The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Role
of the Philosopher
Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of
Philosophy
University of
California at Riverside
Riverside CA 92521
USA
December 10, 2013
The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Role
of the Philosopher
Abstract:
Professional ethicists appear to behave no
differently than do non-ethicists of similar social background. The evidence suggests that they are no
likelier to donate to charity, to choose a vegetarian diet, to reply to student
emails, to pay conference registration fees they owe, to return their library
books, to vote in public elections, to stay in regular contact with their
mothers, to be blood or organ donors, or to behave politely at
conferences. On some issues, however, such as charitable donation and
vegetarianism, ethicists tend to endorse more stringent ethical norms than do
non-ethicists. This pattern of results might fit with a view on which the
role of the philosopher is only to espouse and defend ethical norms, not to live
according to those norms.
The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Role
of the Philosopher
Professional ethicists appear to behave no
differently than do non-ethicists of similar social background. However, ethicists also appear to embrace
more stringent moral norms than do non-ethicists, at least on some issues. Part 1 will summarize the empirical
evidence. Part 2 will discuss one
possibly attractive response: that an ethicist’s role is to espouse and defend
moral norms, with no special obligation to live according to the norms she
espouses and defends.
1. The Moral Behavior of Ethicists.
So far,
all of the systematic empirical studies of the moral behavior of professional
ethicists have been done by a single research group – the research group led by
Eric Schwitzgebel, the author of this article.
This will, then, be an embarrassingly self-centered review.
Our first study (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2009), examined professional philosophers’
opinions about the moral behavior of ethicists. We
offered gourmet chocolate to passersby at a meeting of the Pacific Division of
the American Philosophical Association in exchange for completing, on the spot,
a ‘5 minute philosophical-scientific questionnaire’. There were two versions of the survey. One version asked respondents whether ‘professors
specializing in ethics tend, on average, to behave morally better, worse, or
about the same as philosophers not specializing in ethics’, with a seven-point
response scale from ‘substantially morally better’ (marked 1) through ‘about
the same’ (marked 4) to ‘substantially morally worse’ (marked 7). Opinion was divided: 35 per cent of
respondents circled a number on the ‘better’ side of the scale (1-3); 46 per
cent circled 4 ‘about the same’, and 19 per cent circled a number on the ‘worse’
side. The second version asked
respondents to rate the overall moral behavior of an arbitrarily
(alphabetically) selected ethicist from their own department and also to rate
the overall moral behavior of a similarly selected specialist in metaphysics
and epistemology: 44 per cent rated the selected ethicist morally better
behaved than the other selected philosopher, 26 per cent rated them the same,
and 30 per cent rated the ethicist worse – a trend toward ‘better’ over ‘worse’,
but not statistically significant in our sample.
We have
directly examined moral behavior – or behavior that is arguably moral – using a
wide variety of measures. Schwitzgebel
(2009) examined the rates at which relatively obscure philosophy books – the
kinds of books likely to be borrowed mostly by professors and advanced graduate
students in the field – were missing from leading academic libraries in the
U.S. and Britain. Ethics books were
substantially more likely to be missing than other types of philosophy books,
even though the two groups of books were similar in overall age, check-out
rate, and holdings per library.
Schwitzgebel and Rust (2010) found that ethicists and political
philosophers were no more likely to vote in public elections, as measured by
state records of voter participation, than were non-ethicist philosophers or
professors in fields other than philosophy or political science. (Political scientists, in contrast, did vote
more often than other professors.) Schwitzgebel,
Rust, Huang, Moore, and Coates (2012) found that ethicists were no more likely
to behave courteously at professional meetings than were other philosophers, as
measured by rates of talking audibly during the formal presentation, allowing
doors to slam when entering or exiting mid-session, and leaving behind cups and
trash at one’s seat. Audiences in
environmental ethics sessions did, however, leave behind less trash. Rust and Schwitzgebel (2013) found that
ethicists were no more likely than other professors to respond to email
messages designed to look like queries from students. Schwitzgebel and Rust (forthcoming-b) found
that non-ethicist philosophers were more likely to respond to a request to
complete a survey when they were offered a charity incentive to do so ($10 to
the respondent’s choice of six major, well-regarded charities) than when they
were not offered a charity incentive, but ethicists appeared to be unmoved by
the charity incentive. Schwitzgebel (2013)
found that ethicists were no more likely than other philosophers to pay their
registration fees at meetings of the American Philosophical Association in the
mid-2000s, when the APA relied upon an honor system for registration payment.
Schwitzgebel
and Rust (forthcoming-b) examined self-reports of moral attitudes and moral behavior,
across several issues, in three groups of professors in five U.S. states:
philosophers specializing in ethics, philosophers not specializing in ethics,
and a comparison group of other professors from the same universities. Some of the self-reports could be directly
checked against objectively measured behavior, thus enabling a three-way
comparison of self-reported attitude, self-reported behavior, and directly
measured behavior for these three groups of professors. Schwitzgebel and Rust solicited self-reported
attitudes and behavior on nine different issues: membership in one’s main
disciplinary academic society (such as the American Philosophical Association),
voting in public elections, staying in touch with one’s mother, regularly
eating the meat of mammals, blood donation, organ donation, answering student
emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questions. The groups did not detectably differ in their
self-reported rates of membership in disciplinary societies, in their
self-reported voting rates, in their self-reported rates of blood or organ
donation, in their self-reported responsiveness to student emails, or in their
self-reported honesty in answering survey questionnaires. Non-philosophers reported more regular
contact with their mothers than did the two groups of philosophers. Non-ethicist philosophers reported giving a
lower percentage of their income to charity than did either ethicists or
non-ethicist philosophers. And although
ethicists reported eating the meat of mammals at fewer meals per week than did
the other two groups, the three groups did not detectably differ in the rates
at which they reported having eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous
evening meal. Checking response accuracy
in various ways (e.g., comparing self-reported vote rate with state recorded
voting rates for the same respondents), the three groups did not appear to
differ overall in the accuracy of their self-reports. Impressionistically, the aggregate result is
approximately a tie. Schwitzgebel and
Rust also mathematically aggregated the behavioral data in three different
ways, finding no difference overall between ethicists and the other groups by
any of the aggregate measures. Schwitzgebel
and Rust (forthcoming-a) presents a meta-analysis of all the studies described
in this section and again finds no tendency for ethicists to behave morally
better or morally worse overall than other philosophers.
Schwitzgebel
and Rust also examined correlations between self-reported normative attitude
and both self-reported and directly measured behavior. Although ethicists showed a detectably higher
correlation between attitude and behavior than did the other groups with
respect to voting in public elections (r = .36, vs. .14 for non-ethicist
philosophers and .01 for non-philosophers), they showed a detectably lower
correlation between attitude and self-reported charitable giving (r = .33, vs.
.46 for non-ethicist philosophers and .62 for non-philosophers). The aggregate attitude-behavior correlation
did not detectably differ among the groups (r = .20 for ethicists, vs. .24 for
non-ethicist philosophers and .16 for non-philosophers; all comparisons in this
paragraph use Fisher’s r-to-z conversion and a pairwise
alpha level of .05).
The
most notable group difference Schwitzgebel and Rust found was this: On several
issues, ethicists appeared to endorse more stringent moral standards. Ethicists were more likely than other groups
to rate blood donation and charitable donation as morally good, and they were
more likely to rate meat-eating and failing to be an organ donor as morally
bad. The results are especially striking
for vegetarianism: 60 per cent of ethicists rated ‘regularly eating the meat of
mammals, such as beef or pork’ somewhere on the ‘bad’ side of a 1-9 scale from ‘very
morally bad’ to ‘very morally good’, compared to 45 per cent of non-ethicist
philosophers and only 19 per cent of professors from departments other than
philosophy (χ2 = 64.2, p < .001). When asked ‘About what percentage of income
should the typical professor donate to charity? (Enter “0” if you think it’s not the case that
the typical professor should donate to charity.)’, only 9 per cent of ethicists
entered ‘0’, compared to 24 per cent of non-ethicist philosophers and 25 per
cent of other professors (χ2 = 18.2, p < .001); and among
those not entering ‘0’, the geometric mean was 5.9 per cent for ethicists vs.
4.8 per cent for both of the two other groups (ANOVA, F = 3.6, p = .03). However, as mentioned above, these
differences in normative attitude did not detectably manifest in behavior.
2. The Role of the Philosopher.
If the
role of the philosophical ethicist were to present her- or himself as a living
model of wise conduct, these results might be alarming. However, most philosophers seem to be
unalarmed and unsurprised by the results described in Part 1. Most philosophers’ general idea of the role
of the philosopher does not appear to be threatened by the possibility that ethicists
behave overall no differently than do non-ethicists, or by the possibility that
ethicists behave overall no more consistently with their espoused opinions, or
by the possibility that ethicists espouse stringent moral views without tending
to shift their behavior accordingly.
I think
of Randy Cohen’s farewell column as ethics columnist for the New York Times Magazine. Cohen writes:
Writing the column has not made me even
slightly more virtuous. And I didn’t
have to be…. I wasn’t hired to personify
virtue, to be a role model for kids, but to write about virtue in a way readers
might find engaging. Consider sports
writers: not 2 in 20 can hit the curveball, and why should they? They’re meant to report on athletes, not be
athletes. And that’s the self-serving
rationalization I’d have clung to had the cops hauled me off in handcuffs.
What spending my workday thinking about
ethics did do was make me acutely aware of my own transgressions, of the times
I fell short. It is deeply demoralizing
(Cohen 2011).
In light of the vegetarianism results
described in Part 1, we might consider the following scenario: An ethicist
philosopher considers the question of whether it’s morally permissible to eat
the meat of factory-farmed mammals. She
reads Peter Singer. She reads objections
and replies to Singer. In light of the
considerations, she concludes – as the majority of U.S. ethicists seem to –
that in fact it is morally bad to eat meat.
She presents the material in her applied ethics class. Maybe she even writes on the issue. However, instead of changing her behavior to
match her new moral opinions, she retains her old behavior. She teaches Singer’s defense of
vegetarianism, both inwardly and outwardly endorsing it, and then proceeds to
the university cafeteria for a cheeseburger, perhaps feeling somewhat bad about
it.
To the
student who sees her in the cafeteria, our philosopher says: Singer’s arguments
are sound. It is morally wrong of me to
eat this delicious cheeseburger. But my
role as a philosopher is only to discuss philosophical issues, to present and
evaluate philosophical views and arguments, not to live accordingly. Indeed, it would not be fair to expect me to
live to higher moral standards just because I am an ethicist. I am paid to teach and write, like my
colleagues in other fields; it would be an additional burden on me, not placed
upon them, to demand that I also live my life as a model. Before accepting such an additional demand, I
would require additional compensation.
Furthermore,
our ethicist continues, the demand that ethicists live as moral models would
create distortive pressures on the field that might tend to lead us away from
the moral truth. If I feel no inward or
outward pressure to live according to my publicly espoused doctrines, then I am
free to explore doctrines that demand high levels of self-sacrifice on an equal
footing with more permissive doctrines. If
instead I felt an obligation to live as I teach, I would feel considerable
pressure to avoid highly self-sacrificial doctrines. I would be highly motivated to avoid
concluding that the wealthy should give most of their wealth to charity or that
people should never lie out of self-interest. The world is better served if the
intellectual discourse of moral philosophy is undistorted by such pressures,
that is, if ethicists are not expected to live out their moral opinions.
Such a
view of the role of the philosopher is very different from the view of most
ancient ethicists. Socrates, Confucius,
and the Stoics sought to live according to the norms they espoused and invited
others to judge their lives as an expression of their doctrines.
It is
an open and little discussed question which is the better vision of the role of
the philosopher.
References:
Cohen, Randy (2011) ‘Goodbye’, New York Times
Magazine, Feb. 27 issue, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27FOB-Ethicist-t.html
Rust, Joshua, and Eric Schwitzgebel (2013) ‘Ethicists’
and Nonethicists’ Responsiveness to Student Emails:
Relationships among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self-Described Behavior, and Empirically
Observed Behavior’, Metaphilosophy, 44, 350-371.
Schwitzgebel, Eric (2009) ‘Do Ethicists Steal
More Books?’ Philosophical Psychology,
22, 711-725.
Schwitzgebel, Eric (2013) ‘Are Ethicists Any More
Likely to Pay Their Registration Fees at Professional Meetings?’ Economics & Philosophy, 29,
371-380.
Schwitzgebel, Eric, and Joshua Rust (2009) ‘The Moral Behaviour of Ethicists:
Peer Opinion’, Mind, 118, 1043-1059.
Schwitzgebel, Eric, and Joshua Rust (2010) ‘Do
Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors?’ Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1,
189-199.
Schwitzgebel, Eric, and Joshua Rust
(forthcoming-a), ‘The Behavior of Ethicists’ in W. Buckwalter and J. Sytsma (eds.)
Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy.
Schwitzgebel, Eric, and Joshua Rust
(forthcoming-b) ‘The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors: Relationships among Self-Reported
Behavior, Expressed Normative Attitude, and Directly Observed Behavior, Philosophical Psychology.
Schwitzgebel, Eric, Joshua Rust, Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Alan T. Moore, and Justin Coates (2012) ‘Ethicists’
Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences’, Philosophical
Psychology, 25, 331-340.