Abstract
In his Experiments in Ethics, Appiah focuses mostly on the dimension of naturalism as a naturalism of deprivation - naturalism’s apparent robbing us of aspects of the world that we had held dear. The aim of this paper is to remind him of that naturalism has a dimension of plenitude as well - its capacity to enrich our conception of the world as well. With regard to character, we argue that scientific psychology can help provide a conception of character as dynamic, in a way that may preserve many key aspects of eudaimonistic ethics from the situationists’ challenge. With regard to intuition, we address Appiah’s worry that naturalistic explanations of the sources of our intuitions may leave us feeling that those intuitions have been thereby debunked. We suggest that it may be that feeling of debunking that should itself be debunked.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It seems to us that having a commitment does not necessarily imply being conscious of that commitment. One can be aiming at something explicitly or simply endorse it in a less ‘conscious’ form. However this issue does not have to be settled here.
For example, Ross and Nisbett listed George Kelly (1955), Mischel (1973), Markus (1977, Markus, Smith, & Moreland, 1985), and Cantor & Kihlstrom (1987).
Bealer, G. “The Incoherence of Empiricism”; Sosa, E., “A Defense of Intuitions”
References
Kamtekar, R. (2004). Situationism and virtue ethics on the content of our character. Ethics, 114: 458–491.
Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bloom, P. (2004). Descartes’s Baby: How the Science of Cognitive Development Explains What Makes Us Human. New York: Basic Books.
Bealer, G. (2000). A Theory of the A Priori. Philosophical Quarterly 81: 1–30.
Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. New York: W. W. Norton.
Weinberg, J. (2007). “How To Challenge Intuitions Empirically Without Risking Skepticism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy. 318–343.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Weinberg, J.M., Wang, E. Naturalism’s Perils, Naturalism’s Promises: A Comment on Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics . Neuroethics 3, 215–222 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-010-9065-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-010-9065-5