Thanks again to everyone who took the emotional responses survey. Below are the cases and response data for the first 100 responses. I’ve given a bit of analysis following each case, and there are some general remarks following that. First, I wanted to say just a bit about what I was up to here.
Philosophers have long debated the nature of happiness, with some saying that happiness is just a certain kind of psychological state and others claiming that true happiness is not just a matter of having certain feelings but also requires genuine virtue.
The new field of experimental philosophy may not be able to help us arrive at a definitive resolution of this age-old debate, but at the very least, it does seem to have inspired a very funny interactive video!
(Note: To go through this interactive video, you have to click at the end of each segment to begin the next one.)
Institutes are designed for teachers of American undergraduate students. Because of recent changes to the program, now up to three spaces may be awarded to graduate students in the humanities.
Newman, Lockhart, and Keil recently published their finding that when judging a person’s overall moral goodness or badness across a lifetime, we seem biased toward the end of life (at Cognition here). According to this theory, we do not judge the moral qualities of a person’s lifetime character by merely adding up the ‘moral points’ of her individual actions over that life. Instead, if Scrooge or Andrew Carnegie turns things around at the end of their lives, we will attribute much greater goodness to them across their whole lives because we give greater consideration to what people do at the end of their lives than we give to the rest of their lives, when determining the moral character of a life. I think that the data presented by Newman et al. are open to at least two other explanations, however.
The Yale Experiment Month studies have now gone live here. They are a series of experimental philosophy scenarios proposed by a variety of folks that successfully made their way through the Yale team's vetting process (as well as that of their home institutions' HSRB) and are now ready to pump your intuitions. Please go take a survey (or two or three). I suspect there will be many interesting new results we'll be hearing about over the next several months. (Full disclosure: David Faraci and I have a survey included in the mix.)
Adam Lerner, a student at William & Mary, has constructed a survey (also part of Yale's Experiment Month) to gather intuitions on punishment. Go here to get your intuitions pumped.
The Experiment Month initiative is a program designed to help philosophers conduct experimental studies. If you are interested in running a study, you can send your study proposal to the Experiment Month staff. Then, if your proposal is selected for inclusion, we will conduct the study online, send you the results and help out with any statistical analysis you may need. All proposals are due Sept. 1.
For further information, see the Experiment Month website here.
There's an excellent new resource for those interested in keeping up with, or contributing to, the wide variety of fascinating work being done in experimental philosophy. It's the Experimental Philosophy Page, and it's set up in wiki format so anyone can edit and update it. Currently there are over 125 papers on-board.
Tim Scanlon's new book Moral Dimensions provides an elegant account according to which an agent's mental states are relevant to the question as to whether that agent is blameworthy but not to the question as to whether the agent's behavior itself is morally wrong.
As the philosopher Kristen Bell points out to me, however, the empirical data indicate that people's actual judgments show exactly the opposite pattern. People's wrongness judgments actually depend more on the agent's mental states than their blame judgments do.
One of the most influential arguments in the philosophical study of well-being is Robert Nozick's famous 'experience machine' thought experiment. Suppose that you had the opportunity to enter a machine that would give you the subjective experience of having an extraordinary life -- it would seem to you that you were a rock star and a great philosopher and a devoted spouse, all at the same time -- even though, all the while, you would really just be lying there inside the machine. Would you choose to plug in? Many people say no, and Nozick therefore infers that we not only value having positive subjective experiences but also having a life that is in reality a good one.
In a forthcoming paper, Felipe De Brigard challenges this conclusion by conducting an innovative series of experimental studies. At the heart of his approach is a new thought experiment, which we might call the 'inverted experience machine.'
Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in any given post reflect the opinion of only that individual who posted the particular entry or comment.
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