Experimenting with Ethics in the Twenty-First Century

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 ..