I’ve been waiting for these survey results, by philosophy professors Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust, to come out. (Schwitzgebel is a fellow blogger whom I referred to last time.) I was among the 200 philosophers they surveyed at the 2007 APA conference, identifying myself as an ethicist. The answers I gave appear to match the answers most other people gave: ethicists are not usually better people than non-ethicists. That is (respondents said when they elaborated their opinions), ethicists are not typically more conscientious, fair, generous, honest, kind, selfless or thoughtful than other philosophers, or than non-academics.
Schwitzgebel and Rust surveyed philosophers as the people who presumably knew ethicists the best. Obviously there are problems with the extremely non-random sample in the survey methodology (whoever wanted a cookie or candy at the conference filled out the survey). Still it’s useful because the result is, on the one hand, pretty obvious to anyone who hangs around philosophy departments (I had no doubt the results would turn out as they did), and on the other hand, somewhat troubling. If studying ethics doesn’t make us more ethical, in some sense, then is it worth doing?
The question is unfair to some extent. Many ethicists focus on the application of ethics to very specific contexts, where it’s not obvious what the right thing to do is. Others focus on the nature of ethical claims: how can we really say something is good or right, in the first place? Answering either of these questions isn’t really supposed to make us more virtuous people, any more than studying sociology or physics is.
And yet there’s still a problem here. What if we do want to be better people? Academic ethics, at least in some cases, should teach us what it is to be a good person. But that doesn’t make us good people, any more than we become good soccer players just by knowing what a good soccer player does. It might help, but really we need something else. What is that something else? I’ll try to say more in my next post.
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Hi Amod! Thanks for the posts on my work!
I agree that it’s implausible to suppose, and uninteresting to show false, that thinking about ethics isn’t sufficient for being good. The question, rather, is whether on average it helps. It’s that “on average” question that I think Josh’s and my data call into question.
Hi Eric – welcome to the blog, and thanks for the comment! The clarification is a useful one as well. I suppose the place where the “on average” question would get most interesting to me is in distinguishing between different kinds of ethicists. I wouldn’t really expect reflection on ethics to make a difference, even on average, in the cases where ethics is the kind of technical matter I point to above: where it’s just about deciding the right action in complex applied cases, or dealing with highly abstract foundational questions.
Where I would expect (and hope) it to make a difference is in the kind of reflection that’s more directly about being a better person: virtue ethics, especially, and probably also “Continental” ethics like Lévinas or Ricoeur. I’d be interested to see the data disaggregated according to speciality – though I say that mostly theoretically, because the sample size for the disaggregated data would probably be small enough as to make it meaningless. I could imagine the data going either way on this point. If studying virtue ethics does make you more virtuous, on average, then what your data reflect is mainly a matter of specialization, a problem with the particular topics covered by philosophy departments. If it doesn’t, then it’s a deeper problem, indicating that theory does nothing without practice (as my follow-up post suggests). I would certainly want the former result to be the case, but I suspect it may well not be
I don’t find these statistics all that informative, to be honest. There are just too many variables at work in shaping the ethical quality of a person’s actions for any simple statistical study to reveal much. Besides the problems that you’ve already mentioned, there are at least a few others. First, that some kinds of ethical theory seem not only unlikely to make anyone better, but perhaps more likely to make people worse. It is, at least, not implausible that believing some forms of subjectivism and non-cognitivism could allow one to rationalize kinds of action that a moral realist would reject (though nothing of the sort follows from the theories themselves). Second, as Schwitzgebel and Rust point out, I think, studying moral philosophy may also just make people more sophisticated at rationalizing their behavior *whatever* theories they believe, if they are so inclined. Third, what it is that makes a person better or worse and what it takes to judge such things accurately is pretty complicated, but it seems unlikely that many people are in a good position to pass informed ethical judgments on many other people unless the criteria are fairly superficial. Fourth, most discussions of the results I’ve read strike me as underestimating the potential influence of ideology over the answers. Non-ethicists in particular have a vested interest in *not* believing that ethics makes people morally better, and for most academics, at least, to suggest that being an academic or a philosopher is likely to make a person morally superior is likely to invoke moral outrage. Finally, even if the average opinions accurately reflect reality (and we really don’t have much good reason to think so), does it really matter that studying academic moral philosophy does not *cause* people to be better? The important question about the *value* of moral philosophy doesn’t receive an answer when we observe that it can’t make people better the way that taking some pills can relieve your pain. It’s worth noting, at least, that almost none of the important ethical theories in the history of philosophy would have led us to expect that the characteristic practices of academic moral philosophers would reliably produce people of better character. Certainly no competent contemporary ethicists that *I* know of defend views that should lead us to expect such things.
So, while I’ve been very impressed with the care and restraint that Schwitzgebel and Rust have shown with their study, all I can really say in the end is, so what?