Saxe, I argued in the book that

we should hold onto the idea from virtue ethics that it

matters what kinds of people we are. Machery

assembles a compelling case that there are reasons

to doubt that human beings have enough psycholog-

ical unity for it to make sense to speak of kinds of

person. And, since ought implies can, if we cant be

people of those kinds, it must be wrong to claim that

we ought to aim to be people of certain kinds. (He is

also doubtful that the properties that people do carry

across contexts are the sorts of properties we canaffect. Once more, my proposal is threatened by the

contraposition of ought implies can.)

My main response to Macherys argument against

caring about what kind of people we are is to concede

that he is completely right that the project requires a

laborious study of human behavior; and then insist

that I simply dont think that the evidence from that

study so far supports his view that the causes of

human behavior will turn out to be largely disuni-

fied. But I think he also misunderstands (like Young

and Saxe) the extent of my attraction to virtue ethics.(Clearly, then, the fault here is mine not theirs.) So let

me be clear finally: I do not think that caring about

who you are is the same as caring about character as

conceived in most virtue ethics.

What does caring about who you are entail then?

First, I believe, a concern for certain narrative features

of ones life. When I started on the project of writing

Experiments in Ethics I was going to make a plea for

even more cross-disciplinarity than the engagement

between ethics and the moral sciences. I had intended

to write as well about how both literature and literarystudies illuminate ethical questions. Had I completed

that larger project, I would have said more about this

question, and it would take a good deal more space

than I have here to do this issue any sort of justice. So

let me just exemplify what I have in mind.

At the end of chapter 2, I spoke making it easier

both to avoid doing what murderers do, and to avoid

beingwhat murderersare.I hope it is clear both that a

murderer is a kind of person and that being-a-murderer

is not in any obvious sense a matter of having a certain

character. If you intentionally kill someone neither inself-defense nor in warfare, your life is the life of a

murderer. That fact sits, I believe, in the negative

column in the accounting necessary to decide whether

or not your life has gone well. It matters, I think, beyond

the fact that you did something morally wrong. So, too,

the fact that you killed someone accidentally can also sit

in the negative column, even if you did so in a way that

was not morally culpable. That is because ethical

evaluation reflects moral luck as well as moral choices.

240 K.A. Appiah


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This is, no doubt, a controversial claim. Less

controversial, I think, will be the observation that caring

about who you are can involve exactly some of the

things that Machery admits we cando. So, for example,

he discusses the extent to which we can controlby

over-ridingsome of the automatic System 1 processes

stressed by those, like Bargh, who have drawn attentionto the automaticity of many of our responses. Having

conceded that we can at least sometimes regulate our

System 1 responses, Machery says:

the extent to which we can control them is

unclear. For instance, control seems very diffi-

cult when we are tired or when we have to

decide very quickly. In addition, because control

is effortful and might deplete our mental

resources, control might be often followed by

a lack of control.But committing herself to exercising control when

she can (when she isnt tired, in a hurry, or stressed by

earlier attempts at control) is exactly the sort of thing

that someone concerned with who she is might do. As

Machery rightly insists, you dont have to derive the

insight that it is hard to be virtuous from recent

experimental psychology. Machery continues:

Second, and more important, controlling the

automatic processes is one thing, changing them

is another one. It is unclear whether merelycontrolling the expression of some of the states

and dispositions that are meant to constitute

character and the kind of person we are (rather

than changing them) counts as changing the

kind of person we are

Here, I think, there are two things to say. One is

that we have good evidence that we can, at least

sometimes, modify these implicit attitudes. Cordelia

Fine has pointed out that work by Monteith et al

(among others) suggests that these processes are in

fact sensitive to reflective control in at least twoimportant ways: first, they may be the result of the

automatization of reflective judgments; and second,

they may be over-ridden with sufficient effort, when

avoiding error is a sufficiently salient aim which it

can be for distinctively moral reasons.9 We know, in

any case, that peoples automatic responses differ in

ways that are culturally variable. The race-based

implicit attitudes Machery mentions, for example,

differ in different sub-populations of the world for

reasons that no one believes are simply genetic. (For

one thing, conceptions of race differ in culturally-

shaped ways.) There is work in social psychology that

supports Gordon Allports Contact Hypothesis,which suggests that productive association across

racial lines of certain sorts leads to a reduction in

negative race-based attitudes.10 Suppose this is true of

implicit attitudes as well; then, you might well engage

in such productive association in part because you

didnt want to be the kind of person that had racially-

biased implicit attitudes.

But a second thing to say is that, if there are

dimensions of the person that you can do nothing

about, it doesnt follow that you cant take them to

be ethically important. I am irredeemably irascible incertain contexts. Theres nothing Im aware of I can

do about this, except try to avoid those contexts

when I see them coming. But this fact sits in the

negative column in my account. And the way my

recognition of this fact shows up is not in my

changing anythingI cantbut in my regret.

The other one of my claims Machery wants to

undermine (the other balloon he wants to pop) is a

proposal I made about moral intuition. I suggested we

could learn something about which of our moral

intuitions we should trust by studying the psycholog-ical processes that produce those intuitions. Though it

comes with a good deal of interesting psychological

detail, the heart of Macherys argument here is more

standardly philosophical: he thinks I have not shown

there is a non-circular way to do this.

The details of his objection here are not crucial,

because I want to concede this point. The gestures

towards a coherentist epistemology that I have made

several times already naturally raiseas coherentist

epistemologies always dothe specter of circularity. I

dont think I can say anything briefly about this worrythat will satisfy Machery. So let me just say this. I take

the candidate views here to be broadly either founda-

tionalist or coherentist. And, given what he says about

moral intuition, I doubt that Machery would be happy

with a moral foundationalism. So I urge him to play a

role in developing the coherentist picture.

9 Cordelia Fine [9]. Im grateful to Neil Levy for drawing this

article to my attention. 10 See Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp [10].



10/11

Conclusion

Let me end, as I began, by stressing the very great

interest of these papers and of the issues they raise. I

am very grateful to all six authors for the care with

which they read my book and for drawing my

attention to much work with which I was unfamiliar.These papers confirm that there is a great deal of

work in the moral sciences for moral philosophers to

be thinking about. All of them are naturalist in

insisting that philosophy should take science seri-

ously. I endorse this form of naturalism heartily. We

need more experiments in ethics, more reflection on

them, more integration of experiment with moral

theory. The view that only science should be taken

seriouslyone name for which is scientismis

one I believe we all reject with equal enthusiasm.

Our growing intellectual division of labor makes itincreasingly important to try to scan from time to

time the vast vistas of our knowledge and seek

consilience. Philosophy is not the only perspective

from which one can pursue that task. But all of us

can agree that when philosophers neglect that project

they have abandoned one of our most valuable

intellectual traditions.11

References

1. Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of

Morals,Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed.

Mary Gregor, 78. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

2. Williams, Bernard. 1982. Moral Luck in Moral Luck,

2039. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. Austin, J.L. 1956. A plea for excuses. In J. L. Austin:

Philosophical papers, 3rd ed, ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J.

Warnock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

4. Knobe, Joshua. 2006. The concept of intentional action: A

case study in the uses of folk psychology. Philosophical

Studies 130(2): 203231.

5. Churchland, P.M. 1981. Eliminative materialism and the

propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78: 6790.

6. Kwame, Safro. 1995. Readings in African philosophy.

Lanham: University Press of America.

7. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2008. Experiments in ethics,

178. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

8. Zimbardo, Philip. 2008. The Lucifer effect: Understandinghow good people turn evil. New York: Random House.

9. Fine, Cordelia. 2006. Is the emotional dog wagging its

rational tail, or chasing it? Philosophical Explorations 9:

(1).

10. Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. 2005. Allports

intergroup contact hypothesis: Its History and Influence. In

On the nature of prejudice: Fifty years after Allport, ed.

John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, and Laurie Rudman, 262

277. Oxford: Blackwell.

11 Im very grateful not only to the six respondents to my book

but also to Neil Levy for conceiving of and implementing this

symposium; as well as for writing the initial summary and

commenting on a first draft of this article.

242 K.A. Appiah


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