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October 14, 2008

The Moral Sense Test for Philosophers
By Neil Levy

Many of you will be familiar with the Moral Sense Test, which has produced some valuable data on ordinary people’s intuitions about trolley cases and related dilemmas. Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher of mind (who does fascinating work on the unreliability of first person judgments) and Fiery Cushman, from Marc Hauser’s lab at Harvard, have now designed a version of the test especially for philosophers. They want to be able to compare the responses of people with graduate degrees in philosophy to those of the folk. I encourage everyone to take the test; it shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes.

The test can be found here.

Posted on October 14, 2008 at 1:35 am in Experimental Ethics, Neil Levy's Posts, Normative Ethics, Philosophical Methods


Comments

  1. 1. Posted by Alexander West | November 2, 2008 9:30 am

    I started completing this test however once I got to the two questions which included a description of the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand as Maori tribesmen I stopped. While I am a Pakeha New Zealander, part of my family is Maori and I found the use of this description belittling and insulting at the most extreme end. Further the implication that Maori are essentially utilitarian in their ethical understandings and worldview showed a woeful lack of understanding and experience of Maori culture, philosophy and kaitiakitanga. Maori are a strong and vibrant presence in NZ society: government organisations, courts, universities etc operate on a bilingual basis, there are a large number of very successful Maori-led businesses and corporations, Maori hold senior positions at all universities and are represented in Parliament in both the Maori and general seats. I was stunned to see that the creators of the MST thought it was acceptable to refer to them in such a derogatory, condescending and elitist manner.
    Alexander J West

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