Neuroethics (2010) 3:233242 DOI 10.

1007/s12152-010-9062-8

ORIGINAL PAPER

More Experiments in Ethics

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Received: 2 February 2010 / Accepted: 18 March 2010 / Published online: 13 April 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This paper responds to the four critiques of my book Experiments in Ethics published in this issue. The main theme I take up is how we should understand the relation between psychology and philosophy. Young and Saxe believe that bottom line evaluative judgments dont depend on facts. I argue for a different view, according to which our evaluative and non-evaluative judgments must cohere in a way that makes it rational, sometimes, to abandon even what looks like a basic evaluative judgment because we have changed our minds about the facts. This leads me to qualify Tiberiuss claim that our moral judgments always derive, in part, from fundamental evaluative justificatory stopping points, arguing that even these can themselves be adjusted in the light of scientific understanding. Weinberg and Wang object to my use of Kants distinction between the perspective of the senses and the perspective of the understanding, because they identify it with a distinction between scientific and philosophical worlds. I argue that a distinction of perspectives isnt a distinction between worlds and that, in any case, the distinction is not between science and ethics. Finally, in responding to Macherys objections to a couple of my proposals, I return to the suggestion that a
K. A. Appiah (*) Department of Philosophy and University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: kappiah@princeton.edu

coherentist epistemology is required to deal with the relations between science and ethics. Keywords Automaticity . Autonomy of ethics . Coherentism . Foundationalism . Hume . Kant . Incest . Naturalism . Moral anti-realism . Moral realism Let me begin by saying how gratifying it is that Experiments in Ethics has helped elicit four such interesting responses. One of my main aims in writing the book was precisely to draw attention to the range and interest of the work going on at the interface of moral philosophy and the social sciences. I think these papers, with their diversity of issues, disciplinary backgrounds and methods, reflect the vigor of the intellectual life of what the moral sciences (as I suggested we might call them once more) today. So let me say something about some of my agreements and disagreements with each paper before making a few concluding remarks at the end. I begin with Young and Saxes paper. But in the course of discussing it, as you will see, I will come across issues that reappear in my discussion of the others.

Young and Saxe on Mental States and Attributions of Blame I learned a great deal from Liane Young and Rebecca Saxes discussion of the role of the agents mental states in normal moral assessments of blameworthi-

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ness. Among the conclusions they draw from their own experimental work is this: when someone acts in the belief they will harm someone else but, in fact, causes no harm, they are regarded as more blameworthy than someone who acts in the belief that they will not harm someone but, in fact, causes harm. This fits with an old idea in moral philosophyone expressed, perhaps, in the first sentence of Kants Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Moralswhere he says that a good will is the only unqualifiedly good thing in the world. Kant puts the point emphatically in a famous passage on the next page: A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, Even if, by a special disfavor of fortune or by the niggardly provision of a step motherly nature, this will should wholly lack the capacity to carry out its purpose then, like a jewel, it would still shine by itself, as something that has its full worth in itself [1]. Many people have pointed out that, though a good will is, no doubt, a good thing, what happens in the world matters, too. It is bad when what I did leads to harm to another whether or not I am bad for having acted in the way that had this bad consequence. And our actual responses to situations that involve what Bernard Williams dubbed moral luck suggest that we sometimes evaluate people in ways that depend on whether or not they achieved their aims: we appear to treat murder as more blameworthy than attempted murder, even when the difference between the two is the result of a gust of wind that blows an arrow off target [2]. Still, Saxe and Young are surely right that we evaluate people, in large measure, on the basis of the mental states with which and on which they act. I am not quite sure how I managed to give them the impression that I wanted to deny this. You might think, after reading their paper, that I dont discuss the relevance of internal states other than character to moral evaluation. But the discussion of intention in the section on Folk Psychology Unplugged in chapter 3 is exactly about that. Its true that I dont say much about the question how thoughts about the beliefs and desires of agents figure in moral evaluation. I hadnt thought there was work in experimental psychology that challenged standard philosophical views on this question. If Id been aware of their own very interesting work on this topic, I might

indeed have taken this issue up: except that, as they themselves argue, nothing in their work undermines standard moral common sense. Their work is consistent with thoughts that are routine both in informal moral discussion and in moral philosophy: that in deciding how culpable someone is we need to consider both what they thought they were doing and what they were aiming to do; that it is, other things being equal, worse to act with malice towards others than to act without malice; and so on. I take their own work to show many important things: first, that, in normal adults, the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) is active when we are analyzing of the role of states such as belief, desire and intention in the actions of others; second, that normal adults do indeed make moral evaluations of agents blameworthiness in ways that give great weight to various aspects of what the agent believed, intended and desired; and third, that one feature of Asperger Syndrome is an imperfect development of this capacity, which appears quite late in normal development. The second of these conclusions is one that will be welcome to many moral philosophers, because it shows that people are doing something like what moral philosophy suggests they should do. Most philosophers who have thought about holding people responsible for their acts recently think that in deciding what agents can be held responsible for we need to bear in mind their beliefs about the situation in which they were acting, the aims with which they acted, as well as (something that Young and Saxe dont discuss in their paper) what they ought to have known or aimed at. That the normal functioning of the RTPJa part of the brain that appears to be used for analyzing states of intention, belief and desireis crucial to standard attributions of responsibility is, as they point out, quite consistent, as a result, with what most philosophers already believe. One thing in the way they describe their work seems to me, from a philosopher s point of view, a little misleading. They move too easily, I think, between talk of belief and desire and talk of what is intentional and accidental, without explicitly invoking the idea of intention, and without noting that the vocabulary we use in these areas is notoriously slippery.1 The word intention occurs only once in their paper, in the phrase

See, for example, J. L. Austin [3].

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mental states (e.g. intention).2 Perhaps the word desire is vague enough in ordinary usage to cover not just what we want to do but also what we intend to do, but these seem to me to be different questions; and different in ways that are morally important. Consider the scenario with Bill, Frank and Susan, they describe from Woolfolk, Doris and Darley: In one variation of the story, their plane is hijacked by a gang of ruthless kidnappers who surround the passengers with machine guns, and order Bill to shoot Frank in the head; otherwise, they will shoot Bill, Frank, and the other passengers. Bill recognizes the opportunity to kill his wifes lover and get away with it. He wants to kill Frank and does so. In another variation: Bill forgives Frank and Susan and is horrified when the situation arises but complies with the kidnappers demand to kill Frank. In this case it seems to me natural to say that the issue is really desire and not intention: in both scenarios Bill acts with the intention to kill Frank and, what is not exactly the same thing, he kills Frank intentionallybut in the second he does so, as one might say, against his desires. So it is the presence of the wish that he didnt have to kill Frank, even though he doesnt act on it, that provides some degree of excuse for Bills behavior. In their own scenario, however, in which Grace accidentally poisons a friend because she quite reasonably assumes that a white substance in a container labeled sugar is sugar (and not the toxic substance it actually is) what matters is that she had no intention of harming her friend, not just that she didnt want to. Even if she had desired to harm her friendand even though this would be a bad desire to haveit wouldnt have made the death any more blameworthy. Grace would be a bad person for having this desire, but she wouldnt be any more culpable for the death.3 So we need to keep clear the distinction

between whether we think the agent is blameworthy and whether she has desires she shouldnt have, whatever we think of the consequences of her act. Here is a place where the hope, which I expressed in Experiments in Ethics, that there might be a fruitful passage of ideas between philosophy and psychology might be realized, if psychologists took up experimental work that explored scenarios which distinguished between the roles of intention and desire in inculpation and exculpation more explicitly. When it comes to the view that Young and Saxe express about the relations between science and philosophy in this area, Im afraid I think things are not as simple as they claim. Their picture is this. There are bottom line evaluative judgments that dont depend on facts and so can neither be supported nor undermined by science. This is a picture that suggests a broadly Humean moral epistemology: we have basic evaluative commitments, ends which derive from the will, and facts are relevant because they are relevant to identifying means to those ends. On their view there are, so to speak, axioms, moral foundations on which we build. I am doubtful of this picture. Consider two examples they offer of bottom-line moral thoughts: M: mental states matter to moral evaluations, IN: incest is wrong. The place of claims like these in our moral thinking strikes me as better understood on a coherentist than on a foundationalist view. Precisely because our moral thought is not a system with axioms that we cannot doubt, but more like a network of claims that we seek to bring into coherence, scientific evidence could, I think, be relevant to each of these claims. Take M. One possible view in cognitive psychology is a form of eliminativism about belief, intention and desire: a theory on which there are no such states.4 This philosophical view is motivated by a great deal of scientific evidence. If it were true, the mental states that are supposed to matter to moral evaluations would notor, if you like, would not reallyexist. So M does have factual presuppositions; or, more precisely, our ability to use M in our moral lives depends on certain eliminativist theories being false. I dont know

The distance between the way we use the word intentionally and our concept of intention is one theme of the literature that grows out of Joshua Knobes paper [4], which is a significant landmark in the recent turn to experimental philosophy I discuss in the book. 3 Of course, youd actually have to do the experiments to find out whether most people carved up the territory as I have (and as, I suspect, many other philosophers naturally would). Then youd have to decide who was right.
2

See, e.g., P. M. Churchland [5].

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how I would react if I thought eliminativism was right: but Im not sure that I would conclude that I should give up moral evaluation. IN is also rationally sensitive to empirical fact. While I cannot produce a particularly plausible hypothetical here, there are surely rather unlikely scientific theories whose truth would turn around the claim that incest was always wrong. Suppose, for example, it turned out that there were certain mental disorders that could be eradicated in some people, if they engaged in incest. (Not just if they thought they had engaged in incest; suppose the genetic relatedness of the parties is part of the causal mechanism.) John Haidts arguments to dumbfound those who think incest is wrong tend to involve showing them that certain arguments against incest have false premises. So he focused on undermining arguments against incest. The main argument in favor of incest he invited people to consider was, in essence, that people should be free to do together what they both want to do, provided it harms no one else. Since we are used to the idea that sexual morality is not just about whether you harm others, many people find this argument unconvincing. But offered the consideration that someone who was severely mental ill could be cured by sex with a willing sibling (and in no other way we know of), someone might reasonably come to the view thatin these circumstancesincest was permissible. Naturally, they could hold on to the view that incest was bad in itself but permissible if it had enough positive countervailing consequences. Deciding whether a scientific claim had led them to modify their bottom line moral judgment in this sort of case would require us to settle on an exact formulation of the judgment. But notice that I am not taking IN to mean that every act of incest is impermissible: that claim would simply be refuted by the existence of cases where incest was the best option. Defenders of IN as a bottom-line judgment might construe it in a variety of ways. Here is one: the fact that an act is an act of incest provides a moral reason not to engage in it. On this view, our response to the sorts of hypotheses I just mentioned shows only that such a (socalled) pro tanto reason to avoid acts of incest can be over-ridden by other features of the act. We can still believe that being-an-act-of incest is a wrong-making feature, even when other features either undermine or out-weigh the force of this feature. My claim,

however, is that sufficient scientific evidence about incest (including, perhaps, evidence about how our judgment that it is pro tanto wrong was formed) could lead us reasonably to abandon the pro tanto judgment altogether. Indeed, I see no reason to think that there is any formulation of IN that it is plausible to ascribe to actual moral thinkers, which couldnt be affected in this sort of way by scientific evidence of some imaginable (if highly unlikely) sort.5 Part of the reason I believe this is that I grew up in two places with different notions of incest. In the Akan culture of Asante, where my father was born, sex with the children of your father s sister, far from being incestuous, is regarded as a sort of ideal. I grew up calling my father s sister s daughter my wife. Sex with your mother s sister s child is the worst kind of incest, on the other hand; as bad as sex with your own uterine sibling. Since these are just two kinds of first-cousin, so far as people in England, where my mother was from, are concerned, my English relatives would have found this distinction quite baffling. (Perhaps you do, too.) One way to make sense of this way of thinking is to understand the picture of how a human being is made that underlies it.6 People are supposed to be composed of three significant elements. A body, which is made out of your mother s blood, and two kinds of spirit-like elements: the sunsum and the kra.7 Your sunsum comes from your father and accounts for

Neil Levy, in comments on the first draft of this paper, urged me to make my views here clearer. I had the good fortune to hear a talk by Arudra Burra, a graduate student here at Princeton, while I was thinking about how to do so, in which he gave a very careful treatment of similar issues about whether lying is pro tanto wrong. He argues it isnt. (I say more about pro tanto reasons in the section on Seeing Reason in Chapter 3 of Experiments in Ethics.) Some might respond that in picking the incest example I made the case too easy for myself, because they think that the bottom-line judgments are more general (causing pain is wrong) or more particular (doing this here and now is wrong). I realize that one will need different arguments to persuade people of different philosophical positions of the need to make factual and normative claims cohere. 6 For further philosophical exploration of Akan conceptions see Safro Kwame [6]. 7 I say blood because the word thats used is the same as the word for the red stuff that runs in your veins. Obviously, though, this is a conception of blood that will differ from the one held by most readers of this article.

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many aspects of your personality. It is your sunsum whose experiences produce dreams, because it can leave your body when you are asleep. (Your kra, on the other hand, never leaves you until you die: it is a sort of life force.) On this theory, as you will quickly see, I and my mother s sister s children share the same blood. My father s sister s children share blood with him and with their mother, but not with me. So incest here is sex with a close blood-relative. The pattern of incest-avoidance that I described coheres in an obvious way with this picture of the nature of the human being. Absent this picture, I think it is quite natural to feel less drawn to the pattern of incest-avoidance. It would be reasonable to deny that this picture of the human being was scientific: but science could persuade you that it was incorrect.8 So here is a case where, so it seems to me, anyone can understand why learning a piece of science might lead you to modify a commitment like IN (construed as a pro tanto judgment). So I continue to think that we have to take the sorts of matters that science explores into account, even when we are thinking about very central moral beliefs. Let me say, finally, that there are two places where Young and Saxe seem to misunderstand something I wrote. First, they say, Appiah never acknowledges that there may be a moral fact of the matter. Thats not quite true. What I did was explicitly declare that I wasnt going to take sides on the issue of moral realism in the book. Heres what I wrote: I suspect that a preoccupation with whether moral sentences are fact-stating or truth-apt is, in some measure, an artifact of the exaggerated authority that the philosophy of languagemy own sub-disciplinary alma materhas enjoyed for much of the postwar era. And I shall endeavor to treat without prejudice realists and quasi-realists and anti-realists [7]. My view is that whether you say youre a realist or not, you can accommodate the needed distinction between what is morally true and what people think is morally true; that is you can construct a notion of moral error with or without metaphysical realism.

The second, and perhaps more consequential, misunderstanding, is that, pace Young and Saxe, I do not favor virtue ethics. I did defend one consequence of virtue ethics, which is the view that it matters not just what we do but who we are. My discussion of character, however, was meant to suggest that the notion of who we are implicit in much virtue ethics was misguided. Who we are is not a matter of character, I argued, as conceived of either in common sense of most virtue ethics. The most important moral significance of the truth of situationism in social psychology, I think, is that we should focus on shaping peoples circumstances in such a way as not to place them in the sorts of situations where humans tend to behave badly. One obvious example of a relevant piece of social psychology is Zimbardos experimental work simulating prison conditions: his work has obvious implications for the social organization of real prisons (lessons, which, as he has pointed it out, were entirely ignored at Abu Ghraib, to the everlasting shame of our country) [8].

Tiberius on the Autonomy of Ethics I agree very much with very much of what Valerie Tiberius says, including her claim that my articulation of what I meant by the autonomy of ethics could have been clearer. And I am attracted to her account of what is true and false in the claim that ethics is autonomous of the sciences. I am especially attracted to her clear articulation of four things that ethicists can usefully do, each of which can be better done if we keep an eye on the best scientific understanding: i) apply anthropology, psychology, and other social sciences to ethical problems. ii) modify traditional conceptions of the good life (or traditional theories of morality) in light of new empirical findings. iii) draw out the implications of the commitments we already have. iv) advocate certain commitments, portraying them in a way that makes them attractive or compelling to those who do not recognize them as their own. But let me suggest some complications to a view that I think, as I say, is broadly correct. The first complication I have in mindand it is one that is not inconsistent with anything Tiberius

How reasonable it is to regard the view as unlike a scientific one is actually a complex issue: see K. Anthony Appiah Invisible Entities. Rev: Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West by Robin Horton Times Literary Supplement (July 2 1993): 7.

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actually saysis that we need to be clear about the role of what she calls fundamental justificatory stopping points. Tiberius says (echoing an observation of Young and Saxes Ive already discussed): when we reflective creatures ask for a justification, what we need is an answer that already counts as a reason for us (and again, not necessarily an ethical reason). A justificatory stopping point must therefore be something we are already committed to that is not in question. So, there is a sense in which ethics retains its autonomy. But the force of this argument depends on a proper understanding of what it means to be committed already. At any time, my justificatory stopping points will, indeed, be fixed. As my scientific understanding of what human beings and our world are like grows, however, those stopping points may shift. It is indeed true, thenat each momentthat, as Tiberius says, [j]ustification stops not at a body of facts, but at a pattern of normative commitments that cant be improved uponat that moment. But I believe that one of the things that can improve a pattern of normative commitments is its fitting better with a total picture, informed by the sciences, of what we human beings are like. Whatever this fitting better means, it is not a matter of mere logical consistency. Consistency can seem demanding enough at times, but it will not be enough to guarantee the right sort of coherence. (Consider the example of Asante attitudes to incest I gave earlier: theres nothing logically inconsistent in continuing to believe the traditional pattern of incestavoidance is right while giving up the belief that your body comes from your mother s blood.) So the form of coherentism that I want to gesture at is one in which our normative commitments and our picture of the world are being adjusted to one another as time goes on. Now we cannot entertain our total picture in a single reflective moment and much of the time our thinking will be very local within the vast web of our ideas. That is one perfectly good reason for organizing our inquiries into fields, so that within, say, psychology, the implications for our moral lives of our psychological understanding is not at the center of attention; just as much of the time in moral philosophy we wont need to focus on the detailed psychological presuppositions of our arguments. I accept the need for a division of intellectual labor, which has been a crucial part of the great epistemic

leaps of the last few centuries. But I want to insist that even though we need to divide up these tasks, they are all, in the end, connected. This is evident in the fact that science, especially social science, will naturally use language with embedded normative commitments. Political scientists seek evidence about whether democracies are more or less likely to fight wars than authoritarian states. Anthropologists discuss conceptions of incest in relation to kinship structures. Psychologists explore the question whether psychopaths experience guilt. The concepts of democracy, incest and guilt are moral concepts. Their presence in a thought engages moral commitments. Many people appear to believe that when these concepts are invoked in the sciences, the scientific content of the claims can be identified by replacing the normative terms with some non-normative terms on which they supervene. This thought is supported by some forms of metaphysical naturalism, which see normative properties as constructed out of nonnormative properties by the addition, so to speak, of a normative commitment. (In the simplest sort of model, incest is composed of the non-moral concept of sexual relations with near kin and a con-attitude.) Even supposing this is the right metaphysical picture, however, that is no reason to think that our normative commitments play no epistemological role in allowing us to identify the extension of normative predicates. (In the simplest model, the extension of As near kin in the concept of incest will depend in part on whether we find ourselves with a con-attitude, all things considered, to sexual relations between A and some person.) To grasp and use the concept of kindness it is not sufficient, of course, to be able to specify its extension in the actual world, since grasp of the concept entails a capacity to think about possible acts of kindness as well. But I see no reason to think that our capacity simply to identify actual acts of kindness is independent of our grasp of what is normatively appropriate. If we need to recognize moral norms in order to grasp moral concepts, then understanding these scientific claims presupposes a grasp of moral norms. The relations between our normative thought and the sciences thus go both ways. Without moral understandinggrasp of moral conceptswe cannot understand certain scientific claims, just as, without

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the sorts of knowledge produced by the sciences, we cannot act upon our moral ideas.

Weinberg and Wang on Naturalism Jonathan Weinberg and Ellie Wang do a good job of resisting my failure to endorse a more enthusiastically naturalistic perspective. So let me declare myself happy to accept their notion of a naturalism of plenitude: stocking our ontological pantry with strange and wondrous ingredients never dreamt of in armchair philosophy. They do a good job, too, in their discussion of character, of showing how some psychological literature that I didnt discuss could allow one to fill out the picture of the human person in ways that would allow us to keep more of the insights of virtue ethics than I allowed. The general outlines here I accept, even if I might want to disagree with a few details. This is exactly the sort of fruitful engagement between moral thought and psychology that I believe is most valuable. But I am unconvinced by their unwillingness to accept my use of a distinction between perspectives, a distinction that I borrowed, with modifications, from Kant. The major modification is that I wanted to stick with a distinction of perspectives and not to go on to a distinction between worlds. Weingberg and Wang want to deny me this modification. It is a distinction, they write, etymologically at least, between two separate worlds, and it is not made clear in Appiahs book just how, once this distinction is in place, we are to recover that continuity between sciences world and philosophys. I dont think I grasp why the metaphor of a stance leads to a distinction between worlds. The etymological point applies to Kants choice of terminology: the Sinnenwelt, the Verstandeswelt. That is true. But I consistently stuck to talk of stances and perspectives in order to underline my defection from this feature of Kants thought. A stance (etymologically) is a way of standing; a perspective what you see from one place you might stand. Both metaphors are meant to suggest that there is one world being looked at in different ways. Furthermore, the perspectives in question are not a philosophical perspective and a scientific one, but one in which we look at the world as agents and one in which we look at it as objects. Kant invoked this

difference of perspectives to try to explain how one could still approach the world as an agent if one believed (as he did) that ones body was an object embedded in a system governed by causal laws. His insight, I believe, was this: you cant approach a decision with the thought, Im a causal object so what happens next is fixed by causal laws. What to say here is, I think, one of the hardest questions in metaphysics. But I dont think that you can eliminate the gap between these perspectives by observing that there is only one world. I think that Weinberg and Wang agree with me about this, because they say: Perhaps we can find a way of viewing the world as possessing both explanations and justifications all at once, in one-but-not-entirely-unified perspective. They are recognizing here exactly the impossibility of pulling Kants two perspectives into one. I think Kant was right, too, to link the difference between the perspective we adopt as agents and a purely naturalistic perspective to a distinction between reasons and causes (or justifications and explanations, as Weingberg and Wang put it). Facing the world as an agent, I find reasons to do and think and feel things imposed upon me, so to speak, in my experience. Naturalism can mean many different things. But if it entails a picture of the world in which there are no reasons, then I do not see how you can be a naturalist. If, on the other hand, like Weinberg and Wang (and me) you accept that there are both explanations and justifications, you have to accept, with Tiberius (and me), that there are justificatory stopping points that are not themselves given by the causal structure of the world. The integration of science and ethics we are all defending is focused, more specifically, on bringing together what I called the moral sciences with philosophical reflection on how we make a success of our lives. But there are other sciences. And the physical sciences are hard to integrate with the moral sciences (let alone with ethics) for many reasons. One is that the best contemporary physics arguably does without a notion of causation altogether. Another is that we have no notion at all how to integrate, say, psychology with physics, because their vocabularies are so remote from one another. You might observe that the integration of psychology with economics is not in terribly good shape either. The micro-foundations of economics that were worked out through the use of game theory and

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decision theory relied on a picture of human psychology that was thin to the point of evanescence. But we have some new ideas today about how to bring psychology and economics closer together, as behavioral economists enrich the psychological microfoundations of economics. This is not a reduction of economics to psychology, as reduction was conceived by the received view of scientific theory and explanation we inherited from positivism; but it is consistent with the wider aim of the unification of our various pictures of the world. In this sense, though, physics, on the one hand, and psychology and the moral sciences on the other, remain totally unintegrated. For while neuroscience uses tools, like fMR imaging, that depend on recent physics, nothing of significance for psychology depends on details of physical theory. I bring this up to underline a point I made earlier: much modern intellectual progress is the result of an intellectual division of labor. Psychology proceeds better without worrying about exactly how the latest models of cognition, say, fit with the latest understanding of fundamental physics. Even enthusiasts for integration like Weinberg and Wang must agree that, at any moment in the history of human understanding, there will be limits to where integration can profitably be pursued. In finding those limits it will not be helpful to appeal to the idea of naturalism or to the idea that there is only world.

Macherys Naturalism of Deprivation Weinberg and Wang accuse me of working primarily with a naturalism of deprivation: the naturalists job is to pop the metaphysicians balloon, and keep her feet planted back on (empirically) solid grounds. I am going to try to work hard to eliminate this habit of mind. But if they are looking for others to convert, I think they need look no further than Edouard Machery. Machery assembles a good deal of psychological evidence against two projects that I endorsed in my book, aiming to pop a couple of my ethical balloons. The first of those balloons is my view that it matters, as I put it, who we are. As I mentioned in discussing Young and Saxe, I argued in the book that we should hold onto the idea from virtue ethics that it matters what kinds of people we are. Machery assembles a compelling case that there are reasons

to doubt that human beings have enough psychological unity for it to make sense to speak of kinds of person. And, since ought implies can, if we cant be people of those kinds, it must be wrong to claim that we ought to aim to be people of certain kinds. (He is also doubtful that the properties that people do carry across contexts are the sorts of properties we can affect. Once more, my proposal is threatened by the contraposition of ought implies can.) My main response to Macherys argument against caring about what kind of people we are is to concede that he is completely right that the project requires a laborious study of human behavior; and then insist that I simply dont think that the evidence from that study so far supports his view that the causes of human behavior will turn out to be largely disunified. But I think he also misunderstands (like Young and Saxe) the extent of my attraction to virtue ethics. (Clearly, then, the fault here is mine not theirs.) So let me be clear finally: I do not think that caring about who you are is the same as caring about character as conceived in most virtue ethics. What does caring about who you are entail then? First, I believe, a concern for certain narrative features of ones life. When I started on the project of writing Experiments in Ethics I was going to make a plea for even more cross-disciplinarity than the engagement between ethics and the moral sciences. I had intended to write as well about how both literature and literary studies illuminate ethical questions. Had I completed that larger project, I would have said more about this question, and it would take a good deal more space than I have here to do this issue any sort of justice. So let me just exemplify what I have in mind. At the end of chapter 2, I spoke making it easier both to avoid doing what murderers do, and to avoid being what murderers are. I hope it is clear both that a murderer is a kind of person and that being-a-murderer is not in any obvious sense a matter of having a certain character. If you intentionally kill someone neither in self-defense nor in warfare, your life is the life of a murderer. That fact sits, I believe, in the negative column in the accounting necessary to decide whether or not your life has gone well. It matters, I think, beyond the fact that you did something morally wrong. So, too, the fact that you killed someone accidentally can also sit in the negative column, even if you did so in a way that was not morally culpable. That is because ethical evaluation reflects moral luck as well as moral choices.

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This is, no doubt, a controversial claim. Less controversial, I think, will be the observation that caring about who you are can involve exactly some of the things that Machery admits we can do. So, for example, he discusses the extent to which we can controlby over-ridingsome of the automatic System 1 processes stressed by those, like Bargh, who have drawn attention to the automaticity of many of our responses. Having conceded that we can at least sometimes regulate our System 1 responses, Machery says: the extent to which we can control them is unclear. For instance, control seems very difficult when we are tired or when we have to decide very quickly. In addition, because control is effortful and might deplete our mental resources, control might be often followed by a lack of control. But committing herself to exercising control when she can (when she isnt tired, in a hurry, or stressed by earlier attempts at control) is exactly the sort of thing that someone concerned with who she is might do. As Machery rightly insists, you dont have to derive the insight that it is hard to be virtuous from recent experimental psychology. Machery continues: Second, and more important, controlling the automatic processes is one thing, changing them is another one. It is unclear whether merely controlling the expression of some of the states and dispositions that are meant to constitute character and the kind of person we are (rather than changing them) counts as changing the kind of person we are Here, I think, there are two things to say. One is that we have good evidence that we can, at least sometimes, modify these implicit attitudes. Cordelia Fine has pointed out that work by Monteith et al (among others) suggests that these processes are in fact sensitive to reflective control in at least two important ways: first, they may be the result of the automatization of reflective judgments; and second, they may be over-ridden with sufficient effort, when avoiding error is a sufficiently salient aim which it can be for distinctively moral reasons.9 We know, in any case, that peoples automatic responses differ in
9

ways that are culturally variable. The race-based implicit attitudes Machery mentions, for example, differ in different sub-populations of the world for reasons that no one believes are simply genetic. (For one thing, conceptions of race differ in culturallyshaped ways.) There is work in social psychology that supports Gordon Allports Contact Hypothesis, which suggests that productive association across racial lines of certain sorts leads to a reduction in negative race-based attitudes.10 Suppose this is true of implicit attitudes as well; then, you might well engage in such productive association in part because you didnt want to be the kind of person that had raciallybiased implicit attitudes. But a second thing to say is that, if there are dimensions of the person that you can do nothing about, it doesnt follow that you cant take them to be ethically important. I am irredeemably irascible in certain contexts. Theres nothing Im aware of I can do about this, except try to avoid those contexts when I see them coming. But this fact sits in the negative column in my account. And the way my recognition of this fact shows up is not in my changing anythingI cantbut in my regret. The other one of my claims Machery wants to undermine (the other balloon he wants to pop) is a proposal I made about moral intuition. I suggested we could learn something about which of our moral intuitions we should trust by studying the psychological processes that produce those intuitions. Though it comes with a good deal of interesting psychological detail, the heart of Macherys argument here is more standardly philosophical: he thinks I have not shown there is a non-circular way to do this. The details of his objection here are not crucial, because I want to concede this point. The gestures towards a coherentist epistemology that I have made several times already naturally raiseas coherentist epistemologies always dothe specter of circularity. I dont think I can say anything briefly about this worry that will satisfy Machery. So let me just say this. I take the candidate views here to be broadly either foundationalist or coherentist. And, given what he says about moral intuition, I doubt that Machery would be happy with a moral foundationalism. So I urge him to play a role in developing the coherentist picture.

Cordelia Fine [9]. Im grateful to Neil Levy for drawing this article to my attention.

10

See Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp [10].

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Conclusion Let me end, as I began, by stressing the very great interest of these papers and of the issues they raise. I am very grateful to all six authors for the care with which they read my book and for drawing my attention to much work with which I was unfamiliar. These papers confirm that there is a great deal of work in the moral sciences for moral philosophers to be thinking about. All of them are naturalist in insisting that philosophy should take science seriously. I endorse this form of naturalism heartily. We need more experiments in ethics, more reflection on them, more integration of experiment with moral theory. The view that only science should be taken seriouslyone name for which is scientismis one I believe we all reject with equal enthusiasm. Our growing intellectual division of labor makes it increasingly important to try to scan from time to time the vast vistas of our knowledge and seek consilience. Philosophy is not the only perspective from which one can pursue that task. But all of us can agree that when philosophers neglect that project they have abandoned one of our most valuable intellectual traditions.11

References
1. Kant, Immanuel. 1997. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Mary Gregor, 78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2. Williams, Bernard. 1982. Moral Luck in Moral Luck, 2039. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3. Austin, J.L. 1956. A plea for excuses. In J. L. Austin: Philosophical papers, 3rd ed, ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 4. Knobe, Joshua. 2006. The concept of intentional action: A case study in the uses of folk psychology. Philosophical Studies 130(2): 203231. 5. Churchland, P.M. 1981. Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78: 6790. 6. Kwame, Safro. 1995. Readings in African philosophy. Lanham: University Press of America. 7. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2008. Experiments in ethics, 178. Harvard: Harvard University Press. 8. Zimbardo, Philip. 2008. The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random House. 9. Fine, Cordelia. 2006. Is the emotional dog wagging its rational tail, or chasing it? Philosophical Explorations 9: (1). 10. Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Linda R. Tropp. 2005. Allports intergroup contact hypothesis: Its History and Influence. In On the nature of prejudice: Fifty years after Allport, ed. John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, and Laurie Rudman, 262 277. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Im very grateful not only to the six respondents to my book but also to Neil Levy for conceiving of and implementing this symposium; as well as for writing the initial summary and commenting on a first draft of this article.

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