Are Ethicists Ethical?

In all seriousness, why would there necessarily be a connection between professional knowledge and personal behavior? It’s fairly well established that you can be a thoughtful and insightful psychologist and yet a lousy spouse. You can be an expert in the theory, methodology, and practice of early childhood education, and yet a terrible parent.

There are many instances in which we recognize that a person might have spent time (many years, even) becoming well-versed in a field and its theories, and even be a wise and useful instructor of those theories, and yet fail when it comes to putting theory into practice. Being an ethical and moral person is generally acknowledged to take a fair amount of ongoing effort. Is it really that much of a surprise that ethicists are similar to other professional fields in that it’s easier to talk the talk than walk the walk?

(I’m not being snarky here, so if these are well-trod talking points in the mainstream-vs-ethicists debate, I apologize.)

A methodologically bankrupt paper in experimental philosophy? How is that even possible.

Ethicists are academia’s sunday school teachers, and about as useless. I suspect they rate about the same on the Virtu-o-meter, which is to say, not-so-great–not quite like Nabakov trench-coat level, but close

Maybe the ethicists realise just how flimsy the structure is?

Sometimes navel gazing has its uses – or the sociology of professionals can tell us that professionals conduct themselves in ways at considerable variance from what is regarded as professional conduct. Think about academics at annual meetings. How often during the various sessions do academics behave in ways that would have them screaming for the law if they received this treatment from their students. No, I wouldn’t trust somebody who is an ethicist to exhibit anything but the normal weasel behavior that is customary for modern organizational types.

Astronomers are made of star-stuff, so they’re like the anti-ethicists.

Could this be influenced by the employment available to applied ethicists? Bioethics is quite lucrative, I gather, but I assume employment is contingent on reaching conclusions well-suited to the interests of your employers – biotech companies or health insurers. Ethics is one of the few areas of philosophy I know of where lucrative non-academic employment is available, and this may itself have a corrupting influence that reaches beyond those who get, and perhaps even those who seek, such employment.

Two extremely important meta-ethicistical considerations.

First, there are plausible situations where for each ethicist, his or her most adamant positions are distinct minority positions in the field as a whole. Thus, say, 10% are ethical vegetarians, another 10% anarchists, 10% have read “The Fountainhead,” 10% favor organ lotteries, etc. In this sort of extreme situation each ethicist might think that 90% of ethicists are depraved, but that “the folk” are much more virtuous. (I suggest that we call this first issue the paradox of Contra Sed cycles.)

Second, one reasonable answer to the question “why are ethics valuable” is that ethicists are trying to come up with better answers to questions like “ought one to P?” When ethicists are engaged in cutting-edge ethical research rather than apologetics for existing moral values, we should expect them to have correct beliefs about what is permissible and impermissible; even if ethicists were perfectly ethical (by their own, correct, standards), those still influenced by older, worse ethical ideas would erroneously see them as unethical. Therefore, error (on the part of non-ethicists) is possible.

So between the possibility of Contra Sed cycles and the Error’s Possibility Theorem, we shouldn’t read too much into the results of this poll. Indeed, it may be impossible for any poll to answer questions about whether ethicists behave ethically.

It’s a commonplace that a cobbler’s kids are ill-shod, tailors’ kids are ill-dressed, carpenters’ walls stand aslant and their doors hang askew. The rule perhaps is that when you’re at home you’re not at work any more.

Of course Rousseau was way ahead of the game here (on the lines of #11 above). From the 2nd Discourse:

bq. Nothing but such general evils as threaten the whole community can disturb the tranquil sleep of the philosopher, or tear him from his bed. A murder may with impunity be committed under his window; he has only to put his hands to his ears and argue a little with himself, to prevent nature, which is shocked within him, from identifying itself with the unfortunate sufferer. Uncivilised man has not this admirable talent; and for want of reason and wisdom, is always foolishly ready to obey the first promptings of humanity. It is the populace that flocks together at riots and street-brawls, while the wise man prudently makes off. It is the mob and the market-women, who part the combatants, and hinder gentle-folks from cutting one another’s throats.

Also? The Genovese murder seems like a pretty compelling indictment of Rousseau’s claims about Uncivilised man’s identification with unfortunate sufferers!

Are lawyers, legal, or merely skilled in circumventing the law? Are doctors, generally speaking, healthy?

I must admit to knowing a computer programer who is bipolar, and having taken a leak standing next to a plumber.

Well qb, my Rousseau reference was offered in good humour rather than in a spirit of scholarship, although it is hard to think that those indifferent in the Genovese case were other than civilized city dwellers. I have to say, though, that your #21 shows a touchingly naive faith in the idea that those with sophisticated reasoning capacities can’t put them at the service of self-interest whilst entertaining the self-deceived belief that they are acting from reasons of morality.

let me remind you that you are in violation of our comments policy through your failure to supply a valid email address.

So are half the commentators on this and other threads – it doesn’t look very good if you only bring up a widely ignored rule when you don’t like somebody’s comments.

Chris,

I think I took your Rousseau reference in the spirit in which it was intended, but your response prompted me to look again. There seems to be an ambiguity in the distinction he was trying to make. On the one hand is the philosopher/non-philosopher distinction, and the other is the civilized/uncivilized distinction.

I was taking the quote as an attack on the follies of philosophical sophistication; unless you think the observers of the Genovese murder were all philosophers, it’s a hard to see why they’re not counterexamples to his claims about the “foolish promptings of humanity” being the domain of the populace, the mob, and the market women.

I definitely wasn’t denying that ethicists are capable of self-interested self-deception about their reasons for action. I was only saying that non-ethicists are perfectly capable of doing the same thing, albeit through a different mechanism. Perhaps I should have been more clear. Subtle reasoning gets sophisticated reasoners into trouble, but non-subtle reasoning gets unsophisticated reasoners into just as much (cf. casuistry versus dogmatism).

And, um, it is a valid email address–I use it often, though it isn’t my primary account–so I’m not sure what you’re on about there. I checked it a moment ago, just to make sure it’s still up and running this morning. What made you think it isn’t valid?

All fair points …

On the email, I just assumed that it must be an invented address on the basis of the domain. But I’ll take your word that it exists, works etc. Sorry for being suspicious.

Well, ok I misunderstood the way email addresses are displayed, point taken. But unless you have tried emailing each and every commentator on CT, you have no way of knowing either, because anybody can grab a valid email address off the net in three seconds. As you point out, in the whoever many years of commenting here and elsewhere, I have always used a fake email address, because I get enough emails every day and only give it out when absolutely necessary for business or private purposes. To my knowledge, nobody ever tried to email me anyway and I don’t see the point if we can talk in an open forum like this. I also didn’t see any purpose in creating some secondary email account which I would never look at again, just to conform with a formality, but if it makes you happy, I will do so.

The Genovese murder

… is largely a myth.

the independently plausible picture

Except I’m a New Yorker, and I don’t find the picture plausible at all.

Glen @35
Stealing wasn’t actually against any ethical rules prescribed in Aristotle’s work, so I hadn’t committed any sort of perfect crime, I had just done something that the Nicomachean Ethics would describe as petty, and the prospect of being a small person weighs on the mind more heavily than the notion that one is some sort of amoral mastermind, above ethical rules of conduct, which actually has its appeal.

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…

Thanks Babar, and I appreciate the irony, but I notice you didn’t quote the “well documented effect in social psychology” part of what I was saying. It’s called the bystander effect, and you can look that up for yourself. I am a philosopher, though, and in my field the use of fictitious examples for illustrative purposes is fairly unremarkable. The point I was illustrating is just that non-ethicists are perfectly capable of rationalizing without resort to the nuaces of ethical theory; frankly, I’m surprised that anyone would disagree, but it seems that some people here are strongly committed to the view that ethicists’ powers of rationalization far exceed the norm. It is especially surprising given the paucity of empirical evidence for that conclusion, but hey, I guess we can agree to disagree so long as we’ve only got anecdotes and firmly held convictions to back ourselves up.

Ordinary people do rationalize their selfishness and indifference all the time, in a dogmatic sort of way, like qb said. Professionals help, they popularize these dogmas.

Tim Wilkinson@40

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.

[Previous @47 was in response to Henri Vieuxtemps @44: Ordinary people do rationalize their selfishness and indifference all the time, in a dogmatic sort of way, like qb said. Professionals help, they popularize these dogmas.]

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

alex, do you know it or do you merely rationalize your delusional perceptions into thinking you know it? Also – any question that requests any evidence pertaining to anything is apt to be quite hilarious.

While I can’t comment methodologically on the study, there is a parallel in (of all places) the Organisational Psychology field. Generally, when a cohort of individuals (say in a training program) self-evaluate using a set of distinctions (say by using a communications skills questionnaire) and later self evaluate having studied the subject (say during the course) – they will often rate themselves lower post-course.

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.

Paul