Back in 1991 my co-blogger here at Crooked Timber, Elizabeth S. Anderson, reminded every one of the significance of John Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living (Ethics, 102(1): 4-26). She situated Mill’s views on the matter in the context of a debate with Bentham (and Parfit) over the nature of the good in which Mill wanted to defend a hierarchy of goods in an empirical fashion. In the paper, it’s Mill’s actual life that is the paradigmatic experiment in living “or a valid test of a conception of the good,” (p. 15; see also the use of ‘disconfirmation’ on p. 16.)
What’s striking about this conception of an ‘experiment in living’ is how first-person-ish it is. In Mill’s case the experiment was done on him by his father, and he himself could refute it in virtue of the crisis he experienced and the lack of remedy Bentham’s theories afforded. As Anderson notes this is ultimately a quest for self-understanding. (p. 24) As she explains, “The crucial test for a conception of the good is that it provide a perspective of self-understanding which is both personally compelling (has normative force for the agent) and capable of explaining and resolving her predicament-the reasons for crisis and for recovery from it.” (p. 24) An experiment in living is both epistemic and therapeutic in character.
In what follows, I am not mostly interested in these features of experiments in living. But they do lurk in the background of what I am after.
About a decade ago, my friend Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) also drew on Mill in his “Expanding the justificatory framework of Mill’s experiments in living.” Utilitas 27.2 (2015): 179-194. Here “experiments in living are meant to provide the engine of social progress: not only do we have the opportunity for improving our cultural and moral condition, but we can also better discover why some of our existing social arrangements are so successful.” (179) Notice the first-person plural; the perspective is clearly social and collective in character. The experiment still has an epistemic quality, but now it is primary a means toward discovery and social progress.” Interestingly enough, Muldoon builds a vindicatory aspect — “why some of our existing social arrangements are so successful” — into his approach.