Terror of 'Terrorism': An Empirical Study

Experimental philosophy has made significant contributions to theoretical investigations in areas such as philosophy of mind and epistemology. However, one area where experimental philosophy has had less of an impact is in applied ethics. This may seem surprising because of some of the seeming natural connections between experimental philosophy and applied ethics. In a new paper, Edward Cokely and I attempt to build some bridges between experimental philosophy and applied ethics.

In two experiments, we show that people's intuitions about terrorism can be predictably manipulated. In the first experiment, we demonstrate that calling a group of people 'terrorists' alters a host of judgments about that group. In the second experiment, we use “real” materials from a news source to show that people's intuitions about terrorism can be altered by what has recently been considered (e.g., how many people terrorists have killed). We argue that these results have important implications for the applied ethical study of terrorism. We hope this helps spark an increased interest in experimental philosophers to weigh in on important, current, and difficult issues in applied ethics.

Comments

[David Slutsky]

The institutional analyses that Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky provide (with such things as their propaganda model) about how the major media (and other powerful institutions) react differently to, and shape different moral interpretations of, what appear to be morally comparable events, actions, and other subjects of moral properties seems potentially highly relevant to your work/ideas. See especially their 1979 book "The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism" (which is volume I of their "The Political Economy of Human Rights"). Also relevant is their 1979 book "After the Cataclysm" (which is volume II of their "The Political Economy of Human Rights"). The "paired cases" that Herman and Chomsky discuss in their 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent" appear equally relevant, though I more strongly recommend volume I of their "The Political Economy of Human Rights" for a start.