Experiments In Ethics, Kwame Anthony Appiah, 2008, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 274 Pages, Price Hardback/Paperback

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 view that most virtue ethicists (and moral educators alike) presumably hold: namely, that 1 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. 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]