There is an interesting review by Paul Bloom of Anthony Appiah's new book Experiments in Ethics here. Appiah makes a convincing case for a dialogue between empirical research and ethics. Moral psychology reveals human beings to be less straightforward (and less transparent to ourselves) in many respects than we might think. There are summaries of some great experiments here. One of my favourites is the one that was done at Princeton which concluded that seminary students who had recently been thinking about the Good Samaritan were much less likely (by a factor of 6!) to help someone slumped in a doorway, apparently in distress, if they'd just been told that they were late for an appointment...When we attribute compassion to someone it might be that they aren't in a hurry that day. Appiah uses this and similar research to question some of the assumptions of Virtue Theorists about how we might acquire the virtues, and whether eudaimonia is possible.
The diversity and complexity of human beings is also a theme of his excellent book Cosmopolitanism (in which he makes the case for accepting that there are human universals, that we are citizens of the world, but also argues that we should try to understand and celebrate difference and diversity).
Look out for two interviews with Appiah (one on each of these books) in the next few months on Philosophy Bites.
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