The Moral Behavior of Ethicists: Peer Opinion

Joshua Rust and I have finally written up the results of our poll at last year's Pacific APA meeting regarding the moral behavior of ethicists.  Summary results: The majority of philosophers expressed the view that ethicists do not behave better than non-ethicists.  Ethicists themselves were about evenly divided between saying ethicists behave better and saying they behave the same.  Non-ethicists were about evenly divided between saying that ethicists behave better, the same, and worse.

The draft essay is here.   Email comments gratefully welcomed!

Comments

[Brother Charles]

Great stuff.

I have no doubt, based on my extensive anecdotal experience, that the results would be the same, mutatis mutandis, for a similar poll of us priests.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Very interesting, Charles! A bit depressing, though, don't you think?

Generally, I've found philosophers *not* to be surprised or depressed by these results -- which to me is even more surprising and depressing!

[Dale Dorsey]

I wonder why we should regard this as surprising or depressing. Would we be surprised to learn that philosophers don't believe that epistemologists have more knowledge than philosophers in other subdisciplines?

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

I think epistemology is the wrong comparison here. Debates about the gap between justified true belief and knowledge, and most other epistemic topics, are pretty far removed from actual daily epistemic concerns in a way that moral issues in ethics (e.g., about honesty, giving to the poor, etc.) are not. If all ethics were trolley problems and abstruse meta-ethical metaphysics, it would be a different matter -- but it's not!

The better comparison, I think, is this: Do philosophers of art have better taste (in the arts they know)? Are feminists less sexist? Are logicians more attuned to scope ambiguities? I assume the answer to these questions is "on average, yes"!

[Dale Dorsey]

Agreed. The issue is interesting, but I have a few more skeptical worries, to which you probably have substantial and thought provoking answers. First, one wonders about how the "ethics pie" is being divided up here. As far as I know, the people who worry "about honesty, giving to the poor, etc." are applied ethicists, rather than, say, normative ethicists (who do worry about trolly problems, etc.), political philosophers (whose concerns are, obviously, political), and meta-ethicists (whose concerns are about moral motivation, semantics, intention, philosophy of action, moral psychology, as you say, "abstruse" matters). These categories are ill-formed, but the general idea should be clear. I have no reason to believe that there are significantly more ethicists working in the first area as opposed to the second and third areas, nor that, say, normative ethicists are all agreed on what the applied implications are of their own theoretic commitments. Nor do I have reason to believe that applied ethicists are not significantly more "ethical" than moral theoreticians of the other sorts.

Second, just to take an issue at random, most philosophers who work on "giving to the poor," are at work trying to defend something like our common-sense intuitions about the demandingness of moral injunctions. (Though the views recieving the most press are obviously the most demanding ones.) It would not be surprising, then, to find that their behavior does not stand out as more moral or less moral, because many (though not all) believe that our everyday practices are substantially justified. This illustrates a general point. Even if we should draw a link between moral reflection and moral motivation (a link which there is very good reason to doubt), we should be comparing people's behavior with their own considered reflection, not their behavior with others' opinions about their behavior, no?

[Wes Anderson]

I anticipate the observational studies. How will you proceed with these? I am glad that X-Phiers are not limiting themselves to survey methods.

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Dale!

On your first issue: I think most ethicists do some mix of all these sorts of ethics -- at least in their teaching if not in their publications. Just reading Aristotle or Mill or Hume or Kant tends to get pretty quickly and obviously into practical, everyday implications (especially if you want students to get interested).

On your second issue: People's self-judgments will be clouded with rationalization and self-deception. I don't think it's so hard to make at least roughly accurate assessments of who are the saints and who are the more self-serving among one's colleagues. In saying this, I'm depending of course on part of the point you are making here: That what is morally right tends largely to accord with our commonsense view of what is morally right. The issue I have in mind, guiding my research, is the relationship between moral reflection, moral motivation, and moral behavior. I do think one can doubt that there is any relationship between these three -- surely there is no necessary relationship in any *particular instance* -- but to think there is no relationship *at all*, to think that moral reflection has on average zero positive impact on moral behavior, is to my mind a dark and depressing view!

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

Wes, I'm of two minds about describing my observational studies. On the one hand, I'd love the feedback and input (which helped me a lot in designing the study reported above). On the other hand, I don't want word of these studies to get out and change the behavior of the people being studied! For two of the studies I'm currently at work on, I think this is a substantial risk.

I suppose I can mention one other study I'm considering. It's not *exactly* on the topic of the moral behavior of ethicists, but it is related.

I'm considering looking at rates at which students are convicted of academic dishonesty in ethics classes (compared to other philosophy classes) and business ethics classes (compared to other business classes). Since reporting and prosecution rates vary enormously between professors, I'm especially interested to break this down by professor. If Prof. A has less (or more) cheating in his ethics than his non-ethics classes, and so does Prof. B, etc., that would be pretty interesting data.

Suggestions welcomed! I'll probably post on this over at the Splintered Mind, too, in the near future, so thoughts/comments will be welcomed there also.

[Manyul Im]

Eric,
Isn't the primary concept of the study, "morally better behavior,"seriously question-begging at an elementary level? Clearly, someone with Kantian leanings would consider some actions that are morally better by consequentialist standards to be morally worse. Likewise in reverse and also as applied to Virtue Ethicists. Your study might only show that there are more tacit consequentialists among philosophers than Kantians. How does one identify one's philosopher peers as dedicated consequentialists, Kantians, or virtu-ists anyway, aside from those who have published on them or carry Kant-society membership cards? Am I taking this too seriously or not seriously enough? And what about the Confucians out there?

[Manyul Im]

Sorry, Eric, retract the previous comment; I didn't look carefully enough at your study. My bad.

Humbly,
Manyul

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

No problem Manyul! Your comments transfer nicely to my post over at the Splintered Mind
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/
where I expand a bit on Leiter's idea that Kantians are worse. I myself don't feel much of a pull one way or the other on that, but I have noticed that it seems to be a common opinion!

Your suggestion about more people being implicit utilitarians is an interesting one -- but at the same time my *guess* is that the kind of problematic behavior Leiter and others have in mind would be problematic by Kantian *or* utilitarian (or virtue ethic) standards.

[Dustin]

Hello all,

As part of my continuing attempt to further understand what people intend by 'experimental philosophy', I'd like to ask you all whether you believe that the work discussed in this post is experimental philosophy.

Thanks in advance for participating in MY little (informal) survey!

[Dustin]

Hello all,

As part of my continuing attempt to further understand what people intend by 'experimental philosophy', I'd like to ask you all whether you believe that the work discussed in this post is experimental philosophy.

Thanks in advance for participating in MY little (informal) survey!

[jonathan weinberg]

Yes, it is experimental philosophy.

(That's my intuition, anyway....) ;-)

[Brandon N. Towl]

What seems interesting about this study is not that ethics fail (or are perceived to fail) at acting ethically; rather, it is that the opinion of ethicists does seem to differ somewhat from the opinion of non-ethicists. There are at least some (a non-negligible minority of) ethicists who believe that ethicists, on the whole do behave better. To me, the failure might be expected (for reasons that the other posters have mentioned)-- but, if we expect the failure, the question is why people in this field expect the failure *not* to happen. I think this might make for an interesting follow-up....

[Eric Schwitzgebel]

That does seem like an interesting follow-up, Brandon. Thanks!

As to whether it's "experimental philosophy", it's not experimental philosophy in the narrow sense of research on folk intuitions about philosophical puzzles. I sense that most of the leaders of the movement want to see experimental philosophy as broader than that, but whether there's a broader, useful, stable concept of experimental philosophy that isn't just "experiments done by people who happen to be in philosophy departments" I don't feel entirely clear on yet. A few months ago there was a long exchange about this on this blog....

[jonathan weinberg]

I think we can easily strengthen it from "experiments done by people who happen to be in philosophy departments" to "experiments done by people who happen to be in philosophy departments _when said experiments are meant to be brought to bear on philosophical questions_".

So, e.g., a lot of JD Trout's work in speech perception would thus not count as experimental philosophy, for example -- which is certainly not meant to be any sort of slight to that work of JD's.

[Kelly Heuer]

I think it's fantastic that an empirical study of sorts was done on this topic. I have often joked about this with my boyfriend (a biologist) -- usually to claim that because I am a philosopher/ethicist I am more likely to be right/act well vis-a-vis whatever we're debating. Alas, this proves that even if arguments ad hominem were not fallacious, I would still be wrong on empirical grounds!

[stephen]

Perhaps most of us tend to judge others more harshly than we judge ourselves. The results seem to support that view. Ethicists give themselves a more charitable review than they get from non-ethicists. One thing the study seems to show is that people on average take pride in their own virtues whilst disapproving of the vices of others.

Perhaps if you polled a group of great saints you would find that they consider themselves profound sinners. That's because they have humility and a sense of their own limitations. So it might not be too depressing to find that people consider themselves morally flawed, and rather more worrying if they think themselves better than others.

Another point is that we can know the difference between right and wrong but not care about it. That point was neatly made by the passing Kantian who stole a choc and announced "I am evil!".

[Steven Pick]

I believe Fielding resolved this issue a couple of centuries ago:

Philosophers are composed of flesh and blood as well as other human creatures; and however sublimated and refined the theory of these may be, a little practical frailty is as incident to them as to other mortals. It is, indeed, in theory only, and not in practice, as we have before hinted, that consists the difference: for though such great beings think much better and more wisely, they always act exactly like other men. They know very well how to subdue all appetites and passions, and to despise both pain and pleasure; and this knowledge affords much delightful contemplation, and is easily acquired; but the practice would be vexatious and troublesome; and, therefore, the same wisdom which teaches them to know this, teaches them to avoid carrying it into execution.

[stephen]

And Ovid a couple of millenia ago:

video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.

I see the better path and approve of it. But I follow the worse.

[Dave Clark]

This is easy:
1. Utilitarians are the nicest by far.
2. Virtue ethicists are mixed (some are very nice, and some are not).
3. Humeans are universally nice-ish, but not as nice as utilitarians or the nice virtue ethicists. Humeans are pleasing to the spectator, but not *too* pleasing.
4. Kantians are generally not-nice, with one or two famously nice exceptions (i.e., if you are not famous for being nice, and you are a Kantian, you need help).