Experimental moral philosophy emerged as a methodology in the last decade of the twentieth century, as a branch of the larger experimental philosophy (X-Phi) approach. Experimental moral philosophy is the empirical study of moral intuitions, judgments, and behaviors. Like other forms of experimental philosophy, it involves gathering data using experimental methods and using these data to substantiate, undermine, or revise philosophical theories. In this case, the theories in question concern the nature of moral reasoning and judgment; the extent and sources (...) of moral obligations; the nature of a good person and a good life; even the scope and nature of moral theory itself. This entry begins with a brief look at the historical uses of empirical data in moral theory and goes on to ask what, if anything, is distinctive about experimental moral philosophy—how should we distinguish it from related work in empirical moral psychology? After discussing some strategies for answering this question, the entry examines two of the main projects within experimental moral philosophy, and then discusses some of the most prominent areas of research within the field. As we will see, in some cases experimental moral philosophy has opened up new avenues of investigation, while in other cases it has influenced longstanding debates within moral theory. (shrink)

Do psychopaths make moral judgments but lack motivation? Or are psychopaths’ judgments are not genuinely moral? Both sides of this debate seem to assume either externalist or internalist criteria for the presence of moral judgment. However, if moral judgment is a natural kind, we can arrive at a theory-neutral criterion for moral judgment. A leading naturalistic criterion suggests that psychopaths have an impaired capacity for moral judgment; the capacity is neither fully present nor fully absent. Psychopaths are therefore not counterexamples (...) to internalism. Nonetheless, internalism is empirically problematic because it is unable to explain psychopaths’ moral deficits. (shrink)

We accomplish three things in this paper. First, we provide evidence that the motivational internalism/externalism debate in moral psychology could be a false dichotomy born of ambiguity. Second, we provide further evidence for a crucial distinction between two different categories of belief in folk psychology: thick belief and thin belief. Third, we demonstrate how careful attention to deep features of folk psychology can help diagnose and defuse seemingly intractable philosophical disagreement in metaethics.

Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a methodology inthe last decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the largerexperimental philosophy approach. From the beginning,it has been embroiled in controversy on a number of fronts. Somedoubt that it is philosophy at all. Others acknowledge that it isphilosophy but think that it has produced modest results at best andconfusion at worst. Still others think it represents an important advance., Before the research program can be evaluated, we should have someconception of (...) its scope. But controversy surrounds questionsabout its boundaries as well. Uncontroversially, the distinctionbetween experimental and non-experimental philosophy is not identicalto the distinction between a posteriori and a prioriphilosophy. Experimental evidence is a proper subset of empiricalevidence, which is itself a subset of a posteriorievidence. Can any more be said?, L1: A child raised in a particular linguistic community almostinevitably ends up speaking an idiolect of the local language despitelack of sufficient explicit instruction, lack of extensive negativefeedback for mistakes, and grammatical mistakes by caretakers., character, moral | cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral | emotion | ethics: virtue | intuition | moral anti-realism | moral psychology: empirical approaches | moral realism | moral relativism | well-being, Copyright © 2014 byMark Alfano Don Loeb, View this site from another server:. (shrink)

Motivational internalism postulates a necessary connection between moral judgments and motivation. In arguing for and against internalism, metaethicists traditionally appeal to intuitions about cases, but crucial cases often yield conflicting intuitions. One way to try to make progress, possibly uncovering theoretical bias and revealing whether people have conceptions of moral judgments required for noncognitivist accounts of moral disagreement, is to investigate non-philosophers' willingness to attribute moral judgments. A pioneering study by Shaun Nichols seemed to undermine internalism, as a large majority (...) of subjects were willing to attribute moral understanding to an agent lacking moral motivation. However, our attempts to replicate this study yielded quite different results, and we identified a number of problems with Nichols' experimental paradigm. The results from a series of surveys designed to rule out these problems show that people are more willing to attribute moral understanding than mor.. (shrink)

According to non-cognitivism, moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. This paper presents an empirical argument against this view. We begin by showing that non-cognitivism entails the prediction that after some reflection competent ordinary speakers’ semantic intuitions favor that moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. At first sight, this prediction may seem to have been confirmed by previous research on folk metaethics. However, a number of methodological worries (...) lead us to doubt this interpretation. We, therefore, conducted a psychological study that alleviates these worries as far as possible. It turned out that competent ordinary speakers’ reflective semantic intuitions dominantly fail to favor that moral sentences do not aim to represent how things morally are. This challenge to non-cognitivism is defended and supplemented by considering deflationary theories of moral truth and middle ground theories in the cognitivism/non-cognitivism debate. (shrink)

Epistemic expressivists maintain, to a first approximation, that epistemic assertions express non-cognitive mental states, like endorsements, valuations, or pro-attitudes, rather than cognitive mental states such as beliefs. Proponents of epistemic expressivism include Chrisman, Gibbard, Field, Kappel, and Ridge, among others. In this paper, I argue for an alternative view to epistemic expressivism. The view I seek to advocate is inspired by hybrid expressivist theories about moral judgments, Copp Oxford studies in metaethics, 2009), Finlay, Strandberg ). According to these hybrid views, (...) moral judgments express semantically cognitive or representational states and pragmatically convey the speaker’s non-cognitive mental states via implicatures. I will argue that a particular version of this view can reasonably be extended to epistemic judgments and that it has several advantages over its expressivist and cognitivist competitors. In particular, I will try to show that there exist certain phenomena in the epistemic domain that seem to be best accounted for by expressivist theories of epistemic judgments. However, a version of hybrid expressivism that maintains that epistemic judgments convey the attributor’s non-cognitive mental states via generalized conversational implicatures is able to account for these phenomena just as well without running afoul of the main problems that have been identified for different versions of epistemic expressivism. (shrink)

In The Moral Problem, Michael Smith argues that only motivational internalists can offer an adequate explanation of why changes in moral judgment tend to be accompanied by changes in motivation in morally virtuous people. Smith argues that the failure of motivational externalism to account for this phenomenon amounts to a reductio of the view. In this paper, I draw on dual-process models of moral judgment to develop an externalist response to Smith’s argument. The key to my proposal is that motivationally (...) efficacious states are often the source of our moral judgments, and changes in judgment are typically the result of changes in these states. However, moral judgments can also be formed via an alternative pathway that does not necessarily affect motivation, and so motivation and judgment can come apart. This response not only defuses Smith’s objections to externalism, but challenges Smith to square his internalist proposal with the empirical details of moral judgment. (shrink)

L'internalisme motivationnel est la théorie selon laquelle il existe une connexion nécessaire entre les jugements moraux et la motivation. Dans ce chapitre, nous distinguons un certain nombre de ses variantes et écartons celles d’entre elles qui sont moins directement intéressantes pour les grands débats métaéthiques. Nous examinons ensuite trois arguments philosophiques qui échouent à établir ou à réfuter l'internalisme. Enfin, nous présentons quelques arguments empiriques, relevant respectivement de la psychologie, des neurosciences et de la philosophie expérimentale.

Moral Internalism proposes a necessary link between judging that an action is right/wrong and being motivated to perform/avoid that action. Internalism is central to many arguments within ethics, including the claim that moral judgments are not beliefs, and the claim that certain types of moral skepticism are incoherent. However, most of the basis for accepting Internalism rests on intuitions that have recently been called into question by empirical work. This paper further investigates the intuitions behind Internalism. Three experiments show not (...) only that these intuitions are not widespread, but that they are significantly influenced by normative evaluations of the situation in question. These results are taken to undermine Internalist intuitions, and contribute to the growing body of evidence showing that normative evaluations influence supposedly non-normative judgments. (shrink)

According to the established understanding of the Frege-Geach problem, it is a challenge exclusively for metaethical expressivism. In this paper, I argue that it is much wider in scope: The problem applies generally to views according to which moral sentences express moral judgments entailing that one is for or against something, irrespective of what mental states the judgments consist in. In particular, it applies to motivational internalism about moral judgments. Most noteworthy, it applies to cognitivist internalism according to which moral (...) judgments consist in motivating beliefs. Hence, in order for a metaethical view to evade the Frege-Geach problem, it should avoid stating that moral judgments are motivating. (shrink)