Do Ethicists Steal More Books?

When I was young, my father and I used to joke about stealing Bibles, or breaking into a Christian store and making off with a load of crucifixes. The irony appealed to us, on the assumption that an important part of wanting a Bible or a crucifix is endorsing a set of values that includes the repudiation of theft. There's something likewise ironic, it seems, in stealing an ethics text (or should I say deliciously wicked?).

One might expect Bibles and books extolling the life of virtue to be relatively less stolen than similarly popular books with no moral message. On the other hand, given my sense that ethicists, on the whole, behave no better than the rest of us, maybe we shouldn't expect a difference. In casual conversation, I've sometimes heard it remarked that ethics books seem, indeed, more likely to be missing from libraries than books in other areas of philosophy -- which would comport nicely with the sense some people have of the particular viciousness of ethics professors. However, the impression that ethics books are more likely to be stolen might derive from their simply being more popular, or it might be a saliency effect -- perhaps we're more likely to be struck by and remember a theft of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals than a theft of Kripke's Naming and Necessity.

Here at the University of California, we have access to a system called Melvyl, which gives circulation information on all the books in the University of California system. The main campus libraries at Berkeley, Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, and Santa Cruz also give due date information, including for overdue books. So we can inquire: Are ethics books more or less likely to be overdue or missing from these UC campuses than other philosophy books?

I looked at the book reviews in Philosophical Review from 1994-2001. I included in my survey books that were clearly in ethics (excluding philosophy of action, political philosophy on proper governance [rather than private virtue], and other borderline cases). As a comparison class, I also looked at books that were clearly outside of ethics if the review started on a page number divisible by four. This gave me 76 ethics books and 67 non-ethics books. Almost all these texts were held by at least 5 of the 6 campuses; some texts had multiple copies at a single campus.

The ethics books were listed as off the shelf (checked out or missing) in 73 cases (between the 6 campuses) out of 452 held copies, for an off-shelf rate of 16.1%. Of these, 8 were overdue or missing (5 missing or lost; 1 more than 1 year overdue; 2 less than one year overdue), for a 1.8% deliquency rate per copy. 11.0% of the off-shelf books were delinquent.

The non-ethics books were listed as off the shelf in 66 cases out of 379 held copies, for an off-shelf rate of 17.4%. Of these, 7 were overdue or missing (actually, all 7 were simply missing, none overdue), for a 1.8% delinquency rate per copy. 10.6% of the off-shelf books were delinquent.

These numbers are too small to draw any definite conclusions, but they do seem to suggest that, among philosophical books prominent enough to be reviewed in Philosophical Review, ethics books are checked out and stolen at very nearly the same rate as non-ethics books -- neither more nor less.

The University of California has a pretty good system for tracking down overdue books. I wonder to what extent the low delinquency rates are due to good enforcement rather than the conscientiousness of the patrons. In this connection, it would be interesting to do a study of libraries that depend primarily on the honor of the patrons. The UCR Philosophy Department Library is an example of the latter (as opposed to the main library, Rivera, whose holdings are included in Melvyl, described above); but unfortunately there's no systematic record of its holdings.

If any readers of this blog have access to the circulation records of a consortium of libraries, or have access to information from which they could infer deliquency rates in libraries that depend mostly on the honor of the patrons, and are interested in exploring this issue farther, I'd love to hear from you!