As I recall, two things are often found: – no particular correlation between (say belief, or church attendance, or other independant variable) and ethical behavior – or a ‘u-shaped’ one – where the most atheistic and the most deeply religious are the most ethical

Forgive the lack of cites and the vagueness, but it has been a full decade since I swam in those particular waters.

For example, they might evaluate as a ‘good listener’ (who would say otherwise), but once they begin to practice and see examples of what ‘good listening’ is they find out they are very poor listeners (and I’ve never met anyone who listens as well as they think they do).

In a sense, their education raises their standards before it raises their skills.

Are professionals who study ethics posessed of higher standards and more aware of their own (and humanity’s) “akrasia”.

Paul

One might hope that this would be the case, but I don’t see any prima facie reason to think it would be. Then again, part of the analysis depends on what we take to be “ethical behavior.” Adopting an aretaic perspective might give a very different sense of what qualifies as the good than if the latter is specified according to right acts or consequences.

Glen Tomkins @46 inneresting, I’ll have a ponder

[just noticed middle para of #40 is supposed to be italicised quote]

I always assume that Aristotle was up to, not just a bit of rhetoric, but whole hog irony. He was the heir of those flagrant and notorious ironists, Socrates and Plato, and was known in antiquity for his dialogues, whose prose style was especially admired. The best guess is that everything his reputation rested on is lost, and the stuff of his that survives is a more or less organized set of lecture notes. You pretty much have to make up a context to put these inherently scattered ruminations into.

While you therefore could, because the work doesn’t supply its own context, and wasn’t (to all appearances) meant to stand on its own, put the Nicomachean Ethics into the context of what our latter-day ethicists do for a living, I certainly wouldn’t. I see a line straight from this work to the overtly comic “Characters” by Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus. If you follow that line, you’ll see that the ancients are way ahead of your analysis. Their comedies centered on the figure of the panourgos, this dynamic character, often a slave or merchant or other low-life, who is willing to do anything, however trashy, and usually involving some clever and elaborate schem, but all in the service of pure id. Think Basil Fawlty, but, at least in the case of Aristophanes, XXX-rated. The panourgos gets all the best lines, and usually wins in the end (Trashiness and injustice are rewarded in comedy, while justice and nobility are punished in tragedy. Maybe Basil Fawlty isn’t the purest example of comedy because we moderns won’t let injustice triumph, but instead we pull our punches and insist that Basil be humiliated in the end.), but the audience doesn’t end up at all tempted to emulate trashy behavior.

How/why does this work? Beats me. But I would guess it has to do with there simply being more universal buy-in to common ideas of what behavior is trashy, as compared to what is right or wrong, and also it being easier to get people to the self-recognition of trashy behvior, as opposed to evil behvior, that you need for catharsis. We can identify with Basil Fawlty, and will strive to not be like him for having him shoved in our faces, but presenting Hitler to us with any force or immediacy doesn’t do anything except make us want to change the channel. The usual strategy to depicting Hitler is to make him a stick figure, safely free of any dramatic immediacy. Even weak tea like “Downfall” gets criticized for giving him any sort of life. And getting an audience to self-recognize in Hitler—well, that would get you thrown in jail for Holocaust Denial in some countries.

So, yes, maybe Aristitotle had a moralistic agenda, but that wouldn’t be an ethicist’s agenda. And he seems to me to have wanted to pursue this agenda through comedy rather than the discussion of ethical theories. At any rate, I think that the Nicomachean Ethics is a definite genre-bender, in modern terms, however you slice it.

You’re also right that the main discussion here is about relative capacities for rationalization between ethicists and non-ethicists, although if you’ll remember, I brought up the Genovese case in response to Rousseau’s decidedly absolutist view that philosophers rationalize and the “uncivilized” just plain don’t. (A view on which the bystander research casts considerable doubt even when we discount Genovese.)

Anyway, perhaps we can agree that both ethicists and non-ethicists have significant capacities for rationalization, and that the only thing which remains be shown is whether the former really do outstrip the latter. But I was certainly not saying that ‘everyone knows I’m right, so I don’t need evidence.’ The reason I know I wasn’t saying that was because I explicitly denied it. To wit:

I guess we can agree to disagree so long as we’ve only got anecdotes and firmly held convictions to back ourselves up.

Now, burden-of-proof arguments are notoriously difficult to settle, but suffice it to say that at this point, I don’t really care. No one has presented evidence that ethicists are better at rationalizing than non-ethicists, and no one has presented evidence that they are not. As I said above, I “venture to guess” that non-ethicists are prone to sloppy reasoning about moral issues, and so too to dogmatism, but if you really want to take issue with my guesses, the burden of proof really is yours.

The relative capacity of trained ethicists and mere proles to do this is precisely what’s under discussion here, tho. And you brought up the non-existent “observers of the Kitty Genovese murder” not once but twice in support of your view. Saying “everyone knows I’m right, so I don’t need evidence” may be an acceptable mode of argument in your branch of philosophy but it isn’t here.

I’m pretty impressed by your ability to rationalize your use of a fictitious example to illustrate a point.

Perhaps ethics would be a more useful endeavor if it merely tried to describe the human condition, instead of discussing prescriptive theories of behavior as anything but revealing of the character of those who hold them. Aristotle was engaged in a sort of intellectual and characterological pathology, not any sort of intervention, but such modesty of ends is more realistic, given our means.

But Aristotle was getting up to a bit of rhetoric. I think there is (certainly there was) a strand of ‘virtue ethics’ on more-or-less Aristotelian lines, that was connected to study of what were known as ‘thick’ moral concepts. The standard objection to such an approach, I imagine, is going to be a (G.E.) Moorean one along the lines of rhetorical questions like ‘who says I shouldn’t be “small” [or whatever]?’ Are these really unitary concepts or disguised moral generalisations? You could develop a line of argument parallel to the ‘amoral mastermind’ fantasy (and which you could make subtle and convoluted to an arbitrary degree) which says ‘I alone am so self-confident or cleverly cynical (or whatever) that I can cope with being small in order to get an advantage – indeed maybe I am not so small after all, etc…