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Experimental Philosophy:A Modest Proposal

The practice of  Experimental Philosophy  appears to be wholly comprised of administering questionnaires to the philosophically naïve in order  to ascertain their philosophic "intuitions" .  

My  proposal  is simply  that in writing up their results the experimenters should feel obliged to include at least one section in which they, the  experimenters, say what they believe are  the correct answers  to each of the questions they have asked.  Where the  experimenters' opinions diverge from their subjects’  revealed intuitions, the experimenters should  try to explain why the subjects  got it wrong. 

This requirement   would  sensitize the experimenters and alert the audience to potential issues of experimenter bias--always  danger  in any kind of survey -- and would also have the salutary benefit of ensuring that some actual  philosophy was done in the course of the proceedings.

Philosophical Intuitions

In philosophy, your first intuitions about a problem are the opinions you hold after you've discussed it for a hour with someone who has thought about it for a lifetime.

Allowing Experimental Philosophy

"Oh, Agent Starling... do you really think you can dissect me with this blunt little tool? "

Over at the Experimental Philosophy Blog Joshua Knobe reports on some recent work.

People ordinarily distinguish between doing and allowing. They distinguish between 'breaking' and 'allowing to break,' between 'raising' and 'allowing to rise,' between 'killing' and 'allowing to die.'  A question now arises as to how people make this distinction. How do people know, e.g., whether a given act counts as actually breaking something or merely allowing it to break?

Fiery Cushman, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and I have a new paper on this question.  As you may by now have guessed, our thesis is that people draw the distinction in part by looking to the moral properties of the act in question.

... In our first study, all subjects were given a story about a person who ends up in the hospital.  The person is being kept alive by life-support systems, but then the doctor turns off these systems specifically for the purpose of making sure the person dies.  Subjects are then asked whether it would be more accurate to say that the doctor 'ended' the person's life or that he 'allowed it to end.'

Now comes the tricky part.  Subjects were randomly assigned either to the 'morally bad' condition or to the 'morally ambiguous' condition. Subjects in the morally bad condition were told that the doctor removed the life-support system because he despised the patient and did not want to use valuable resources on him; subjects on the morally ambiguous condition were told that the doctor turned off the life-support systems because he honestly believed that the patient would be better off not having to go on suffering. ...

As expected, subjects in the morally bad condition tended to say that the doctor 'ended' the patient's life, while those in the morally ambiguous showed a more complex pattern. ...

In our actual paper, we mostly just present these results without offering much of a explanation, but we are very curious about how exactly one might explain the effect found here.  It seems like it might be helpful to think in a more general way about what the distinction between doing and allowing is all about and then to figure out how that distinction might relate to moral considerations.  Any suggestions?

Well, golly, I have thought in a general way about the distinction and do have a few suggestions...