Empirical and Armchair Ethics

Empirical and Armchair Ethics∗

In a recent paper, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve present a novel argument against prioritarianism. The argument takes its starting point from empirical surveys on people’s preferences in health care resource allocation problems. In this paper, I Vrst question whether the empirical Vndings support their argument, and then I make some general points about the use of “empirical ethics” in ethi...

The armchair and the trolley: an argument for experimental ethics

Ethical theory often starts with our intuitions about particular cases and tries to uncover the principles that are implicit in them; work on the 'trolley problem' is a paradigmatic example of this approach. But ethicists are no longer the only ones chasing trolleys. In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have also turned to study our moral intuitions and what underlies them. The re...

The limits to empirical ethics

a critical study of the descriptive evolutionary ethics and the empirical ethics

this research is a new attempt in order to study the effect of evolution theory in the dimension of empirical ethics. in the contemporary area the evolutionary ethics is in the three branches: descriptive, prescriptive and meta-ethics. the descriptive evolutionary ethics tries to modify human’s ethical believes in the evolutionary aspect and achieves more share from two others part in this grou...

Evidence and armchair access

In this paper, I shall discuss a problem that arises when you try to combine an attractive account of what constitutes evidence with an independently plausible account of the kind of access we have to our evidence. According to E=K, our evidence consists of what we know. According to the principle of armchair access, we can know from the armchair what our evidence is. Combined, these claims ent...