4.6 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2008
⏱️ 15 minutes
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0:00.0 | This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton. |
0:07.0 | Philosophy bites is available at www |
0:09.6 | philosophy bites.com. Estate agents have long known that the smell of freshly baked |
0:14.9 | bread makes a house seem more attractive to prospective buyers. An avalanche of |
0:19.7 | research over the past few years is showing how our ethical behavior is similarly affected by |
0:25.3 | such apparently irrelevant factors. |
0:28.0 | So do such experiments tell us anything useful about morality, about the moral principles by which we should lead our lives. |
0:35.0 | Here's Anthony Appia of Princeton University. |
0:38.0 | Anthony Appia, welcome to Philosophy Bites. |
0:40.0 | Very good to be here. |
0:41.0 | Now the topic we're going to focus on today is experiments in ethics. |
0:45.8 | Could you say how experiments come into ethics at all? Well the first thing I think I want to say is that the idea that experiments matter for what used to be called the moral sciences at Cambridge |
0:56.6 | where we both were educated. |
0:58.7 | That is not just philosophy but economics and so on. |
1:02.0 | Studies which have to do with how we should live and |
1:04.0 | including how we should organize society. That's a very old idea. It's not a modern |
1:07.4 | motion. Hume had that idea and the word experimental occurs in the title of the treaty. |
1:13.0 | So I think it's very crucial not to think of this as a kind of new-fangled thing |
1:19.0 | because then we lose track of the important point, which is that we're in a very interesting situation right now. |
1:24.1 | We have developed in modern psychology tools for looking at how people actually do their moral thinking. |
1:35.0 | Everything from the kind of work that has been done in social psychology |
1:39.0 | to see what features of circumstances lead people to be generous or not or need people to be kind or unkind |
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