Large-scale social experiments in experimental ethics

Julian F. Müller

pp. 247-263

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

Abstract

The move toward experimental ethics might be understood as a countermovement against the overreliance on arm chair philosophy. This trend in many ways mirrors the recent developments in economics. For the most part, from the 60s to the 80s, economics relied almost exclusively on the homo œconomicus model and deductive reasoning. This was counteracted in recent years by a turn toward experimental research. Experimental research in economics meanwhile has two broad branches, laboratory experiments (Kahneman, 2011; Smith, 2008) and observational studies of field experiments (Ostrom, 1995).