Ethics

Can experience provide us with the data for making a decision about what is morally right or wrong?

Comments

It would be hard to deny this, though some philosophers have claimed that morality may be grasped a piori or independently of experience. Perhaps simple reflection on what it is to be a person or to be rational can generated some reasonable moral claims, but it certainly appears that our values from the value of friendship to justice to happiness are shaped by the broad spectrum of human experience, and it therefore appears that experience and reflection can 'provide us with the data for making a decision about what is morally right or wrong.' One can see in simple cases how experience might play a crucial role: someone might have no sympathy for those who are unemployed until he has lost his job, a person might not care at all where her food comes from until she sees a film on factory farming, someone might not care a fig for a country's foreign policy until his neighbor's son is killed in a foreign war, somoene may think homosexuality is an unnatural perversion until he realizes several seemingly quite healthy and happy family members are gay, and so on.

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