> One cannot make a laboratory of the mind or use human beings as it’s lab rats. That isn't the only way to subject philosophical ideas to empirical scrutiny,

> One cannot make a laboratory of the mind or use human beings as it’s lab rats. That isn't the only way to subject philosophical ideas to empirical scrutiny, but whenever people use the historical evidence to determine things like how well different economic systems behave, for example, all of a sudden a lot of people get very angry and defensive and refuse to acknowledge the validity of prior experience. > People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm. Some kinds of philosophy can be experimented on in some respects. For example: Does unquestioning obedience produce an ethical system that minimizes arbitrary killings? Well, I think we can look to the historical record and find the answer to that one, and conclude that it doesn't. More deeply, though, how do we conclude that we care about arbitrary killing? That's a kind of question that we can't answer through experimentation, because the world doesn't outright tell us what values we should adopt. The most we can do is reason through the problem and then use experimentation (even retrospective experiments, as in history) to try to figure out which ethical systems support those values best. That said... We're not blank slates. We're humans, we're social animals, so we care about certain things instinctively and, thus, some ethical systems are more humane than others in their outcomes.