Experiments in Philosophy

Knowledge about our own mental states seems to be the most secure thing in the world, doesn’t it? I certainly know what I feel and think right now and I know it more securely than any other thing I might know. Right? Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel begs to differ.

Suppose you learned that someone had committed a horrible rape. And now suppose you find out that he is suffering from a neurological condition. Would you still hold him responsible for what he had done?

Fellow "Experiments in Philosophy" blogger Jesse Prinz posted about UVA psychologist Jon Haidt's work on political differences. I want to continue exploring the philosophical implications of Haidt's work by asking whether it's all right for Julie and her brother Mark to have sex.

Here's a scenario drawn from a study Haidt conducted:

A new study in experimental philosophy asks whether people would be willing to live a life of illusion.

Do you think members of the opposition party are a bunch or idiots? Or worse, might they bad people deliberately trying to acheive reprehensible ends? The real problem is that liberals and conservatives have different basic values, and political debates are just cross talk.

Philosophers and psychologists often debate about whether our beliefs, emotions, desires, values, etc., are innate or whether they are learned. But does this type of debate make sense? Paul Griffiths, Stefan Linquist and I have argued that it does not!

Imagine a world where no one believed in free will. Life would no longer have meaning, right? We'd be robots, puppets on a string, living a mockery of a real human existence. And why be moral? After all, if we do something bad, we didn't freely choose to do it, and so we cannot be morally responsible for that choice. So why bother?

As my second official post, I'll point our readers to a finding that recently appeared in Science. Elizabeth Dunn (UBC) and her colleagues demonstrated that giving money to others makes us more happy overall than using that money for ourselves.

I have a confession to make. Although our group of bloggers is described as "a band of philosophers," I'm faking the funk, so to speak. In real life, I'm a psychologist through and through. So I'm thankful to my real-philosopher colleagues for giving me a "pass" to contribute to this blog (and to the field). At the end of the day, I like to think that experimental philosophy is really social psychology with a fresh set of questions to investigate.

Philosophers have long wondered whether the mind depends on the body or whether our thoughts and feelings reside in an immaterial 'soul.' Though intellectuals are still arguing back and forth about the right answer to that question, experimental studies have revealed some surprising facts about how ordinary people think of these issues.