¹ My discussion will be based on the following works: Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Gaita, Raimond, ‘Narrative, Identity and Moral Philosophy’, Philosophical Papers 32 (2003), 261–277 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raimond Gaita, The Philosopher's Dog (London: Routledge, 2003); Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Raimond Gaita, After Romulus (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2014).

² See Joshua Alexander, Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2012). For a general account of the application of experimental philosophy in ethics, see John M. Doris and Stephen P. Stich, ‘As a matter of fact: Empirical perspectives on ethics', in F. Jackson and M. Smith (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 114–52. For a recent discussion on the use of intuition in the field of ethics, see David Edmonds, Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014), 87–124.

³ For recent works in this area, see, for example, Avner Baz, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Herman Cappelen, Philosophy without Intuitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and P. M. S. Hacker, The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature (Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 436–463.

⁴ Alexander, Experimental Philosophy, 32.

⁵ John M. Doris and Alexandra Plakias, ‘How to Argue about Disagreement: Evaluative Diversity and Moral Realism’, in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 323–324, citing Peng, Doris, Nichols and Stich (unpublished manuscript).

⁶ Ibid., 324. Referring to the same work by Doris and Plakias, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes the following: ‘Some deeply held convictions […] turn out to be surprisingly culturally variable, including our repugnance toward telishment. One study asked students to respond to a “magistrate and the mob” scenario: if authorities don't falsely convict and punish an innocent man, murderous ethnic rioting will break out, resulting in many deaths and injuries. Chinese students were much more likely to consider telishment in this scenario to be justified than were American students'. (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 231, note 21.)

⁷ Another experiment that is seen to give support to the existence of moral disagreement requires subjects to respond to the following: ‘A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it’. This experiment shows that people with high socio-economic status react to this case differently from people with low socio-economic status: people with lower socio-economic status tend to find the behaviour of the man more objectionable. See Doris and Stich, ‘As a matter of fact’, 140–141. (See also the experiment related to the ‘culture of honor’ in Doris and Plakias, ‘How to Argue about Disagreement’, 316–322.)

⁸ Doris and Plakias, ‘How to Argue about Disagreement’, 323.

⁹ There are some complicated issues involved such as group membership, stereotyping and so on. Consider, for example: Who would identify oneself as one who has a tendency of ‘sacrificing individual interests “for the good of the group”’? Who are the Chinese anyway? Can one be Chinese without having such utilitarian sympathy?

¹⁰ Gaita's thought on the unthinkable and evil has been discussed in Jonathan Glover, ‘Insanity, crankiness and evil – and other ways of thinking the unthinkable’, in Christopher Cordner (ed.), Philosophy, Ethics and a Common Humanity: Essays in Honour of Raimond Gaita (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2011), 37–48.

¹¹ Cf. Anscombe's criticism on utilitarianism in Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘Modern moral philosophy’, Philosophy 33 (1958), 1–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Consider the proverb ‘a liar needs a good memory’.

¹³ My position here suggests that there is something distinctive about moral reasoning. The question whether the use of experimental philosophy in areas other than that of moral philosophy can also have an ethical dimension remains. One may say that the application of the experimental approach in aesthetics has no immediate ethical implication. (See, for example, Cova, Florian and Pain, Nicolas, ‘Can Folk Aesthetics Ground Aesthetic Realism?’, The Monist, 95 (2012), 241–263 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.) This issue, however, needs to be settled case-by-case. For example, although experimental philosophers may focus on epistemological questions alone, the descriptions of experimental subjects (regarding their epistemic status) in their studies may have moral or normative connotations. (See Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich and Jonathan M. Weinberg, ‘Meta-skepticism: Meditations in Ethno-epistemology’, in Steven Luper (ed.), The Skeptics: Contemporary Essays (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 227–247.)

¹⁴ As a possible example of a philosophical position where no sharp distinction between moral and non-moral intuitions is maintained, see Matt Bedke, ‘Ethics makes strange bedfellows: intuitions and quasi-realism’, in Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory? (Abingdon, Oxon, England and New York: Routledge, 2013), 416–434.

¹⁵ Someone sympathetic to the methodology of experimental philosophy may object to my criticism above by saying that what is needed to tackle the problem is the use of more refined empirical experiments which are sensitive enough to differentiate intuitions which are based on moral justifications from intuitions based on non-moral justifications. In response to this objection, a lot depends on whether experiments that employ an empirical approach, i.e., one that presupposes a clear distinction between subjects and objects, are well-suited to understand morality. I return to this issue in my discussion on form and content in section 5 below.

¹⁶ See Gaita, Good and Evil, xxi–xxii.

¹⁷ Ibid., 308–330.

¹⁸ The discussion on form and content and the contrast between ‘the realm of facts’ and the ‘realm of meaning’ form a major theme in Gaita's works and they can be found in different places in his writings. For form and content, see, for example, the chapter on ‘Moral Understanding’ in Good and Evil. His more recent work The Philosopher's Dog contains illuminating discussions on the realms of facts and meaning.

¹⁹ Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 53–54.

²⁰ The view that serious moral thinking essentially involves ruling certain things out can be further elucidated with reference to the notion of moral identity. A person who subscribes to some ethical theory or ethical principle is, by definition, someone who has made some choices regarding the ethical theory or principle. This ethical choice, no matter how minimal or ephemeral it is, commits the person to some ethical positions. Such ethical positions can be seen as some form of anchor, without which it is not possible to ascribe the ethical theory or principle to the person in question. What this suggests is that some anchor or thoughts that are considered unthinkable are constitutive of one's ethical identity. The unwillingness to dispense with some principle or the refusal to entertain ideas regarded as unethical is part of what it is to be someone serious about ethics. Consider Gaita's case where a man robbed a woman and slashed her baby. In doing so he caused the death of the baby and immense trauma to the mother. Now, suppose one responds to this case by saying: ‘Well, I know that most people would find this act ethically wrong or simply evil but it all depends. If you are a utilitarian of a particular kind it is conceivable that under some very unusual circumstances this act may be considered not so evil. Or if you happen to come from a culture with radically different views on women and babies you may also have different feelings about this act…’ At this point, rather than trying to engage with the utilitarian and relativist arguments, I want to say that it is not entirely clear as to whom we are dealing with: is it a morally serious person, or simply anyone? For, the inability to articulate a substantial stance points to the fact that the person seems not to be speaking for himself or herself: anyone could have made such a reply and to the extent that they are making this kind of reply, their moral identity remains elusive.

²¹ Another way to look at my position here is to focus on the distinction between facts and meaning. The case of Ivan Ilyich resembles the situation of some human beings: to them, their own mortality seems more like a notion or a piece of information in their head and they are actually reluctant to confront it. When this is the case, acknowledging the fact that one is mortal seems perfectly compatible with being blind to the meaning of one's mortality. If no such gap between fact and meaning existed, we could expect that questions of value would be solved with the discovering of more facts. This distinction between facts and meaning suggests that ‘the realm of facts’ and ‘the realm of meaning’ are radically distinct.

²² Cf. The notion of minimal narrative in Gaita, ‘Narrative, Identity and Moral Philosophy’, 261–277.

²³ In his critique of experimental philosophy, Baz points out that experimental philosophy's major methodological flaw lies in an artificial separation of semantics from pragmatics. In other words, when experimental subjects are asked to choose between the answers ‘REALLY KNOWS’ and ‘ONLY BELIEVES’ in response to a Gettier case, they are required to apply the terms ‘to know’ and ‘to believe’ with reference to their meaning (semantics) alone without being able to refer to the wider context where such terms are actually used (i.e., their pragmatics). The implication, argues Baz, is that subjects put in such a situation actually lack the contextual resources to apply the terms in the same way they apply them in ordinary circumstances. (See Baz, When Words Are Called For, esp. 87–133.)

²⁴ Recall the case discussed by Doris and Stich (in ‘As a matter of fact’) regarding the man with the chicken. Doris and Stich seem to think that the apparent moral disagreement between people of high and low socio-economic statuses regarding this case calls for more ‘systematic empirical investigation’. Instead of going along with this suggestion, I want to say that a different kind of dialogue, aimed at mutual moral understanding, seems more promising.

²⁵ I would like to thank my colleague Ho-mun Chan for introducing experimental philosophy to me. Older versions of this paper have been presented previously at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting in December 2012, the Moral and Political Philosophy Research Seminar at the University of Helsinki in March 2014, and the Philosophy Colloquium at University of Wales Trinity Saint David in April 2014. I would like to express my gratitude to the audience at these occasions for their constructive comments and suggestions. Lastly, I would like to thank Samantha Wray for her ongoing support and advice.