Abstract
The recent development of a field known as experimental philosophy—
in particular, its subfield devoted to moral decision making—invites us to
reflect on what it means to experiment in ethics and how it is that philosophers
determine the good. Furthermore, as this new discipline uses the
methods of experimental psychology to examine our intuitions about such
things as praise, blame, and moral responsibility, we ought to consider the
relationship between ethics and our psychological makeup. To this end, it
will be beneficial to consider the American pragmatists’ interpretations of
these issues. Ethics, for these thinkers, was both a psychological and an
experimental enterprise, one in which all of our psychological capabilities
are brought to bear in solving specific moral problems through the testing
of hypothetical and tentative solutions. I plan to argue here that the future
of experimental ethics will find itself indebted to the American past, not
only in its attempts to address the empirical data it already collects but in
rethinking the scope of ethics and experimentation.