Being Ethical

Posted on August 17, 2010
Filed Under Ethics, Philosophy | 2 Comments

There was a pretty interesting Bloggingheads TV this week featuring Joshua Knobe and one of my favorite bloggers Eric Schwitzgebel. Eric of course runs The Splintered Mind. The dialog between the two largely goes over what Eric has been posting on the past few years regarding whether reasoning about ethics makes one more ethical. Most particularly about the behavior of ethics professors. So if you are a regular reader of his blog the first part will seem quite familiar. That is that at best ethicists aren’t any better than others and are in some ways worse.

It’s an interesting question since it effectively goes against a fairly strong Peircean principle I have: that inquiry will lead to better knowledge with beliefs for Peirce being tied to behavioral habits. So in other words there is prima facie reasons for a Peircean to expect that moral reasoning ought make one more moral.

However Mark Wrathall criticized me rather well a year or so ago when I’d brought up some of Eric’s points on LDS-Phil. (This was just before Mark left BYU to go to become a fellow professor at Riverside with Eric) He noted the data just wasn’t as strong as I was making it appear. A few others noted the obvious selection bias as well.

For example psychology students are infamous as having… How to put this politely so I don’t offend. Let’s say that it seems to outsiders that lots of people go into psychology to figure out what is wrong with them. So while one might expect psychologists to be more mentally healthy it might be the case that they are less mentally healthy due to who tends to become a psychologist. In the same way the type of people who become ethicists might not represent the typical type of person.

What you’d really want is a common test base where some people spend a lot of time thinking about ethical behavior versus those who don’t. Ideally you’d want to break it down by the kinds of ways to think about ethics. After all the way philosophers think about ethics is quite different from say how a religious person might think about ethics and different again from how someone doing evolutionary psychology thinks about it. It’d be interesting to see what kinds of changes in behavior these make.

The other thing that was raised in the dialog between Eric and Joshua is that being a philosopher gives one more capabilities to rationalize ones behavior. That is when you know so much about the various ways ethics is thought about you can typically find some set of reasons to make your behavior seem not quite so bad.

The more I think about it the more I suspect this is a danger for anyone who reasons. It’s just too easy to make yourself appear rational. This gets one back into the worries about Plato and Sophistry.

Related posts:

  1. An Unethical Ethicist?
  2. On Ethics
  3. Ethics without God, Aristotle style
  4. Morris vs. Peirce
  5. Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science
  6. Ethics and an Other Book

Comments

2 Responses to “Being Ethical”

So Clark. Does the “problem of ethicists” tie into the BKP saying, about studying doctrine will change behavior? I suppose there is something more implied there, but on the face of it, it seems like the same assertion?

Well I tried to get at that with the question of whether studying reasons as reasons (i.e. ethics) versus more religious study. That said I’m pretty skeptical there’d be much of a difference. But it’s an interesting question.

There was a Harvard study earlier this year that found no difference in ethical behavior between atheists and church goers. I’m not sure that gets at the main issue since atheists can (and obviously are) be just as concerned with being good as religious people. Indeed since there is no “crutch” to provide alternatives to thinking themselves righteous I’d almost expect a slightly higher incident among atheists. That is there won’t be anything like “cheap grace” which suggests you’re saved despite what you are doing nor social feedback with people saying you are righteous just because they don’t know what you do when no one is watching.

But being religious doesn’t necessarily mean you are terribly worried about being ethical. So one has to be careful with those sorts of studies.

I couldn’t find it but I seem to recall some studies suggesting that religious people act more ethical if they think they are being noticed. Which is sort of the Pharisee charge in Christianity. That many religious people act righteous to get praise but aren’t really good.

Leave a Reply