The Behavior of Ethicists

Arguably, one of the aims of studying ethics is moral self‐improvement. In ancient philosophy, moral self‐improvement is often treated as the foremost aim for the student of ethics – for example, in Aristotle (fourth‐century BCE/1962), Confucius (fifth‐century BCE/2003), and Epictetus ( second‐century CE/2008). Twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century philosophers might overall tend to aim their ethical reflections more toward theoretical discovery than toward self‐improvement, but moral self‐improvement plausibly remains among the goals of a significant portion of professional ethicists to the extent they use their philosophical training in ethics to help them reflect on, for example, to what extent they have a duty to donate to charity or whether it is morally permissible to eat meat, with the thought of acting upon their conclusions. Two related questions thus invite empirical treatment: Is philosophical moral reflection of the sort practiced by professional ethicists in fact morally improving? And how do professional ethicists’ explicitly espoused moral principles relate to their practical moral behavior? Individual ethicists’ lives are sometimes examined with these questions in mind, especially the life of Martin Heidegger, notorious for his endorsement of Nazism (e.g., Sluga 1993; Young 1997; Faye 2005/2009); and general claims about the behavior of ethicists are sometimes made based on personal experience or broad plausibility considerations (e.g., Posner 1999; Knobe and Leiter 2007; Moeller 2009). However, until recently, systematic, quantitative research on these issues has been entirely lacking. To date, all published quantitative studies of the issue have been led by Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust, the two authors of this chapter, mostly in collaboration with each other. Our general finding is this: On average, professional ethicists’ behavior is indistinguishable from the behavior of comparison groups of professors in other fields. Also, in one multivariable study, we find ethicists neither more nor less likely than other professors to act in accord with their expressed moral attitudes. The Behavior of Ethicists