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Mind Advance Access published online on November 16, 2009
Mind, doi:10.1093/mind/fzp108
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© 2009 The Author(s)

The Moral Behaviour of Ethicists: Peer Opinion

Eric Schwitzgebel

Department of Philosophy University of California at Riverside Riverside, CA 92521-0201 USA eschwitz{at}ucr.edu

Joshua Rust

Department of Philosophy Stetson University Unit 8250, 421 North Woodland Boulevard DeLand, FL 32723 USA jrust{at}stetson.edu


  Abstract

If philosophical moral reflection tends to improve moral behaviour, one might expect that professional ethicists will, on average, behave morally better than non-ethicists. One potential source of insight into the moral behaviour of ethicists is philosophers’ opinions about ethicists’ behaviour. At the 2007 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, we used chocolate to entice 277 passers-by to complete anonymous questionnaires without their knowing the topic of those questionnaires in advance. Version I of the questionnaire asked respondents to compare, in general, the moral behaviour of ethicists to that of philosophers not specializing in ethics and to non-academics of similar social background. Version II asked respondents similar questions about the moral behaviour of the ethics specialist in their department whose name comes next in alphabetical order after their own. Both versions asked control questions about specialists in metaphysics and epistemology. The majority of respondents expressed the view that ethicists do not, on average, behave better than non-ethicists. Whereas ethicists tended to avoid saying that ethicists behave worse than non-ethicists, non-ethicists expressed that pessimistic view about as often as they expressed the view that ethicists behave better.


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