On Whether the Job of an Ethicist Is Only to Theorize about Morality, Not to Be Moral

Over several studies, I've found that professional ethicists tend to behave no better than non-ethicists. Ethicists sometimes react to my work by saying "My job is to theorize about ethics, not to live the moral life." What should we make of this response?

First: I agree about the formal job description.

Second: If the idea is that an ethicist's professionally espoused moral views both are and should be entirely isolated from her personal life, that seems an odd position to endorse. Taken to its natural conclusion, it seems to imply that ethicists advocating vegetarianism should be expected to consume cheeseburgers at the same rate as does everyone else. We should resist that conclusion. Both normatively and descriptively, we should expect Peter Singer to live at least approximately the vegetarianism he so passionately advocates. Analogously, if not quite as starkly, it seems reasonable to expect those Kantians who think that lying is particularly heinous to lie a bit less, on average, than do other people, and to expect Confucians who see filial duty as important to be a bit more attentive to their parents, and to expect consequentialists who emphasize the huge importance of donating to famine relief to donate a bit more to famine relief than do other people. Sainthood would be too much expect. But some movement to harmonize one's life and one's moral theories seems both normatively appropriate and descriptively likely, at least on the face of it.

Third: Ethicists seem, on average, to espouse somewhat more stringent moral views than do non-ethicists. For example, ethicists seem to be more likely than non-ethicists to say it's morally bad to eat meat, and on average they seem to think that people should donate more to charity than non-ethicists seem to think people should donate. (See here.) Unless there is some countervailing force, then, movements to harmonize normative attitude and real-world behavior ought to lead ethicists, on average, to regulate their moral behavior a bit more stringently than do non-ethicists. The problem is that this doesn't seem empirically to be the case. For example, although Josh Rust and I found 60% of ethicists to describe "regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef and pork" as morally bad, compared to 45% of other philosophers and only 19% of professors in other departments, when asked if they had eaten meat at their previous evening meal, we found no statistically significant difference among the three groups.

Fourth: So we might consider some countervailing forces. One possibility is that there's some kind of "moral licensing" effect. Suppose, for example, that a consequentialist donates a wad to charity. Maybe then she feels free to behave worse in other ways than she otherwise would have. Suppose a Kantian remains rigorously honest at some substantial cost to his welfare. Maybe then he feels freer to be a jerk to his students. One depressing thought is that all this cancels out: Our efforts to live by our ethical principles exert sufficient psychic costs that we compensate by acting worse in other ways, only moving around the lump under the rug.

A very different possibility: Maybe those of us attracted to moral theorizing tend to be people with deficient moral emotional reactions, which we compensate for intellectually. Our moral reflection as ethicists does morally improve us, after all, relative to where we would be without that reflection -- but that improvement only brings us up to average.

Still another possibility: Ethicists are especially talented at coming up with superficially appealing rationalizations of immoral behavior, setting them free to engage in immoralities that others would resist. On average, the boost from harmonizing to stricter norms and the loss from toxic rationalization approximately cancel out.

There are other possibilities, too, interesting and empirically risky. We should explore such possibilities! But I don't think that such exploration is what ethicists have in mind when they say their job is only to theorize about morality, not to live it.

Fifth: I acknowledge that there is something a bit unfair, still, about holding ethicists to especially high standards because of their career choice. I don't really want to do that. In fact, I find something admirable in embracing and advocating stringent moral standards, even if one doesn't succeed in living up to those standards. Ultimately, most of the weight in evaluating people's moral character should rest on how they behave, not on how far they fall short of their own standards, which might be self-scathingly high or self-flatteringly low.

My aim is not to scold ethicists for failing to live up to their often high standards but rather to confront the issue of why there seems to be such a tenuous connection between philosophical moral reflection and real-world moral behavior. The dismissive "that's not my job" seems to me to be exactly the wrong spirit to bring to the issue.