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P 34 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 VINCIANE VERGUETHEN
JOSHUA KNOBE *06 IS ONE OF EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY’S LEADING LIGHTS
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