Big Things and Small Things in Morality

Hegel wrote that a great man's butler never thinks him great -- not, Hegel says, because the great man isn't great, but because the butler is a butler.

I don't really want to venture into the dark waters of Hegel interpretation, but the remark (besides being insulting to butlers and perhaps convenient for Hegel's self-image) suggests to me the following thought: Being good in small ways or accomplished in petty things -- in the kind of things a butler sees -- is unrelated, or maybe even negatively related, to being truly great. Einstein might not seem a genius to the man who handles his dry cleaning.

Does this apply to moral goodness or greatness? Is being good in small things -- civility with the cashier, not leaving one's coffee cup behind in the lecture hall -- much related to the big moral thngs, such as caring properly for one's children or doing good rather than harm to the world in one's chosen profession? Is it related to moral greatness of the sort seen in heroic rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, such as Raoul Wallenberg, or moral visionaries such as Gandhi or Martin Luther King?

As far as I know, the question has not been systematically studied (although situationists might predict weak relationships among moral traits in general). Indeed, it's a somewhat daunting prospect, empirically. Although measuring small things the return of library books is easy, it's hard to get an accurate measure of broader moral life. People may have views about the daily character of King and Gandhi, but such views are almost inevitably distorted by politics, or by idolatry, or by the pleasure of bringing down a hero, so that it's hard to know what to make of them.

The issue troubles me particularly because of my interest in the moral behavior of ethics professors. Suppose I find (as it's generally looking so far) that on a number of small measures such as the failure to return library books, contribution to charities supporting needy students, etc., that ethicists look no better than the rest of us. How much can I draw from that? Are such little things simply too little to indicate anything of moral importance? (Or maybe, I wonder, is the moral life mostly composed of an accumulation of such little things...?)