Experimental Ethics

Facing otherness in everyday interpersonal relations, making decisions within demanding contexts, living with the plenitude of values - all of these experiences permanently challenge one's moral cognition. Neither a single moral agent nor ethics itself can pretend omniscience when dealing with complex real-world situations. The author presents her own research findings to account for the experimental nature of ethics. She questions a popular conviction that declaring values and following norms is a sufficient condition to be moral. She applies Georg Lind's dual-aspect theory of morality to all sorts of spectacular contexts.

Ewa Nowak is Professor of Ethics in the Institute of Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan.