Descriptive and pragmatic levels of empirical ethics

utilizing the situated character of moral concepts, judgment, and decision-making

Andreas Bunge

Alexander Skulmowski

pp. 175-190

in: Christoph Luetge, Hannes Rusch, Matthias Uhl (eds), Experimental ethics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

Empirical ethics, understood as comprising all empirical research on morality, is commonly conceived as being a purely descriptive endeavor. Research in this field can be broken into two interrelated methodological approaches. The first approach is to merely record subjects' moral intuitions, judgments, decisions, and behavior. For instance, researchers might be interested in whether people sacrifice one person in order to save five in versions of the trolley dilemma (see Di Nucci, this volume). We call this approach experimental recording. However, empirical ethicists usually are not satisfied just recording responses, but rather also want to provide explanations for them. That is, they trace subjects' responses back to their causes — an approach we refer to as experimental retracing. ¹ The provided explanations can stem from various fields of research such as psychology, neurobiology, or even evolutionary biology. For instance, neuroimaging has been used to examine which cognitive mechanisms bring about different judgments with regard to dilemmas like the famous trolley dilemma (Greene et al., 2001; 2004).