Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany.
Conscious Cogn. 2011 Dec;20(4):1722-31. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.04.007. Epub 2011 May 18.
Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate-as measured by a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge-does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails. Implications for the practice of philosophy, experimental philosophy, and applied ethics are discussed.
许多哲学家诉诸直觉来支持某些哲学观点。然而，由于科学证据已经证明，哲学相关直觉存在系统性偏差，这是由于看似不相关的特征（例如，个性）造成的，因此人们有理由对这种做法表示关注。一种用来保护哲学家免受这些担忧影响的流行辩护观点认为，哲学专业知识消除了这些外部因素的影响。在这里，我们检验了这个假设。我们提供的数据表明，在自由意志辩论中可验证的哲学专业知识——通过可靠和有效的专家知识测试来衡量——并没有消除一个重要的外部特征（即可遗传的人格特质外向性）对自由和道德责任判断的影响。这些结果表明，在至少一些重要情况下，专业知识的辩护是失败的。讨论了这些结果对哲学实践、实验哲学和应用伦理学的影响。
