Editorial: Dimensions of Experimental Philosophy

Abstract

Psychologists have been borrowing ideas from philosophers for centuries. In a more contemporary development, philosophers have begun to use the methods of experimental psychology and other social sciences to help address philosophical questions. The resulting, cross-disciplinary interchange has been fueled by a new field known as “experimental philosophy.” In the first issue of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology dedicated to psychology and experimental philosophy (Machery et al. 2010), we showcased work from philosophers and other cognitive scientists working at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. In this second issue, we bring together another exciting sample of cutting-edge papers that illustrate the breadth, depth, and promise of this interdisciplinary approach. David Faraci and David Shoemaker take up the question of how people ordinarily make judgments of moral responsibility. They begin by turning to a famous example, widely discussed in the philosophical literature, in which a child is brought up by a heartless dictator and never taught that it is wrong to harm other people. The traditional assumption about this case had been that people would think the child could not properly be held morally responsible for his subsequent actions. Faraci and Shoemaker show that this assumption is mistaken; people are, in fact, quite willing to hold the dictator’s son responsible. A systematic experimental study then reveals the surprising ways in which people’s judgments in these cases appear to be unaffected by factors that might initially have seemed highly relevant. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2010) 1:315–318 DOI 10.1007/s13164-010-0037-9