Do Ethicists Steal More Books?

(in draft)

If explicit reasoning about morality is morally useful, as Kohlberg and many ethicists have suggested, then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well.  However, professional ethicists’ behavior has never been systematically studied.  The present research examines the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books.  Study 1 found that contemporary (post-1959) ethics books were actually 25% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books.  When the list was reduced to the relatively obscure books most likely to be borrowed exclusively by professional ethicists, ethics books were almost 50% more likely to be missing.  Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were more than twice as likely to be missing as other classic philosophy books.

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