Experiments in Ethics (Flexner Lectures) [Hardcover]

Kwame Appiah is a distinguished Princeton philosopher, and the publisher of this book, Harvard University Press, is one of the most distinguished scholarly publishers in the world. This combination must command respect even before the book is as much as opened.

The volume is one of a series of "lectures" addressed to the general public. The author poses the following problem: how can our understanding of ethics be informed by the findings of empirical social psychology ? He gives us a very useful rundown on the best-known experiments and reflects on their significance.

With so much in this volume to be appreciated, it may be churlish to complain about some of the details. Nevertheless, as someone with little background in philosophy (but a lifelong attention to the social sciences), I must raise at least two of my dissatisfactions:

1. In his chapter on "the varieties of moral experience," the author discusses a number of "modules" that he feels characterize the human psyche: compassion, reciprocity, hierarchy, and so forth. He draws on other scholars who have posited such proclivities, and he also mentions Chomsky who, he says, has proposed a similar, presumably innate, human capacity for language. I do not find these "modules" persuasive as being human universals. There is very little in this discussion that would connect it to empirical science, for example to anthropology, not to speak of the findings of modern neuroscience. Indeed, the descriptions of modules are reminiscent of pre-scientific speculations concerning "four humors."

2. The second chapter, "the case against character," gives us a stimulating and challenging rundown of experiments that suggest that ethical choice is very much influenced by the immediate situation. So we learn, for example, that if you have just smelled the delicious odor of fresh-baked bread, you are more likely to be generous than you would be without such olfactory stimulus. The author seems to conclude (he does hedge this a bit) that there is no such thing as character, that everything depends on the situation.

The problem here is that in any of these situations there are minorities of subjects who don't act as expected. Even with all that good smelling bread, some remain stingy; even without great smells, some are generous. So it would appear that these experimental situations explain some of the variance but not all.

It seems to me, now, that Appiah does not appreciate the multivariate spirit of much of social science. It is generally taken for granted that people are influenced by a number of factors, not just one, and the multivariate methods of statistics are designed to discover just how much of the variance is explained by each variable. In other words, if you prove that the situation has an influence, you have not thereby proven that character does not.

Contributions to moral philosophy, from Aristotle to Emmanuel Kant to John Stuart Mill and to John Rawls, are among the peak achievements of human intellect. Experiments in Ethics addresses The Question: how does moral philosophy relate to the effort in experimental psychology and behavioral game theory to model the contribution of moral values to individual choice and strategic interaction?

This engaging book does not fully settle the issue (does a philosopher ever fully settle the issue?), but it is packed with mordant insights and suggestive ideas for the behavioral scientist.

I start from the understanding that moral reasoning and moral behavior are an intimate part of the human behavioral repertoire. Unlike mathematics or video games, moral behavior is a part of even the simplest hunter-gatherer societies known to us, and the complexity of moral reasoning appears to be a feature of human society everywhere. Humans produce morality the same way spiders weave webs.

This understanding suggests a very simple answer to The Question: just as physics moved from Natural Philosophy to Natural Science in a previous era, and more recently just as the study of human speech moved from the Philosophy of Language to Linguistics, so now does ethics move from Moral Philosophy to Behavioral Science in the current era. If this were correct, moral philosophy in the current era would be relegated to the position of the interpretation of behavioral science, just as the philosophy of science has become the study of the practice of scientists and the interpretation of their intellectual products.

I very much like this simple answer, because I have always been hostile to the notion, shared by many moral philosophers, that they have some special access to Moral Truth, giving them the right to make value judgments concerning the moral behavior of the untutored man in the street. Just as the linguist records but does not determine the rules of grammar, so the moral philosopher reflects on ethics but does not produce moral truths.

However, this answer to The Question presupposes a rather thoroughgoing moral relativism: the institution of slavery is just in a given society if it is justified by a moral principle in that society. In particular, there is no conceptual position outside of society according to which we can judge the superior morality of one society over another. This is fine for the scientist, who is predisposed to observe without moral judgment, but it overlooks a key point: people treat a statement of the form "x is good" to be a fact about x, much as "x is blue" is a fact about x. Indeed, people can argue whether x is in fact good, and they are not arguing about how x is treated in any particular society.

It does no good to retreat the position that each individual has a personal morality, just as each has a personal genome, only partially shared with others. If we argue about morality, we are not arguing about what each of us believes, but rather what we should jointly believe.

I think this reasoning is decisive. We miss something fundamental about morality by saying merely that humans have moral rules the way they have food preferences. Behavioral scientists study the moral rules of people the same way they study the food preferences of individuals. But, there is more to morality than that. And that is why the simple answer to The Question is wrong. As Appiah puts it, "Does anybody really think a moral system is just merely because it has be accepted by most members of a society? "(150) The only reasonable answer is No.

An alternative answer is that moral philosophers specify criteria of goodness, justice, and moral worth. When people disagree with the moral values singled out by the philosopher, people are simply wrong. This is the typical stance of the various types of utilitarianism (Bentham, Sidgwick, Mill), as well as the deontological moralists, such as Kant. Since the criteria need not correspond to what people actually value morally, these schools have an ultimately intuitionist epistemology, although I imagine that it is possible to derive the guiding moral criteria from biological evolution or some other empirical regularity.

Appiah is dismissive of such theories. He says, "Astronomers have stars; geologists have rocks. But what do moral theorists have to work with? For centuries, they typically claimed to proceed from truths that were self-evident---or, more modestly, from our moral intuitions." (p. 73). However, he notes that "Where surveys show people have incompatible intuitions, we should predict that each intuition has some past philosopher who constructed a theory around it. "(191) His point is that the variety of intuitions of the philosophers has about the same breadth, if not depth, of that of hoi poloi.

For Appiah, this does not mean that the moral philosopher should not appeal to his intuitions. He quotes Sir David Ross, in The Right and the Good (1930), who proposed that "the moral convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people are the data of ethics just as sense-perceptions are the data of a natural science." (p. 75) The point is that the moral philosopher has the same data available as the ordinary citizen, but has spent more time and energy grappling with and trying to make sense out of this data. The evidence of the experimental psychologist and behavioral game theorist are thus welcomed by the moral philosopher, who can use this data to sort out moral issues more effectively.

Appiah thus accepts a version of virtue ethics. He says, "Ethics is, in that formulation of Aristotle's, about the ultimate aim or end of human life, the end he called eudemonia." (164) We can translate eudemonia as "flourishing," the term used by Amartya Sen in his work on ethics and economic theory. It is clear why Appiah is so happy with behavioral game theory and experimental psychology: to decide what is best for humans requires that we know a lot about humans. "The end of philosophical ethics," he says, "is to make sense of the project of eudaimonia. It cannot do that on its own: it needs the assistance of all the moral sciences (204)

Appiah explains virtue ethics as follows: "The right thing to do is what a virtuous agent would do in the circumstances...A virtue is a character trait that a person needs in order to have eudaimonia---that is, in order to live a good life. (36) He recognizes that the study of real-life humans indicates that people are at best only inconsistently virtuous, often lapsing, and typically behaving virtuously only over certain idiosyncratic spheres of life. That's okay, he says. Eudaimonia is an ideal state, not one that can be achieved. He remarks that "Virtue ethics assumes that being virtuous is a character trait. In fact, people are virtuous in some situations and not in other situations. There is thus no such thing as a "virtuous disposition." We are just not built that way." (46) However, "individual moments of compassion and moments of honesty make our lives better, even if we are not compassionate or honest through and through." (70)

My own analogy to Appiah's view, which I find attractive, is that the moral philosopher is like the master chef, taking everyday ingredients at their freshest and producing a culinary delight that keeps the customer coming back for more, or perhaps buying and using the master's recipe book. One positive attribute of this analogy is that food preferences, like ethical preferences, have a unity in diversity. We can appreciate the culinary arts of many cultures, but there are some foods that are delicacies in one society that are an abomination in another. So it goes with moral values, which are universal, but have their jarring incompatibilities.

Virtue ethics has something deep to teach the behavioral scientist. For many decades, economists and biologists assumed that the natural state of a human being was selfishness, a characteristic relaxed only on behalf of one's immediate kith and kin. Indeed, biologists extended "selfish genes" to selfish individuals, and economists equated "rationality" with being "self-interested." The contrast with Appiah and other virtue theorists is quite striking. Virtue theorists believe that it may be difficult to determine what the virtuous act is, and it may be tempting to opt for an immediately rewarding act lacking virtue, but virtue is ultimately its own reward. Appiah says, "The claim that we ought to do what's in everyone's long-term interest...is a necessary truth underlies morality." (24)

Many experimental studies in recent years have shown that people often prefer to be virtuous, and are willing to sacrifice material reward to achieve moral ends. Appiah's claim, however, is far stronger. Not only do many people strive to be virtuous, but those who routinely perform virtuous acts have more satisfied lives than those who do not. For instance, James Konow and Joseph Earley, "The Hedonistic Paradox", Journal of Public Economics 92 (2008) note that people who volunteer for community helping or are generous givers in laboratory altruism games are happier, have higher self-esteem, life-satisfaction and even physical health than those who do not.

Appiah's analysis is flawed by his unwillingness to consider analytical models of human behavior. He is happy with experiments, but he never mentions that these experiments may indicate a certain analytical framework that radically illuminates human choice. I refer here to the rational actor model (which I prefer to call the beliefs, preferences and constraints (BPC) model) for understanding the notion of objectives and constraints, and game theory, for understanding strategic interaction. In the BPC, moral values are part of the individual's objective function, so there are quite naturally tradeoffs between material self-interest and moral values, and among competing moral values. It is incorrect to say that individuals are "imperfectly" virtuous, because it is the nature of tradeoffs that there is no unique first-best point, given our constrained circumstances. I am sure that we are, each of us, imperfectly virtuous because of our human failings, but the very framework of virtue ethics, according to which the virtuousness of an act is assessed independently from any other act or concrete circumstances, is just wrong. Appiah would have a much cleaner argument if he took the beliefs preferences and constraints model seriously, and if he analyzed social interaction in game-theoretic terms.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a distinguished philosopher of language. He writes well and humorously. Yet at the end of the day, it's hard to say what, exactly, this book contributes to our understanding of ethics. If you know nothing about ethics and moral thought, then there are some interesting points here; and indeed, the book is written for the layperson. But if you know anything at all about the debates in the field, there's just not that much here. I don't know much, but this book seems to go over old ground.

Appiah asks what new findings in psychology -- particularly areas such as behavioral economics and social psychology -- might have to tell us about ethics. An interesting question. And he does come up with some interesting answers. For example, John Rawls famously introduced the notion of "reflective equilibrium", in which we seek to bring our moral intuitions in line with broader, more abstract theories of the right. Appiah argues -- persuasively to me, at least -- that the findings of psychology show this to be impossible, because people's deeply felt intuitions often contradict each other, and often contradict themselve depending upon how they are framed, so the Rawlsian process simply can't be done.

I was also quite taken by Appiah's critique, in the last chapter, of "dilemmas" in moral ethics, such as the famous trolley problem. These kinds of thought experiments, while interesting and memorable, really say nothing about the way we live our lives, and are so potted as to really offer no general guidance. They are clear, and simple -- and thus have no basis in reality, which is neither. I agree, and again think he is persuasive.

But then what is persuasive? Appiah seeks to reintroduce the notion of "ethics" as something distinct from "morality." While the latter concerns rules of conduct, the former is really about how one should live an excellent life. So how should we do this? Here, Appiah really just punts. He says that we can't just be subjectivists -- a sadist can't say, "My concept of an excellent life is to inflict pain", or someone can't say that his life project consists of devotion to a "saucer of mud". Arguing that the successful pursuit of pain infliction or saucer devotion achieves the excellent life undermines the entire notion of human purpose. But he also says that it's not objective, either: there are different life projects that we can see as excellent. All true, all common sensical, but not really earth shattering. Appiah says at the end of the book that his "philosophy" is that things are more complicated that they might seem. That's what we get at the end of 200 some odd pages?

And it's worse, because in fact Appiah's conclusion in all of this is precisely what theorists of "virtue ethics" have been working on for a couple of decades now. The entire project of virtue ethics is to try to come up with a series of character traits that best contribute to human flourishing. That's an important project.

Yet Appiah gives them no credit. Instead, he insists on critiquing the work of someone like Rosalind Hursthouse, the author of On Virtue Ethics, because she tries to come up with a rule-based virtue ethics. Appiah notes, accurately in my view, that coming up with virtue rules really undermines the approach's contribution, because if you are following those rules for the "wrong" reason, then you're not really virtuous, and if you are inspired by the "right" reason but unsuccessful at what you're trying to achieve, then can you really say you have lived an excellent life? True enough. But this is quite unfair. Virtue ethicists have been criticized for not coming up with guidelines for action. So Hursthouse tries to do so, and then Appiah slams her for coming up with guidelines for action. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

What's more, he really skips over evidence that could confonud his argument. For example, he notes experiments that show that people are more helpful to other if they smell freshly-baked bread, or have just found coins in a phone booth. He even finds an experiment in which Princeton seminary students overwhelmingly refuse to help someone in need if they are in a hurry. So Appiah sort of suggests, without really saying it, that it is pointless to develop "character." But wait: there are still lots of people -- not a majority, but not neglible, either -- who help others even if they haven't gotten the coins. And there are vast treasure trove of resource about how one tries to instill habits of conduct such that one is more likely to exhibit certain virtues. Aristotle went on at length about these external good, and Appiah mentions Aristotle's discussion. But doesn't that show that virtue ethics could be onto something? Our characters aren't perfectible, but maybe they are improvable. What does Appiah think about that? He won't say, perhaps because to discuss would mean that he could not so easily dismiss virtue ethics as he seems to.

And what's really the pity is that there is a book out there that actually does what Appiah seems to claim to want to do, namely, apply the findings of modern psychology to an ethical account of human flourishing. That book is Jonathan Haidt's quite brilliant The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Haidt's book is masterful because it connects the notion of flourishing with the empirical research about what human beings actually do that makes them happier.

One would want a philosopher such as Appiah to think a little bit more deeply about what happiness actually means. I agree with him that a life lived as an excellent sadist is not the same as a life lived as an excellent human. But I don't know WHY I agree with that, and I don't know why he believes it. Maybe he should tell us. He doesn't. Instead, he concludes that the task of ethics is to teach us how to help us develop our own plans for an excellently-lived life. How true. But maybe he should actually try to do so.