My Philosophy Lab

A thought experiment

The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus, 1771

Halfway through my philosophy PhD at the University of Arizona, I fled the desert and drove 3,000 miles across the country. Officially, I was a visiting fellow in the Harvard philosophy department, but I was really there to trespass in Joshua Greene’s Moral Cognition Lab up the road in William James Hall. Josh had a PhD in philosophy from Princeton but had somehow become a professor of psychology. He was best-known for turning trolley cases from thought experiments into lab experiments.

Nowadays, my colleagues are a lot more chill about Josh’s research program and the broader encroachment of behavioral science into moral philosophy. But at the time, many philosophers loathed his work. Josh was famous, or infamous, for an essay he’d written a couple of years earlier called “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul.” Hate the player, don’t hate the name—the title comes from a passage in Nietzsche:

Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.

The deontological tradition unfolding from Kant held that moral principles are justified independently of their consequences. Josh argued that this tradition is largely an exercise in rationalization: sophisticated justifications for crude moral heuristics that evolved in our primitive past.

Down the road in Emerson Hall, Selim Berker had just published a scathing critique, widely read, arguing that neuroscience had no real bearing on moral philosophy. That year at Harvard, I wrote that both were wrong but their disagreement was productive. Psychological studies can’t overthrow an entire tradition, but they can challenge deontological principles that are drawn on the basis of morally irrelevant differences.

Josh’s lab in 2010/11 was a densely wired collective brain. His postdocs included Fiery Cushman and Liane Young, two of the field’s sharpest young moral psychologists. At weekly lab meetings, they were joined by Josh’s PhD advisees, undergraduate students, and sundry others. Usually, one person would present an idea for an experiment or share pilot data, for a project they were working on with Josh or a postdoc. Then everyone would pitch in to strengthen their study—refine their hypothesis, design a better test, rule out confounding variables.

This was all foreign to me, and I wasn’t always a well-behaved guest. “Isn’t your entire approach premised on a mistake…”

In philosophy, traditionally, we don’t hold lab meetings. We go to talks and argue with each other for hours afterward. We take sides. No idea is spared. I was lucky to cut my teeth in a department that held weekly colloquia year-round and continued the Q&A into the evening at the campus pub. Grad school in Arizona was even more intense, spending all my class time and free time with philosophers who couldn’t let it drop.

After my PhD and postdocs, I was hired at Boston University, putting down roots where I’d once only been passing through, across the river from Josh’s lab. These days, teaching steals my time, and as my attention narrows to culture and politics, the (many) talks around town tempt me less and less. I spend every morning and most evenings with my wife and kids. Time is now more precious.

That’s why I started my own lab—to rebuild the culture I’d lost. But I didn’t want to do psychology or traditional philosophy. I wanted something that combined the adversarial nature of philosophy talks with the cooperative inquiry of psychology labs.

The Mind and Morality Lab at BU doesn’t run experiments, but it has something even more essential to scientific labs: a social infrastructure for conversation, collaboration, and mentorship. Wiring for a collective brain.

During each lab meeting, held on Zoom, one of us leads discussion on a new project. After they’ve presented their idea, we spend the rest of our time helping them improve it. Our aim is not refutation but critical philosophical dialogue that enables us to think better.

Of course, we make counterarguments—this is philosophy goddamn it—but our rule of thumb is to air objections that we’re willing to help people respond to. The aim of conversation is to use critical analysis to build up someone’s ideas rather than tear them down.

Originally, the lab was just me and students who had excelled in my courses. Some graduated from BU but still came to lab meetings because they sought the philosophical community that otherwise fades. Eventually, I invited my friend Josh May to join, then Derek Anderson, then Rachel McKinney. There are now about 10-12 regular members, including students.

Over the last year or two, the lab’s focus shifted to public philosophy. Josh and I published Substack essays that had been shaped by lab meetings. Velana Valdez writes a column for BU’s outstanding student newspaper, The Daily Free Press. Tino Themelis began writing (banger) essays on Substack. Derek too.

This spring, the lab wrote its first essay together. Four of us as authors, seven as critics who pushed hard, the piece sharper for it. Last month, we were awarded a grant by the PPE Research Consortium to write more public-facing essays about AI and politics.

At its inception, I envisaged the lab as a factory for journal articles, with students as main authors and me holding the reins. Turns out that’s a lot of work. Our public-facing collaborations are more nimble: 2,000 words instead of 8,000, started and finished in a few weeks rather than a few months (or a few years, given typical journal review times). They’re also more fun and more invigorating—journal articles long ago stopped holding the same appeal.

The lab is an effort to be more cooperative than philosophers usually are, but I think it means we risk being too agreeable, softening our critical edge. So this year, we’re doubling down on a method that deepens our cultural synthesis between philosophy talks and psychology labs.

More of our coauthored essays will stem not from common ground but from its absence. We’re hunting for topics on which we’re divided, mining the lab’s political diversity, using our disagreement to strengthen ideas on both sides of a debate. We’ve already run our first experiment in adversarial collaboration. Back to the lab.