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PHILOSOPHY
THINKERS TAKE
PHILOS0PHY TO THE STREETS
TESTSTHESE
BY DAVID MENCONI
a particularly horrific wartime dilemma. You’re a doctor
tending to people in the squalid Jewish ghetto of a Nazioccupied
town, where several of your patients have come
down with typhoid fever. The expedient thing would be to
report that to the authorities, even though the patients face
certain execution. If you don’t report it, you’re risking an
outbreak that would result in the Nazis executing everyone
in the ghetto (including you) and burning it to the ground.
So what is the ethically and morally “right” thing to do?
This scenario happened in Kovno, Lithuania, during World
War II — the doctor kept quiet and, with others, quelled the
outbreak. It’s the sort of moral question that philosophers regularly
grapple with. For most of the past century, the timehonored
method for philosophical consideration of such
questions was to sit and ponder them alone. Those trained
in philosophical thinking should arrive at intuitions about
right and wrong that are defensible as universal and true.
Except that in the real world, there’s not much consensus
about anything. That especially goes for questions of morality,
where one person’s obligation to act in a way that yields the
utilitarian greater good is another’s unconscionable assumption
of the role of God. Enter “experimental philosophy” —
or “x-phi” — a method that brings ordinary folks into the
process.
Where traditional philosophers try to deduce what every-
May 16, 2012 Princeton Alumni Weekly • paw.princeton.edu
one else thinks by intuition, experimental philosophers ask
everyone else what they think directly. X-phi data can take
the form of everything from opinion surveys to magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Then, applying a philosophical
mindset to the research data, experimental philosophers
seek to arrive at universal insights into free will, intentionality,
the existence of objective moral truth, and other age-old
questions. Among other things, experimental philosophers
have discovered that there is far less unanimity of opinion
out there than traditional philosophy has maintained.
“The terrific thing about experimental philosophy is that,
before it happened, philosophers would say, ‘This is intuitively
the right answer,’” says Princeton philosophy professor
Gilbert Harman. “Then they’d try to develop a theory
accounting for that intuition. If you did not share that intuition,
you were out of luck.”
Princeton is ground zero for experimental philosophy, and
Harman its father — even though Harman describes his
relationship with x-phi as “complicated” because he doesn’t
do philosophy experiments himself. But some of the field’s
leading figures have passed through Harman’s classrooms
over the last decade, where they heard questions like those
he recently was asking 200 undergraduates in an
“Introduction to Moral Philosophy” class.
“Is morality something you can get into disagreements
over?” Harman asked. “About who is right and who is wrong?
And if so, is there a way of finding out the answer? Are there
ways of testing one moral theory against another in the
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