How Can Social Experiments Justify Normative Principles?

A growing program in political philosophy champions social experimentation as a way of justifying normative principles. But a clear methodology of how social experiments can justify normative principles has not yet been developed in full. We reconstruct and assess two existing methodologies, before developing a third methodology. A first methodology — evidential experimentalism — claims that experiments provide justification by generating evidence for what “works.” This is plausible but doesn’t depart as far from mainstream political philosophy as some of its proponents may hope. A second methodology — iterative experimentalism — claims that experiments can, over time, justify initially controversial normative principles. But, we argue, iterative experimentalism is susceptible to a regress problem. We develop a third methodology — procedural experimentalism — that shifts the attention of normative theorizing significantly but avoids the regress problem. Procedural experimentalism is a variant of procedural justification at the level of mid-level normative principles. We illustrate this methodology using a case study about central banking. This type of justification is widely applicable across the administrative state but has, so far, been overlooked.

Johannes Himmelreich
https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/directory/johannes-himmelreich
Associate Professor
Department of Public Administration and International Affairs
Syracuse University

About the Speaker:

Himmelreich works on applied ethics and political philosophy. Himmelreich's research asks how artificial intelligence and data science can augment human judgment. Two questions drive this work: How should AI systems be governed? What does it take for data science to lead to better decisions?
Himmelreich co-edited the Oxford Handbook of AI Governance (Oxford University Press) and has published on algorithmic fairness, the ethics of autonomous vehicles, and collective responsibility in leading philosophy and public affairs journals. His current book project, Good Decisions, is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Beyond this interest in ethics and technology, Himmelreich has also published on the commodification of asylum-provision services as well as on the foundations and nature of moral responsibility and blame. He argues that corporations, states and autonomous systems are agents that can be morally responsible for their actions.

Prior to joining Syracuse University, Himmelreich was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 2017-19. During his time in Silicon Valley, he consulted on tech ethics for two Fortune 500 companies, taught ethics and worked on the ethics of autonomous systems at Apple Inc. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the London School of Economics.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai