"Ethicists' Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences" (Schwitzgebel, Rust, Huang, Moore, and Coates)

is now online here at Philosophical Psychology. If you want to see it and you're stuck behind a pay wall, feel free either to email me for a free copy or download the penultimate draft from my website.

Abstract:

If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (vs. remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (vs. attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (vs. leaving one’s seat tidy). By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear, generally speaking, to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions. However, audiences in environmental ethics sessions did appear to leave behind less trash.