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Experiments in Ethics. By Kwame Anthony Appiah. Harvard University Press 288pp, Pounds 14.95. ISBN 9780674026094. Published 28 February 2008.
Philosophy in the 20th century conceived of itself as distinct from empirical disciplines. Kwame Anthony Appiah's project is to bring economics, psychology and philosophy back together; to reconstitute the moral sciences.
Many philosophers are sceptical about the relevance of empirical moral psychology to ethics. One shibboleth of modern philosophers is that "we cannot derive an ought from an is", so factual premises alone will never be enough to tell us what we ought to do.
But it is also widely accepted that "ought implies can", or that we cannot be obliged to do something if it is not possible for us to do it. This suggests that facts about human nature are relevant to ethical inquiry. There is an emerging strand of "experimental ethics" that takes psychological results very seriously and even sees some philosophers conducting experiments of their own. It opens up a host of questions about the proper relationship between philosophy and the social and natural sciences.
This book, which Appiah describes as "in the nature of a preliminary report from the laboratory of reflection", is based on a set of lectures in which his...