The Hypocrisy of Professional Ethicists

By Published on May 28, 2015

Recently, some philosophers have started spotting ironies in their colleagues’ behavior. Their findings suggest that those who ponder big questions for a living don’t necessarily behave better, or think more clearly, than regular people do. In one study, 573 professors—about a third of them ethicists—were asked about their personal behavior and beliefs. Sixty percent of the ethicists rated eating red meat as “morally bad,” but only 27 percent said they didn’t regularly eat it. Ethicists and political philosophers were no more likely to vote than other kinds of professors, nor were ethicists more likely to donate blood or register as organ donors. “On no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups,” the researchers reported.

Philosophers are also vulnerable to biases. For example, one study found that, compared with introverted peers, extroverted experts in philosophy and psychology were more likely to hold certain beliefs about free will [4]. In another study, people with advanced philosophy degrees answered a pair of ethical questions differently depending on which was posed first [5]. And when presented with variations of the trolley problem—a classic Philosophy 101 dilemma that forces a choice between killing one person to save several people from being hit by a trolley, or not committing the murder but letting the people die—philosophers and laypersons alike tended to change their answers depending on the means of murder [6].

Read the article “The Hypocrisy of Professional Ethicists” on theatlantic.com.

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