Are Ethicists Any More Likely to be Blood or Organ Donors Than Are Other Professors?

Short answer: no.  Not according to self-report, at least.

These results come from Josh Rust's and my survey of several hundred ethicists, non-ethicist philosophers, and professors in other departments. (Other survey results, and more about the methods, are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Before asking for any self-reports of behavior, we asked survey respondents to rate various behaviors on a nine-point scale from "very morally bad" through "morally neutral" to "very morally good". Among the behaviors were:

Not having on one’s driver’s license a statement or symbol indicating willingness to be an organ donor in the event of death,

and

Regularly donating blood.

In both cases, ethicists were the group most likely to praise or condemn the behavior (though the differences between ethicists and other philosophers were within statistical chance).  60% of ethicists rated not being an organ donor on the "morally bad" side of the scale, compared to 56% of non-ethicist philosophers and 42% of non-philosophers (chi-square, p = .001).  And 84% of ethicists rated regularly donating blood on the "morally good" side of the scale, compared to 80% of non-ethicist philosophers and 72% of non-philosophers (chi-square, p = .01).

In the second part of the questionnaire, we asked for self-report of various behaviors, including:

Please look at your driver’s license and indicate whether there is a statement or symbol indicating your willingness to be an organ donor in the event of death,

and

When was the last time you donated blood?

The groups' responses to these two questions were not statistically significantly different: 67% of ethicists, 64% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 69% of philosophers reported having an organ donor symbol or statement on their driver's license (chi-square, p = .75); and 13% of ethicists, 14% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 10% of non-philosophers reported donating blood in 2008 or 2009 (the survey was conducted in spring 2009; chi-square, p = .67).  A related question asking how frequently respondents donate blood also found no detectable difference among the groups.

These results fit into an overall pattern that Josh Rust and I have found: Professional ethicists appear to behave no better than do other professors.  Among our findings so far:

• Arbitrarily selected ethicists are rated as overall no morally better behaved by members of their own departments than are arbitrarily selected specialists in metaphysics and epistemology (Schwitzgebel and Rust, 2009).
• Ethicists, including specialists in political philosophy, are no more likely to vote than are other professors (though Political Science professors are more likely to vote than are other professors; Schwitzgebel and Rust, 2010).
• Ethics books, including relatively obscure books likely to be borrowed mostly by professors and advanced students in philosophy, are more likely to be missing from academic libraries than are other philosophy books (Schwitzgebel, 2009).
• Although ethics professors are much more likely than are other professors to say that eating the meat of mammals is morally bad, they are just about as likely to report having eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening meal (Splintered Mind post, May 22, 2009).
• Ethics professors appear to be no more likely to respond to undergraduate emails than are other professors (Splintered Mind post, June 16, 2009).
• Ethics professors were statistically marginally less likely to report staying in regular contact with their mothers (Splintered Mind post, August 31, 2010).
• Ethics professors did not appear to be any more honest, overall, in their questionnaire responses, to the extent that we were able to determine patterns of inaccurate or suspicious responding (Splintered Mind post, June 4, 2010).

Nor is it the case, for the normative questions we tested, that ethicists tend to have more permissive moral views.  If anything (as with organ donation), they tend to express more demanding moral views.

All this evidence, considered together, creates, I think, a substantial explanatory challenge for the approximately one-third of non-ethicist philosophers and approximately one-half of professional ethicists who -- in another of Josh's and my surveys -- expressed the view that on average ethicists behave a little morally better than do others from socially comparable groups.

We do have preliminary evidence, however, that environmental ethicists litter less.  Hopefully we can present that evidence soon.  (First, we have to be sure that we are done with data collection.)

The Morality of Ethics Professors: Survey

In an earlier post, The Problem of the Ethics Professors, I asked why ethics professors often behave so badly. What does this suggest about the connection between ethical reflection and moral behavior?

Of course, implicit in this question is the presumably empirically testable assumption that ethics professors do behave (at least as) badly as the rest of us. But how to test that assumption?

I can think of no better way than to ask people who know ethics professors. While asking people about their impressions invites, of course, a variety of problems, the altenatives -- actually trying to run a controlled study or a direct observational study (or looking at criminal records!) -- seem patently infeasible. And perhaps if people are asked in the right way, the answers they give will deserve some credit.

So I've designed a questionnaire. My thought is to set up a table at an APA meeting or two (if the APA will let me!) with a sign saying something like "take this brief questionnaire, get a brownie!"

Q's 1 and 2 of the questionnaire would be:

1. As best you can determine from your own experience, do professors specializing in ethics tend, on average, to behave morally better, worse, or about the same as philosophers not specializing in ethics? (Please circle one number below.)

[Here there'd be a likert scale of 1-7 from "substantially morally better" (1) through "about the same" (4) to "substantially morally worse" (7). I can't reproduce the actual look of scale here due to formatting constraints.]

2. As best you can determine from your own experience, do professors specializing in ethics tend, on average, to behave morally better, worse, or about the same as non-academics of similar social background? (Please circle one number below.)

[Here would be the same likert scale as above.]

I would then ask questions about academic rank, area of teaching/research focus, and whether they knew in advance the topic of the questionnaire or had discussed it with anyone.

Thoughts, reactions, and suggestions welcome! Is this lame and pointlessly irritating? What would you predict for the results?

Do Ethicists Steal More Books? More Data

I've finished collecting data relevant to the question of whether ethics books are more likely to be missing from libraries than non-ethics books in philosophy. You might think ethics books would vanish at a lower rate, if the people interested in them were influenced by the contents! (See this post for some earlier discussion.)

I was led to gather these data by what I call The Problem of the Ethics Professors -- the fact, or apparent fact, that ethics professors seem to behave no better than the rest of us. This is perhaps one small, imperfect way of assessing the presupposition behind that question. If I'm wrong, and ethicists really do behave better than the rest of us, perhaps this will reveal itself in their library habits?

It doesn't. For this analysis, I constructed a list of ethics books in philosophy and a comparison list of non-ethics books. The ethics list was derived from all the ethics books reviewed in Philosophical Review from 1990-2001 -- mostly technical work in philosophy principally of interest to advanced graduate students and professors -- combined with all the books originally published after 1959 that appear it at least five different bibliographies in the ethics entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (including political philosophy, legal philosophy, and history of ethics, but excluding philosophy of action and moral psychology). The comparison list was composed of about 1/3 of the non-ethics books from the same issues of Phil Review (randomly selected, and excluding philosophy of action, moral psychology, and philosophy of religion), combined with books appearing in at least five different SEP entries on philosophy of mind or language (excluding philosophy of action and moral psychology).

I then looked at the holdings of these books at the libraries in UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Michigan, and Texas, as well as all the COPAC libraries in Britian, which includes all the major university libraries. (I won't get into the principles of library selection.) A paid research assistant helped me with some of this!

I sorted the information into five categories: On shelf; checked out but not overdue; overdue one year or less; "missing" or more than one year overdue (which I will interpret as also missing); uninterpretable (e.g., "record unavailable").

Here are the uninterpreted numbers:
Ethics books:
Total holdings: 14,551
Total out or missing: 3,708
Total overdue or missing: 780
Total missing: 305

Non-ethics books:
Total holdings: 9,584
Total out or missing: 1,764
Total overdue or missing: 176
Total missing: 113

Obviously more ethics books are overdue and missing, but of course more are also held and checked out. The most interesting figures, I think, are these:

Overdue or missing, as a percentage of those off shelf:
Ethics: 21.0%
Non-ethics: 10.0%

Missing, as a percentage of those off shelf:
Ethics: 8.2%
Non-ethics: 6.4%

An ethics book is more than twice as likely to be overdue, given that it is off the shelf, and about 25% more likely to be missing!

The first difference is statistically significant at p < .001, the second at p = .02, using a simple one-proportion test (two-tailed, of course!).

Now obviously there are confounds. I'm trying to work on straightening those out, and I'll hopefully report more on them next week. I'd be interested to hear suggestions for further analyses.

Here are three worries I have:
(1.) Ethics books are more checked out than non-ethics books, and there is a correlation in the data between number checked out and percentage of those off shelf that are missing or overdue.
(2.) Older books are more likely to be missing than more recent books, and the weighted average age of the ethics books (weighted by number of checkouts) is about two years earlier than that of non-ethics books (1989 vs. 1991).
(3.) It might be those pesky law students! How will things look if I exclude philosophy of law texts or exclude results from law schools?

As far as I can tell from preliminary analysis, controlling for (2) or (3) slightly reduces the effect, but a statistically significant difference remains. Controlling for (1) seems to eliminate the second effect, but not the first.

Do Business Ethics Classes Make Students More Ethical? Students and Instructors Agree: They Do!

I'm inclined to think that university ethics classes typically have little effect on students' real-world moral behavior.

I base this skepticism partly on Joshua Rust's and my finding, across a wide variety of measures, that ethics professors generally don't behave much differently than other professors -- and if they don't behave differently, why would students? And I base it partly on my (now somewhat dated) review of business ethics and medical ethics instruction specifically, which finds shoddy research methods and inconsistent results suggestive of an underlying non-effect.[1]

On the other hand, part of the administrative justification of ethics classes -- especially medical ethics and business ethics -- appears to be the hope that students will eventually act more ethically as a result of having taken these courses. Administrators and instructors who aim at this result presumably expect that the classes are at least sometimes effective.

The issue, perhaps surprisingly, isn't very well studied. I parody only slightly when I say that the typical study on this topic asks students at the end of class "are you more ethical now?", and when they respond "yes" at rates greater than chance, the researcher concludes that the instruction was effective.

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Nina Strohminger and I thought we'd ask instructors and students what they thought about this. We wanted to know two things. First, do instructors and students think that business ethics instruction should aim at improving students morally? Second, do they think that business ethics classes do in fact tend to improve students morally?

Our respondents were 101 business ethics instructors at the 2018 Society for Business Ethics conference, plus students from three very different universities: 339 students from Penn (an Ivy League university with an elite business school), 173 students from UC Riverside (a large state university), and 81 students from Seattle University (a small-to-medium-sized Jesuit university, where Jessica Imanaka coordinated the distribution). Surveys were anonymous, pen and paper. Students completed their surveys on the spot near the beginning of the first day of instruction in business ethics courses.

Using a five-point scale from "not at all important" to "extremely important", Question 1 asked respondents to "rate the importance of the following goals that YOU PERSONALLY AIM to get [to have your students get] from your business ethics classes:

An intellectual appreciation of fundamental ethical principles

An understanding of what specific business practices are considered ethical and unethical, whether or not I [they] choose to comply with those practices

Tools for thinking in a more sophisticated way about ethical quandaries

Interesting readings and fun puzzle cases that feed my [their] intellectual curiosity

Practical knowledge that will help me be a more ethical business leader [them be more ethical business leaders] in the future

Satisfying my [their] degree requirements

Grades that will look good on my [their] transcripts

Brackets indicate changes for the instructors' version.

The target prompt was the fifth: Practical knowledge that will help them be more ethical business leaders in the future.

[students in a business ethics class]

Responses were near ceiling. 58% of students rated practical knowledge that will help them be more ethical business leaders as "extremely important" to them, the highest possible choice. The mean response was 4.44 on the 1-5 scale. This was the highest mean response among the seven possible goals. 40% of students rated it more highly than they rated "satisfying my degree requirements" and 48% rated it more highly than "grades that will look good on my transcript". Responses were similar for all three schools. If we accept these self-reports, gaining practical knowledge that will help them actually become more ethical is one of students' most important personal aims in taking business ethics classes.

Instructors' responses were similar: 58% said it was personally "extremely important" to them to have students gain practical knowledge that will help them be more ethical business leaders in the future. The mean response was 4.41 on the 1-5 scale.

Question 2 asked students and instructors to guess each other's goals (with the same seven possible goals). Students tended to think that professors would also very highly rate (mean 4.71) "practical knowledge that will help students be more ethical business leaders in the future". Professors tended to think that students would regard such knowledge as important (mean 4.09) but not as important as satisfying degree requirements (mean 4.42).

Question 3 asked respondents how likely they thought it was that "the average students gets the following things from their [your] business ethics classes". The same seven goals were presented, with a 1 - 5 response scale from "not at all likely" to "extremely likely".

Overall, both students and instructors expressed optimism: Both groups' mean response to this question was 3.84 on the 1-5 scale.

Based on this part of the questionnaire, it looks like students and instructors agree: It's important to them that their business ethics classes produce practical knowledge that helps students become more ethical business leaders, and they think that their business ethics classes do tend to have that effect.

On the second page of the questionnaire, we asked these questions directly.

Question 4: Do you think that, as a result of having taken [your] business ethics classes, [your] students on average will behave more ethically, less ethically, or about the same as if they had not taken a business ethics course?

Among instructors, 64% said more ethical, 35% said about the same, and 1% said less ethical. Among students, 54% said more ethical, 45% said about the same, and again only 1% said less ethical.

Question 5: To what extent do you agree that the central aim of business ethics instruction should be to make students more ethical? [1 - 5 scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree"]

Among instructors, 63% agreed or strongly agreed and only 19% disagreed or strongly disagreed. Among students, 67% agreed or strongly agreed and only 9% disagreed or strongly disagreed.

The results of these direct questions thus broadly fit with the results in terms of specific goals. Either way you ask, both business ethics students and business ethics instructors say that business ethics classes should and do make students more ethical.

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Many cautions and caveats apply. The results might be influenced by "socially desirable responding" -- respondents' tendency to express attitudes that they think will be socially approved (maybe especially if they think their instructors might be watching). Also, instructors attending a business ethics conference might not be representative of business ethics instructors as a whole -- maybe more gung-ho. Students and instructors might not know their own goals and values. They might be excessively optimistic about the transformative power of university instruction. Etc. I confess to having some doubts.

Nonetheless, I was struck by the apparent degree of consensus, among students and instructors, that business ethics classes should lead students to become more ethical, and by the majority opinion that they do indeed have that effect.

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Note:

[1] However, Peter Singer, Brad Cokelet, and I have also recently conducted a study that suggests that under certain conditions teaching the philosophical material on meat ethics can lead students to purchase less meat at campus dining locations.

Should Ethics Professors Be Held to Higher Ethical Standards in Their Personal Behavior?

I've been waffling about this for years (e.g., here and here). Today, I'll try out a multi-dimensional answer.

1. My first thought is that it would be unfair for us to hold ethics professors to higher standards of personal behavior because of their career choice. Ethics professors are hired based on their academic skills as philosophers -- their ability to interpret texts, evaluate arguments, and write and teach effectively about a topic of philosophical discourse. If we demand that they also behave according to higher ethical standards than other professors, we put an additional burden on them that they don't deserve and isn't written into their work contracts. They signed up to be scholars, not moral exemplars. (In this way, ethics professors differ from clergy, whose role is partly that of exemplar.)

2. Nonetheless, it might be reasonable for ethicists to hold themselves to higher moral standards. Consider my "cheeseburger ethicist" thought experiment. An ethicist reads Peter Singer on vegetarianism, considers the available counterarguments, and ultimately concludes that Singer is correct. Eating meat is seriously morally wrong, and we ought to stop. She publishes a couple of articles, and she teaches the arguments to her classes. But she just keeps eating meat at the same rate she always did, with no effort to change her ways. If challenged by a surprised student, maybe she defends herself with something like Thought 1 above: "I'm just paid to evaluate the arguments. Don't demand that I also live that way. I'm off duty!"

[Socrates: always on duty.]

There's something strange and disappointing, I think, about a response that depends on treating the study of ethics as just another job. Our cheeseburger ethicist knows a large range of literature, and she has given the matter extensive thought. If she insulates her philosophical thinking entirely from her personal behavior, she seems to be casting away a major resource for moral self-improvement. All of us, even if we don't aim to be saints, ought to take some advantage of the resources we have that can help us to be better people -- whether those resources are community, church, meditation, thoughtful reading, or the advice of friends we know to be wise. As I've imagined her, the cheeseburger ethicist shows a disconcerting lack of interest in becoming a better person.

We can run similar examples with political activism, charitable giving, environmentalism, sexual ethics, honesty, kindness, racism and sexism, etc. -- any issue with practical implications for one's life, to which an ethicist might give serious thought, leading to what she takes to be a discovery that she would be much morally better if she started doing X. Almost all ethicists have thought seriously about some issues with practical implications for their lives.

Combining 1 and 2. Despite the considerations of fairness raised in point 1, I think we can reasonably expect ethicists to shape and improve their personal behavior in a way that is informed by their professional ethical reasoning. This is not because ethicists have a special burden as exemplars but rather because it's reasonable to expect everyone to use the tools at their disposal toward moral self-improvement, at least to some moderate degree, or at least toward the avoidance of serious moral wrongdoing. We should similarly expect people who regularly attend religious services to try to use, rather than ignore, what they regard as the best moral insights of their religion. We should also expect secular non-ethicists to explore and improve their moral worldviews, in some way that suits their abilities and life circumstances, and apply some of the results.

3. My third thought is to be cautious with charges of hypocrisy. Part of the philosopher's job is to challenge widely held assumptions. This can mean embracing unusual or radical views, if that's where the arguments seem to lead. If we expect high consistency between a professional ethicist's espoused positions and her real-world choices, then we disincentivize highly demanding or self-sacrificial conclusions. But it seems, epistemically, like a good thing if professional ethicists have the liberty to consider, on their argumentative merits alone, the strength of the arguments for highly demanding ethical conclusions (e.g., the relatively wealthy should give most of their money to charity, or if you are attacked you should "turn the other cheek") alongside the arguments for much less demanding ethical conclusions (e.g., there's no obligation to give to charity, revenge against wrongdoing is just fine). If our ethicist knows that as soon as she reaches a demanding moral conclusion she risks charges of hypocrisy, then our ethicist might understandably be tempted to draw the more lenient conclusion instead. If we demand ethicists to live according to the norms they endorse, we effectively pressure them to favor lenient moral systems compatible with their existing lifestyles.

(ETA: Based on personal experience, and my sense of the sociology of the field, and one empirical study, it does seem that professional reflection on ethical issues, in contemporary Anglophone academia, coincides with a tendency to embrace more stringent moral norms and to see our lives as permeated with moral choices.)

4. And yet there's a complementary epistemic cost to insulating one's philosophical positions too much from one's life. To gain insight into an ethical position, especially a demanding one, it helps to try to live that way. When Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. talk about peaceful resistance, we rightly expect them to have some real understanding, since they have tried to put it to work. Similarly for Christian compassion, Buddhist detachment, strict Kantian honesty, or even egoistic hedonism: We ought to expect people who have attempted to put these things into practice to have, on average, a richer understanding of the issues than those who have not. If an ethicist aspires to write and teach about a topic, it seems almost intellectually irresponsible for them not to try to gain direct personal experience if they can.

(ETA 2: Also, to understand vice, it's probably useful to try it out! Or better, to have lived through it in the past.)

Combining 1, 2, 3, and 4. I don't think all of this fits neatly together. The four considerations are to some extent competing. Should we hold ethics professors to higher ethical standards? Should we expect them to live according to the moral opinions they espouse? Neither "yes" nor "no" does justice to the complexity of the issue.

At least, that's where I'm stuck today. I guess "multi-dimensional" is a polite word for "still confused and waffling".

[image source]

Does Studying Philosophy Change Your Real-World Behavior: Schwitzgebel vs. Schwitzgebel?

In a coincidence of timing, two seemingly contradictory pieces of work by me are both being released today.

One is an interview of me by Ray Briggs and Josh Landy at Philosophy Talk on "the ethical jerk". The interview focuses on my work on the moral behavior of ethics professors, in which (mostly in collaboration with Josh Rust), I find over and over again that professional ethicists do not behave much differently from socially similar comparison groups (such as other professors of philosophy and professors in departments other than philosophy). In particular, Josh and I found that despite ethicists being much more likely than other professors to say that it's bad to each the meat of mammals such as beef and pork, ethicists did not detectably differ from other professors in their self-reports about whether they ate the meat of a mammal at their previous evening meal. (However, see Schoenegger and Wagner's different results here, and my discussion here.)

The second is an empirical paper, collaborative with Brad Cokelet and Peter Singer. From the abstract:

We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy article on their assigned topic and optionally viewed a related video, then met with teaching assistants for 50-minute group discussion sections. They expressed their opinions about meat ethics and charitable giving in a follow-up questionnaire (1032 respondents after exclusions). We obtained 13,642 food purchase receipts from campus restaurants for 495 of the students, before and after the intervention. Purchase of meat products declined in the experimental group (52% of purchases of at least $4.99 contained meat before the intervention, compared to 45% after) but remained the same in the control group (52% both before and after). Ethical opinion also differed, with 43% of students in the experimental group agreeing that eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical compared to 29% in the control group.

If you feel some tension between these two perspectives, I do too. Does studying philosophical arguments for vegetarianism change people's behavior or not? No, you might think, based on the ethics professors results. Yes, you might think, based on the students' results.

Cokelet, Singer, and I address this apparent conflict near the end of the article:

These data can be reconciled with Schwitzgebel and Rust's (2014) noneffects in at least two ways. As Schwitzgebel (2019a) notes, to the extent ethicists' moral behavior is guided by social conformity with non-ethicist peers, ethicists would not be expected to behave differently than their non-ethicists peers, even as their philosophical expertise grows and their opinions change. In contrast, students' opinions about peer behavior might change considerably as a result of ethics instruction, with behavior following suit. Alternatively but not incompatibly, Nahmias (2012) has suggested that Schwitzgebel's null results for ethicists may be compatible with moral behavioral change among philosophy students if professors tend to be settled in their ways, having already undergone, as undergraduates, all the moral change that exposure to philosophy is likely to inspire.

Even these explanations might be too simple, though. I am increasingly convinced that the philosophical ethical reflection changes behavior mainly when the reflection includes a personal, emotional, or narrative dimension -- as suggested by Lori Gruen on the issue of vegetarianism here and as suggested by my student Chris McVey's recent PhD dissertation (some preliminary results here, publishable writeup pending).

(P.S. I'm on vacation, so responses might be slower than usual.)

The Problem of the Ethics Professors

Here's a question to consider: Why don't ethics professors behave better than they do?

The vast majority of philosophers I've polled think that ethics professors, on average, behave just about as ethically as their peers in logic, metaphysics, etc., and others of their socio-economic class generally, or they behave considerably worse. What might explain this fact, if it is a fact? The only explanations I can think of are either empirically implausible or disturbing in one way or another.

Here are some of the most obvious possible explanations:

(1.) Ethical reflection does not lead to ethical behavior. This might be because: (1a.) Ethical reflection reveals that moral behavior is not particularly advisable, or (1b.) Ethical reflection is impotent to effect one's general patterns of responding morally to the world.

(2.) Moral philosophers do not engage in ethical reflection -- or at least not the kind of ethical reflection relevant to everyday moral living. (This might seem plausible, in a way, since so much of ethics and moral philosophy is so abstract -- and yet still one might think or expect or at least hope that ethicists would be especially primed to see the moral dimensions in the everyday decisions they face.)

(3.) Ethical reflection does indeed lead to moral improvement, and the reason ethicists don't behave better than others is that they start out morally worse than the rest of us. They are, perhaps, drawn to ethics because morality is, as it were, a problem area in their lives. (There's something appealing in this thought -- and it harmonizes with the old joke that in psychology the crazy ones go into clinical psychology, the socially awkward ones into social psychology, etc., but really -- do you think we'll find patterns of, say, juvenile deliquency in the early behavior of ethics professors? Somehow I doubt it.)

Is there an appealing and plausible way out of this problem?

Nazi Philosophers

Recently, I've done a fair bit of work on the moral behavior of ethics professors (mostly with Josh Rust). We consistently find that ethics professors behave no better than socially comparable non-ethicists. So far, the moral violations we've examined are mostly minor: stealing library books, not voting in public elections, neglecting student emails. One might argue that even if ethicists behave no better in such day-to-day ways, on grand issues of moral importance -- decisions that reflect one's overarching worldview, one's broad concern for humanity, one's general moral vision -- they show greater wisdom.

Enter the Nazis.

Nazism is an excellent test case of the grand-wisdom hypothesis for several reasons: For one thing, everyone now agrees that Nazism is extremely morally odious; for another, Germany had a robust philosophical tradition in the 1930s and excellent records are available on individual professors' participation in or resistance to the Nazi movement. So we can ask: Did a background in philosophical ethics serve as any kind of protection against the moral delusions of Nazism? Or were ethicists just as likely to be swept up in noxious German nationalism as were others of their social class? Did reading Kant on the importance of treating all people as "ends in themselves" (and the like) help philosophers better see the errors of Nazism or, instead, did philosophers tend to appropriate Kant for anti-Semitic and expansionist ends?

Heidegger's involvement with Nazism is famous and much discussed, but as I see him as a single data point. There were, of course, also German philosophers who opposed Nazism. My question is quantitative: Were philosophers any more likely than other academics to oppose Nazism -- or any less likely to be enthusiastic supporters -- than were other academics? I'm not aware of any careful, quantitative attempts to address this question (please do let me know if I'm missing something). It can't be an entirely straightforward bean count because dissent was dangerous and the pressures on philosophers were surely not the same as the pressures on academics in other departments -- probably the pressures were greater than on fields less obviously connected to political issues -- but we can at least start with a bean count.

There's a terrific resource on philosophers' involvement with Nazism: George Leaman's Heidegger im Kontext, which contains a complete list of all German philosophy professors from 1932 to 1945 and provides summary data on their involvement with or resistance to Nazism. I haven't yet found a similar resource for comparison groups of other professors, but Leaman's data are nonetheless interesting.

In Leaman's data set, I count 179 professors with "habilitation" in 1932 when the Nazis started to ascend to power (including Dozents and ausserordentlichers but not assistants). (Habilitation is an academic achievement after the Ph.D., without an equivalent in Britain or the U.S., with requirements roughly comparable to gaining tenure in the U.S.) I haven't attempted to divide these professors, yet, into ethicists vs. non-ethicists, so the rest of this post will just look at philosophers as a group. Of these, 58 (32%) joined the Nazi Party, the SA, or the SS. Jarausch and Arminger (1989) estimate that the percentage of university faculty in the Nazi party was between 21% and 25%. Philosophers were thus not underrepresented in the Nazi party.

The tricky questions come after this first breakdown: To what extent did joining the party reflect enthusiasm for its goals vs. opportunism vs. a reluctant decision under pressure?

I think we can assume that membership in the SA or SS reflects either enthusiastic Nazism or an unusual degree of self-serving opportunism: Membership in these organizations reflected considerable Nazi involvement and was by no means required for continuation in a university position. Among philosophers with habilitation in 1932, two (1%) joined the SS and another 20 (11%) joined (or were already in) the SA (one philosopher joined both), percentages approximately similar to the overall academic participation in those organizations. However, I suspect this estimate substantially undercounts enthusiastic Nazis, since a number of philosophers (including briefly Heidegger) appear to have gone beyond mere membership to enthusiastic support through their writings. I haven't yet attempted to quantify this -- though one further possible measure is involvement with Alfred Rosenberg the notorious Nazi racial theorist. Combining the SA, SS, and Rosenberg associates yields a minimum of 30 philosophers (17%) on the far right side of Nazism, not even including those who received their university posts after the Nazis rose to power (and thus perhaps partly because of their Nazism).

What can we say about the philosophers who were not party members? Well, 22 (12% of the 179 habilitated philosophers) were Jewish. Another 52 (29%) were deprived of the right to teach, imprisoned, or otherwise severely penalized by the Nazis for Jewish family connections or political unreliability (often both). It's somewhat difficult to tease apart how many of this latter group took courageous stands vs. found themselves insufferable to the Nazis due to family connections or previous political commitments outside of their control. One way to look at the data are these: Among the 157 non-Jewish habilitated philosophy professors, 37% joined the Nazi party and 30% were severely penalized by the Nazis (this second number excludes 5 people who were Nazi party members and also severely penalized), leaving 33% as what we might call "coasters" -- those who neither joined the party nor incurred severe penalty. Most of these coasters had at least token Nazi affiliations, especially with the NSLB (the Nazi organization of teachers), but probably NSLB affiliation alone did not reflect much commitment to the Nazi cause.

Membership in the Nazi party would not reflect a commitment to Nazism (or, also problematic, an unusually strong opportunistic willingness to fake commitment to further one's career) if joining the Nazi party was necessary simply to getting along as a professor. The fact that about a third of professors could be "coasters" suggests that token gestures of Nazism, rather than actual Nazi party membership, were sufficient for getting along, as long as one did not actively protest or have Jewish affiliations. Nor were the coasters mostly old men on the verge of retirement (though there was a wave of retirements in 1933, the year the Nazis assumed power). If we include only the subset of 107 professors who were not Jewish, habilitated by 1932, and continuing to teach past 1940, we still find 30% coasters (28% if we exclude two emigrants).

Here's what I tentatively conclude from this evidence: Philosophy professors were not forced to join the Nazi party. However, a substantial proportion did so voluntarily, either out of enthusiasm or opportunistically for the sake of career advancement. A substantial minority, at least 19% of the non-Jews, occupied the far right of the Nazi party, as reflected by membership in the SS, SA, or association with Rosenberg. Regardless of how the data look for other academic disciplines, it seems unlikely that we will be able to conclude that philosophers tended to avoid Nazism. Nonetheless, given that 30% of non-Jewish philosophers were severely penalized by the Nazis (including one executed for resistance and two who died in concentration camps), it remains possible that philosophers are overrepresented among those who resisted or were ejected.

Yep, It Replicates! Students Eat Less Meat After Studying the Ethics of Factory Farming

In 2020, Brad Cokelet, Peter Singer, and I published a study finding that U.C. Riverside students eat less meat after studying ethical issues concerning meat.  Over 1000 students in large lower-division philosophy classes were assigned either a short article, a 50-minute discussion meeting, and an optional video on meat ethics (focused on factory farming) or similar materials on charitable giving.  We then looked at their food purchases at selected campus dining locations by examining anonymized purchase receipts.

Percentage of purchases containing meat, 2020 study:

Meat ethics condition: 28% before intervention vs. 25% after (p = .004)

Charitable giving control condition: 28% before vs. 29% after (p = .55)

Looking only at purchases of $4.99 or more (likelier to be full meal purchases, but also including expensive snack and drink purchases), the numbers declined from 52% to 45% in the meat ethics condition (p = .001) while staying steady at 52% in the control condition.  The estimated effect duration is several weeks to a few months.

It was a striking result!  Although the effect was small, I had expected no effect at all, partly because ethics professors don't appear to behave any differently than other groups of professors, including specifically on the issue of vegetarianism: Ethics professors in the U.S. are much more likely than other professors to say it's morally bad to eat meat while they self-report eating meat at about the same rate as other professors.  If professional ethicists don't behave any differently as a result of decades of exposure to philosophical ethics, why should we expect a brief intervention on students to have any effect?

I confess I was nervous about whether the effect was some sort of fluke, despite its statistical significance and the care with which we conducted the study.  Would it really replicate?

Yes, it does, as Brad, Peter, and I find in a new paper published last weekend.

Our new study differed from the 2020 study in a few important ways (explained below), but the main intervention was basically the same (a reading, a 50-minute discussion meeting, and an optional video), and the dependent measure was again meat purchases at U.C. Riverside campus dining locations.  We found:

Percentage of purchases containing meat, 2021 study:

Meat ethics condition: 30% before intervention vs. 23% after (p < .001)

Comparison group: 31% before vs. 30% after (p = .79)

Looking only at purchases of $4.99 or more, the numbers declined from 51% to 42% in the meat ethics condition (p = .001) while staying steady at 52% to 53% in the comparison group.

We also found that students (anonymously) expressed more agreement with the statement "Eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical" after the intervention than before (37% vs. 54% agreeing, p < .001).  Also, at the end of the discussion meeting, students were given the opportunity to anonymously pledge to avoid eating factory farmed meat for the next 24 hours.  Forty-three percent did so (in a student population estimated to be < 5% vegetarian) and 76% of those who pledged later reported having followed through on the pledge.

There are some differences between the 2020 and 2021 studies that strengthen our findings, beyond simple replication.

First, in the 2020 version students were invited to view the optional vegetarianism advocacy video at home, on their own time.  About half reported having watched at least some of it.  This raises the worry that the film might have been driving the effect.  Maybe the more traditional aspects of instruction (the reading and discussion) would have had no effect in isolation?  In the 2021 version, instead of using an opt-in structure we used an opt-out structure and we split participants into film and non-film conditions.  Half of the students were not told about the video (the non-film condition).  For the other half (the film condition), the video was shown at the beginning of their discussion meeting and students were invited to step outside for 11 minutes if they preferred not to watch it.  (Only one student out of 358 in this condition actually did so, though we discovered after the fact that some students "opted out" by closing their eyes during some of the footage.)  The purchases of students in both the film and the non-film conditions were then compared with the purchases of a group of other U.C. Riverside students who were not enrolled in the target courses.

Second, in the 2020 version all of the teaching assistants leading discussion were vegetarian.  This raises the concern that the teaching assistants might have been biased in their presentation or that the effect might have arisen through the social influence of teaching assistants, who might have implicitly or explicitly revealed their personal behavior.  In the 2021 version, the majority of instructors were not vegetarian.

So... was there a difference between the film and non-film conditions?  We could find no statistically detectable difference between conditions either in expressed attitude (among 573 respondents) or in pledge rate (among 751 attendees).  However, it is possible that the effect on actual meat purchase behavior was larger for students in the film condition:

Percentage of purchases containing meat, 2021 study, by condition:

Film condition: 30% before intervention vs. 21% after (p < .001)

Non-film condition: 30% before vs. 25% after (p = .047)

Was there a difference between students of the vegetarian versus non-vegetarian teaching assistants?  Here were found no statistically detectable difference in attitudes, pledge rates, or purchase behavior.  For example,

Percentage of purchases containing meat, 2021 study, by instructor attitude:

Vegetarian instructor: 30% before intervention vs. 23% after (p = .010)

Non-vegetarian instructor: 28% before vs. 23% after (p = .014)

Thus, it appears that neither showing the film nor having a vegetarian instructor is necessary for the observed effect.

I am also encouraged by seeing some similar results at Occidental College, where students also appeared to purchase less meat after a class meeting on the climate and health benefits of a vegetarian diet.

Full details of the study here (including links to the pre-registration and the raw data).

[image source]

The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors: Peer Opinion

At the Pacific Division meeting of the APA last week, Josh Rust and I offered passersby chocolate for completing questionnaires on the moral behavior of ethics professors.

We did a preliminary study of this at the Eastern APA. It also connects to a general interest I have in the relationship between moral reflection and moral behavior.

The survey came in two versions. The key questions in Version 1 were:

1. Take a moment to consider the various ethics professors you have known, both as colleagues and in the student-mentor relationship. As best you can determine from your own experience, do professors specializing in ethics tend, on average, to behave morally better, worse, or about the same as philosophers not specializing in ethics? (Please circle one number below.)

[The numbers then ran from 1 ("substantially morally better") to 4 ("about the same") to 7 ("substantially morally worse").]

and

2. [same question, but with the comparison group being "non-academics of similar social background"].

For comparison, identical questions were asked about "specialists in metaphysics and epistemology (including philosophy of mind)".

Version 2 was similar, but it asked the respondent to think about the particular ethicist in your department whose name comes next in alphabetical order after yours (looping around from Z to A if necessary). [Thanks to Jonathan Ichikawa for formulating this question, in a comment on this blog!] Again, for comparison, identical questions were asked about the metaphysics and epistemology specialist in your department. In both versions we collected demographic information about area of specialization, rank, type of institution, and graduate school.

277 people completed questionnaires out of about 1300 registered for the meeting. There were some cute stories, too. Among them: An eminent ethicist who shall remain nameless grabbed a chocolate from our table without completing the survey, then dashed off, saying "I'm being evil!" I don't think she realized that her behavior was actually pertinent to the content of the questionnaire!

Preliminary results: Ethicists think ethicists behave slightly better than philosophers specializing in other areas. Non-ethicists think they behave the same.

On Version 1, ethicists' mean response for the question comparing ethicists' behavior to the behavior of non-ethicists was 3.44 (where 4 is "about the same") (t-test vs. 4, p = .01). M&E specialists got a mean of 4.26. On Version 2, they rated an arbitrarily chosen ethicist in their department better, compared to others in their department, than an arbitrarily chosen M&E specialist (3.38 vs. 3.98) (p = .05)

On Version 1, non-ethicists rated ethicists at an even 4.00 vs. other philosophers. (About 1/3 said they behaved better, about 1/3 said they behaved worse.) On Version 2, non-ethicists rated both the ethicists and the M&E specialists at about 3.5 compared to others in their departments (showing a slight bias toward favoring individuals over groups, but no better opinion of ethicists overall).

More thoughts (including analysis by rank and institution type) to come soon!

The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors and the Role of the Philosopher

Philosophers rarely seem surprised or unsettled when I present my work on the morality of ethicists -- work suggesting that ethics professors behave no differently than other professors or any more in accord with their own moral opinions (e.g., here). Amusement is a more common reaction; so also is dismissal of the relevancy of such results to philosophy. Such reactions reveal something, perhaps, about the role philosophical moral reflection is widely assumed to have in academia and in individual ethicists' personal lives.

I think of Randy Cohen's farewell column as ethics columnist for the New York Times Magazine:

Writing the column has not made me even slightly more virtuous. And I didn't have to be.... I wasn't hired to personify virtue, to be a role model for kids, but to write about virtue in a way readers might find engaging. Consider sports writers: not 2 in 20 can hit the curveball, and why should they? They're meant to report on athletes, not be athletes. And that's the self-serving rationalization I'd have clung to had the cops hauled me off in handcuffs.

What spending my workday thinking about ethics did do was make me acutely aware of my own transgressions, of the times I fell short. It is deeply demoralizing.

(BTW, here's my initial reaction to Cohen's column.)

Josh Rust and I have found, for example, that although U.S.-based ethicists are much more likely than other professors to say it's bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals (60% say it is bad, vs. 45% of non-ethicist philosophers and only 19% of professors outside of philosophy), they are no less likely to report having eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening meal (37%, in our study, vs. 33% of non-ethicist philosophers and 45% of non-philosophers; details here and also in the previously linked paper). So we might consider the following scenario:

An ethicist philosopher considers whether it's morally permissible to eat the meat of factory-farmed mammals. She read Peter Singer. She reads objections and replies to Singer. She concludes that it is in fact morally bad to eat meat. She presents the material in her applied ethics class. Maybe she even writes on the issue. However, instead of changing her behavior to match her new moral opinions, she retains her old behavior. She teaches Singer's defense of vegetarianism, both outwardly and inwardly endorsing it, and then proceeds to the university cafeteria for a cheeseburger (perhaps feeling somewhat bad about doing so).

To the student who sees her in the cafeteria, our philosopher says: Singer's arguments are sound. It is morally wrong of me to eat this delicious cheeseburger. But my role as a philosopher is only to discuss philosophical issues, to present and evaluate philosophical views and arguments, not to live accordingly. Indeed, it would be unfair to expect me to live to higher moral standards just because I am an ethicist. I am paid to teach and write, like my colleagues in other fields; it would be an additional burden on me, not placed on them, to demand that I also live my life as a model. Furthermore, the demand that ethicists live as moral models would create distortive pressures on the field that might tend to lead us away from the moral truth. If I feel no inward or outward pressure to live according to my publicly espoused doctrines, then I am free to explore doctrines that demand high levels of self-sacrifice on an equal footing with more permissive doctrines. If instead I felt an obligation to live as I teach, I would be highly motivated to avoid concluding that wealthy people should give most of their money to charity or that I should never lie out of self-interest. The world is better served if the intellectual discourse of moral philosophy is undistorted by such pressures, that is, if ethicists are not expected to live out their moral opinions.

Such a view of the role of the philosopher is very different from the view of most ancient ethicists. Socrates, Confucius, and the Stoics sought to live according to the norms they espoused and invited others to judge their lives as an expression of their doctrines. It is an open and little-discussed question which is the better vision of the role of the philosopher.

Update 1:17 PM: A number of philosophers have expressed variants of this position to me over the years, but Helen De Cruz has reminded me of Regina Rini's articulate expression of some of these ideas in a comment on one of my earlier posts.]

Liberating On Liberty (from the Library)

Whew! I got some good linkage from my last post on ethicists stealing books, lifting this blog into the rarefied territory of almost thousand visitors a day -- peanuts for the likes of kottke.org and ordinary for Cognitive Daily -- but virtually a populist revolution for me.

The previous post about missing ethics books focused entirely on books first published in 1960 and later. I promised a separate analysis of classic, older texts. Here it is.

I looked at 10 classic (pre-1900) texts outside of ethics and 12 classic ethics texts. Selection criteria were a bit complicated; but please let me know, readers, if you think there are classic philosophy books I should have included on the lists below but did not include that are: (a.) influential, (b.) widely checked out, (c.) either clearly in ethics or clearly outside of ethics (not a blend), and (d.) generally published under separate cover (not as part of a general anthology including both ethics and nonethics texts by that author). The libraries I looked at were: UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, Princeton, Michigan, and Texas.

I looked at missing books both as a percentage of books off-shelf (where "off shelf" means either checked out or missing/lost) and as a percentage of holdings. Data were collected over winter break so as to minimize effects due to texts being assigned for a particular class. (I will collect comparison mid-term check-out data in a month or so.)

The results, then, by book:
(Author, Title, Missing as % of off shelf, Missing as % of holdings)
Ethics:
Aquinas....Summa Theologica.......8.1%....1.2%
Aristotle..Nichomachean Ethics...11.6%....1.9%
Bentham....Principles of Morals..14.3%....1.4%
Hobbes.....Leviathan.............22.4%....3.6%
Kant.......Groundwork............22.0%....2.2%
Kant.......Metaphysics of Morals.12.5%....1.7%
Kant.......Second Critique.......12.9%....1.7%
Locke......Treatise of Gov't.....19.3%....2.3%
Mill.......On Liberty............30.4%....5.0%
Mill.......Utilitarianism........27.6%....2.2%
Plato......Republic..............19.7%....2.9%
Rousseau...Social Contract.......30.0%....3.4%
Total Ethics.....................19.4%....2.6%

Non-Ethics:
Bacon......New Organon.............3.3%...0.6%
Berkeley...Principles.............11.1%...1.0%
Brentano...Psychology Empirical....0.0%...0.0%
Descartes..Meditations.............6.1%...0.7%
Frege......Grundlagen.............29.4%...6.9%
Frege......Geach & Black trans.....0.0%...0.0%
James......Principles of Psych.....6.3%...1.7%
Kant.......First Critique.........10.1%...1.8%
Kant.......Third Critique..........3.6%...0.9%
Locke......Essay Concerning Human.16.3%...1.6%
Total Non-Ethics..................8.7%....1.4%

In sum, the classic ethics texts were about twice as likely to be missing, overall, than the non-ethics texts (p < .001; one-proportion tests, two-tailed).

A few books were outliers, with substantially higher checkout numbers (Plato [132] and Aristotle [95]) or substantially lower (Berkeley [18], Brentano [6], Frege [17 and 7], Bentham [21], and Kant Metaphysics of Morals [16]). (Instability due to small sample size may explain the highly variable results on some of the latter books, esp. Frege.) Excluding these books left short lists of books with very comparable holdings and checkout rates, and large enough holdings and checkouts for some statistical stability. Ethics books were still about twice as likely to be missing. (The odds ratios actually went up a bit.)

Looking by book, excluding those books with fewer than 25 off shelf, almost all the books with above-average missing rates are ethics books; almost all those with below-average rates are non-ethics. This effect was so pronounced that even with such a small sample of books (6 non-ethics, 10 ethics), the difference in the mean percentage missing was statistically detectable (7.6% vs. 20.4%, p = .001; 1.2% vs. 2.6% p = .005).

P.S.: I should add that due to the different types of courses classic ethics and non-ethics books are typically assigned for, and due to the high -- and perhaps not comparable -- rates of checkout by undergraduates, I think these data are not as revealing as the data described in my earlier post, which focused on a larger set of more comparable books, likely to be checked out only by professors and advanced students.

Still More Data on the Theft of Ethics Books

Last month, I noted that ethics books are more likely to be stolen than non-ethics books in philosophy (looking at a large sample of recent ethics and non-ethics books from leading academic libraries). Missing books as a percentage of those off shelf were 8.7% for ethics, 6.9% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1. However, I noted three concerns about these data that required further analysis. I've now done the further analysis.

Here are the concerns:

(1.) Older books are more likely to be missing, and the ethics books were on average a couple years older than the non-ethics books.

I addressed this concern by eliminating from the sample all books published prior to 1985. This brought the average age of the books to the same year (1992.9 for ethics, 1992.7 for non-ethics). On these reduced data, the ethics books were still more likely to be missing: 7.7% to 5.7%, for an odds ratio of 1.35 to 1 (p = .015).

(2.) Ethics books are more likely to be checked out than non-ethics books in philosophy, and there is a tendency for books that are more checked out to have a higher percentage of the off-shelf books missing -- not just a higher percentage of the holdings missing, but a higher ratio of missing to off-shelf-but-not-missing.

I addressed this concern by further reducing the sample, eliminating all the "popular" ethics and non-ethics books -- those cited at least 5 times in the relevant entries of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (This left only fairly obscure books, presumably known to and borrowed by only professors and advanced students in the field.) This actually seems to have increased the effect: 8.5% to 5.7%, for an odds ratio of 1.48 to 1 (p = .026).

(3.) Finally, some people were concerned that maybe law students were driving the effect. Therefore, finally, I eliminated from analysis all "law" books, defined as those books for which at least 10% of the U.S. holdings were in the four law libraries included in the analysis (UCLA, Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell law). This had little effect: 8.3% to 5.7%, odds ratio 1.46 to 1 (p = .044). Also, the percentage of ethics books missing from the four US law libraries was only 7.0%, versus 8.3% for the US non-law libraries.

So it's not (supposedly vicious) law students. And it's not a bunch of (supposedly conscience-impaired) undergraduates stealing Rawls. The effect is large, and statistically significant, just looking at books likely to be borrowed only by professional ethicists and students with a serious scholarly concern with ethics.

Based on these data, it seems indeed that ethicists do steal more books!

Coming soon: I did a similar analysis of the thefts of "classic" texts in ethics and non-ethics -- e.g., Mill's On Liberty vs. Descartes' Meditations. Any predictions?

Steven Pinker: "Wow, How Awesome We Liberal Intellectuals Are!"

Okay, maybe that's not a direct quote.

There aren't many 700-page books I enjoy from beginning to end. Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature was one. Pinker's sweep is impressive, his ability to angle in on the same issue in many ways, his knack for extracting central points from a morass of scholarship, his engagingly accessible but rigorous prose. He is a gifted scholar; his mind scintillates.

But the book also has a comfortable, self-congratulatory tone that leaves me uneasy. By "self-congratulatory" I don't mean that Pinker congratulates himself personally, but rather that he congratulates us -- us Western, highly educated, cosmopolitan liberals, with our broad, sober, rational sense of the world, with our far-reaching sympathies, with our ability to take the long view and to keep human vice in check.

One manifestation of this self-congratulation is how impressed Pinker seems to be that it has been almost seventy years since Europeans and North Americans have killed each other in war by the tens of millions. He calls this "the Long Peace", and he concludes Chapter 5 with the thought that "perhaps, at last, we're learning" to avoid war (p. 294). Credit for the Long Peace, in Pinker's view, goes to liberalism, democracy, "gentle commerce", rising levels of education, and the increasingly open exchange of ideas. The same forces for good also get credit for the "Rights Revolutions": minority rights, women's rights, gay rights, children's rights, and animal rights. The printing press, books, iPhones, university education, hooray! I love all those things too. But it makes me nervous to find myself praising my era above all other eras, my political system above all other political systems, and my types of contribution to society (books, education, technology, communication) as the foundation of all this excellent progress. I wish I could detect any hint of self-suspicious nervousness in Pinker.

Pinker concludes his chapter on the "Better Angels" -- on the sources of all our new peace and rights -- in praise of reason as the best and most dependable source of our progress. He argues that in the past hundred years our ability to think abstractly has risen enormously due to formal schooling, as revealed by massive improvements in people's performance on IQ tests (the Flynn Effect). And this increase in abstract reasoning capacity has, in turn, resulted in immense moral improvement. Men can now imagine much better what it's like to be a woman; white people can imagine what it's like to be black; adults can imagine what it's like to be children. Also, we can reason much better from abstract principles such as "all people are created equal" without being blinded by parochial bunk about the special destiny of our nation, etc. Pinker writes:

The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered to be morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid. They would not stand up to intellectual scrutiny as being consistent with other values they claimed to hold, and they persisted only because the narrower intellectual spotlight of the day was not routinely shone on them (p. 658).

Parody: Come to Harvard, study with us, and become a moral genius!

Pinker describes empirical evidence for seven connections between abstract reasoning and moral virtue:

(1.) People with higher IQs commit fewer crimes.
(2.) People with higher IQs are more likely to cooperate in "Prisoner's Dilemma" experiments.
(3.) People with higher IQs are more likely to be liberals.
(4.) People with higher IQs are more likely to support economic policies, like free trade, that (Pinker argues) tend to lead to peace between nations.
(5.) Countries whose populace had higher IQs in the 1960s were found in one study to be more likely to have prosperity and democracy in the 1990s.
(6.) Another study found countries with better educated populations to be less likely to enter civil war.
(7.) Another study found that politicians who speak in more nuanced, complex manner are less likely to lead their countries into war.

All these connections are interesting, but I don't see a compelling case here for the power of formal schooling and intellectual thought about moral issues to transform moral morons into better angels. Although Pinker sometimes notes that the studies in question control for confounding factors like income, it is hard to control for all potential confounds, and there are certainly some confounds that leap to mind. Higher IQ, for example, in our society, seems to relate to greater opportunity to advance one's interests other than by criminal means. People with more schooling might also react differently to the situation of being brought into a laboratory and given a Prisoner's Dilemma game; for example, they might be inclined to game the situation at a higher level by cooperating mainly as a means of communicating their cooperative nature to the experimenter. (As a Prisoner's Dilemma subject in a Stanford experiment in the 1980s, I seem to remember choosing to cooperate for exactly this reason.) Etc.

My own research on the moral behavior of ethics professors might be interpreted as evidence against Pinker's thesis. If we're really interested in the effect of intellectual moral reflection on real-world moral behavior, the comparison of ethics professors versus non-ethicist philosophers and other professors is potentially revealing because ethicists and other groups of professors will be similar, overall, in amount of formal schooling and in overall ability at abstract thought. But plausibly, ethics professors will have, on average, devoted considerably more abstract reasoning to moral issues like charitable donation, vegetarianism, and the nature of interpersonal virtue, than non-ethicists will have. And I have consistently found that ethicists behave on average no morally better in such matters than do comparison groups of other professors.

Pinker seems to recognize the potential threat to his thesis from the not-especially-admirable behavior of intellectuals. Unfortunately, he offers no detailed response, saying only:

It's also important to note that [Pinker's hypothesis] is about the influence of rationality -- the level of abstract reasoning in society -- and not about the influence of intellectuals. Intellectuals, in the words of the writer Eric Hoffer, "cannot operate at room temperature." They are excited by daring opinions, clever theories, sweeping ideologies, and utopian visions of the kind that caused so much trouble during the 20th century. The kind of reason that expands moral sensibilities comes not from grand intellectual "systems" but from the exercise of logic, clarity, objectivity, and proportionality. These habits of mind are distributed unevenly across the population at any time, but the Flynn Effect lifts all boats, and so we might expect to see a tide of mini- and micro-enlightenments across elites and ordinary citizens alike.

I find it hard to see the merit in this response. It seems to be simultaneously a kind of self-flattery -- it's the kind of abstract moral and political reasoning that we intellectuals are so good at that generates moral enlightenment -- and a self-flattering moral excuse -- but don't expect us intellectuals to achieve much personal moral progress from our reasoning! We're too hot; we can't operate at room temperature! Take our intellectualist morals, please, our U.S. higher education, our professorial sense of right and wrong; treasure the moral improvements that flow from the formal schooling we provide; but don't expect us to exemplify the moral standards we impart to you.

No, no, it's not that bad. But I do wish that Pinker had worried more that it might be that bad.

Are Ethicists Any More Responsive to Undergraduate Emails Than Are Other Professors?

As regular readers know, Joshua Rust and I are interested in the moral behavior of ethics professors -- namely, do they behave any better? Pending the invention of the moralometer, though, it's a bit tricky to measure actual ethicists' actual moral behavior. Josh and I are forced to be a little creative. Here's one of our ideas: Assuming it's morally better, generally speaking, to respond to undergraduate emails than to ignore them, we can look at the rate at which ethicists respond to undergraduate emails, compared to other professors.

Thus inspired, Josh and I sent phony emails to several hundred professors -- emails designed to look like they came from an undergraduate. (Yes, we got human subjects ethics approval first; and yes we're aware that in spamming philosophers we are perhaps coming uncomfortably close to being a test case for our own thesis.) One of our emails asked about the professors' office hours; another expressed interest in declaring a major and asked for the name of the undergraduate advisor. Research question: Would ethicists be more likely than the other groups to respond to the emails?

No, it turns out. Here are the response rates:

Group: 1stemail , 2ndemail
Ethicists: 59.0% , 53.6%
Non-ethicist philosophers: 58.0% , 49.8%
Non-philosophers: 54.6% , 54.1%

This variation is well within chance (chi-squared, p = .51, .60).

Interesting enough, perhaps, as confirmation of our general finding (so far) that ethicists behave no better than non-ethicists. But this study had an additional twist: Many of these same professors also completed a survey we sent them -- a survey asking them, among other things, to rate the morality of "not consistently responding to student emails" on a nine point scale from "very morally bad" through "neutral" to "very morally good". We also asked: "About what percentage of student emails do you respond to?" followed by a blank for them to enter a percentage. Thus, we could compare normative attitude, self-described behavior, and actual behavior. (We hasten to add, here, that all identifying information was removed for analysis: We are not interested in the responses of particular individuals but only of groups.)

Our survey respondents said they nearly always responded to undergraduate emails. More than half estimated that they responded to 100% of undergraduate emails. More than 90% estimated that they responded to 90% or more of undergraduate emails. On the face of it, these appear to be gross overestimates -- I'm tempted even to say, in the aggregrate, borderline delusional (though I don't doubt that there are a few very conscientious email responders out there). When I reported these numbers recently in a talk to undergraduates, they laughed out loud. Ethicists reported neither more nor less responsiveness than did the other groups.

Those who reported responding to 100% of undergraduate emails were indeed somewhat more likely to respond to both emails: 47.2% versus 29.0% for those who claimed less than 100% responsiveness (chi square, p = .003).

Oddly, however, we found no relationship whatsoever between professors' expressed attitudes about the morality of consistently responding to undergraduate emails and their actual behavior. 83.0% of professors said it was morally bad not consistently to respond to undergraduate emails, but these professors were no more likely to respond to our emails than were the 17.0% who said it was morally okay not to respond. In fact, 65.5% of those who said it was okay not to respond consistently to undergraduate emails responded to our second email, compared to only 55.3% of those who said it was bad not to respond. (This was within the range of chance variation given the smallish numbers involved in this particular set of conditions, but the 95% confidence interval for the difference in response rates tops out at a 3.2% advantage for those who think it is morally bad not to respond -- so at best they're responding at practically the same rate.)

On none of these measures did ethicists appear to respond or behave any differently, or any more or less self-consistently, than the non-ethicist philosophers or the comparison group of non-philosophers.

Political Affiliations of American Philosophers, Political Scientists, and Other Academics

As regular readers will know, I've been working hard over the last year thinking of ways to get data on the moral behavior of ethics professors. As part of this project, I have looked at the public voting records of professors in several states (California, Florida, North Carolina, Washington State, and soon Minnesota), on the assumption that voting is a civic duty. If so, we can compare the rates at which ethicists and non-ethicists perform this duty. Soon I'll start posting some of my preliminary analyses.

First, however, I thought you might enjoy some data on the political affiliation of professors in California, Florida, and North Carolina. (These states make party affiliation publicly available information.) Although U.S. academics are generally reputed to be liberal and Democratic, systematic data are sparser than one might expect. Here's what I found.

Among philosophers (375 records total):

Democrat: 87.2%
Republican: 7.7%
Green: 2.7%
Independent: 1.3%
Libertarian: 0.8%
Peace & Freedom: 0.3%

Among political scientists (225 records total:)

Democrat: 82.7%
Republican: 12.4%
Green: 4.0%
Independent: 0.4%
Peace & Freedom: 0.4%

Among a comparison group drawn randomly from all other departments (179 records total):

Democrat: 75.4%
Republican: 22.9%
Independent: 1.1%
Green: 0.6%

By comparison, in California (from which the bulk of the data are drawn), the registration rates (excluding decline to state [19.4%]) are:

Democrat: 54.3%
Republican: 40.3%
Other: 5.3% [source]

Perhaps this accounts for my sense that if there's one thing that's a safe dinner conversation topic at philosophy conferences, it's bashing Republican Presidents.

Now I'm not sure 87.2% of professional philosophers would agree that there's good evidence the sun will rise tomorrow (well, that's a slight exaggeration, but we are an ornery and disputatious lot!), so why the virtual consensus about political party?

Conspiracy theories are out: There is no point in the job interview process, for example, when you would discover the political leanings of an applicant who was not applying in political philosophy. We ask about research, teaching, and that's about it. Even interviewing a political philosopher (a small minority of philosophers) it will not always be evident if the interviewee is "liberal" or "conservative", since her research will often be highly abstract or historical.

Self-interest also seems an insufficient explanation: Many professors are at private institutions, and few philosophy professors earn government grants, so even if Democrats are more supportive of funding for universities and research, many philosophy professors will at best profit very indirectly from that. Furthermore, it's not clear to me -- though I'm open to evidence on this -- that Democrats do serve professors' financial interests better than Republicans. For example, social services for the poor and keeping tuition low seem to have a higher priority among liberal Democrats in California than the salaries of professors.

Democrats might be tempted to flatter themselves with this explanation: Professors are smart and informed, and smart and informed people are rarely Republican. That would be interesting if it were true, and it's empirically explorable; but I suspect that in fact a better explanation has to do with the kind of values that lead one to go into academia and that an academic career reinforces -- though I find myself struggling now to discern exactly what those values are (tolerance of difference? more willingness to believe that knowledgeable people can direct society for the better? less respect for the pursuit of wealth as a career goal?).

Do Ethics Classes Influence Students' Moral Behavior?

Do university ethics classes actually have any practical effect on students' moral behavior outside of a university classroom or laboratory? Basically, we have no idea. I don't believe there is a single published empirical study on the issue. (If I'm wrong, let me know!)

We can make an empirically-informed best guess, though. Here's how: Look at the literature that examines the influence of ethics classes on students' self-reported moral attitudes. If there's a large effect of ethics instruction on student attitudes, maybe it's reasonable to conclude that there would be a moderate effect on student behavior. If there's a medium-sized effect on student attitudes, maybe conclude that there's a small effect on student behavior. Ethics classes work directly on students' attitudes and only indirectly on student behavior outside the classroom. Whatever effect business ethics courses have, for example, on students' tendency to verbally endorse mottoes like "it's bad to pad expense accounts", presumably the effect on behavior will be substantially smaller.

So what does the existing literature on ethics instruction suggest?

The research literature suggests that university ethics classes have at most a small, short-term effect on students' verbally espoused attitudes. This is so even when the researchers seem almost to be begging students to confirm their hypotheses -- for example, by giving before-and-after attitude questionnaires close to the topics of the classes the researchers are teaching (see, e.g., these two studies, among the most-cited recent empirical studies on ethics instruction).

Given the small and inconsistent short-term effects of ethics instruction on student attitudes, I suggest that in the absence of direct evidence it is reasonable to tentatively conclude that the long-term effects on students' attitudes are tiny to non-existent, that the short-term effect on students' practical behavior outside the university setting are tiny to non-existent, and that the long-term effects on practical behavior, if any, are smaller still.

Nor do I find it entirely clear that whatever tiny long-term effects the typical ethics class has on student behavior would be overall positive. Maybe for every positive change in one student's long-term conduct, there's a negative change in another student -- through associating intellectual ethical discourse with that horrible class in which she got a D, or through learning that one can always concoct some theory to rationalize attractive misconduct, or through reinforcing a pre-existing tendency to be a sophomoric know-it-all. Ethics professors don't seem to behave any better as a result of their familiarity with the university ethics curriculum; so why should students?

[For more on this topic, see my new full-length paper here.]

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!

Ethicists No More Likely Than Non-Ethicists to Pay Their Registration Fees at APA Meetings

As some of you will know, I have an abiding interest in the moral behavior of ethics professors. I've collected a variety of evidence suggesting that ethics professors behave on average no morally better than do professors not specializing in ethics (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here). Here's another study.

Until recently, the American Philosophical Association had more or less an honor system for paying meeting registration fees. There was no serious enforcement mechanism for ensuring that people who attended the meeting -- even people appearing on the program as chairs, speakers, or commentators -- actually paid their registration fees. (Now, however, you can't get the full program with meeting room locations without having paid the fees.)

Registration fees are not exorbitant: Since at least the mid-2000s, pre-registration for APA members been $50-$60. (Fees are somewhat higher for non-members and for on-site registration. For students, pre-registration is $10 and on-site registration is $15.) According to the APA, these fees don't fully cover the costs of hosting the meetings, with the difference subsidized from other sources of revenue. Barring exceptional circumstances, people attending the meeting plausibly have an obligation to pay their registration fees. This might be especially true for speakers and commentators, since the APA has given them a podium to promulgate their ideas.

From personal experience, I believe that almost everyone appearing on the APA program attends the meeting (maybe 95%). What I've done, then, is this: I have compared published lists of Pacific APA program participants from 2006-2008 with lists of people who paid their registration fees at those meetings -- data kindly provided by the APA with the permission of the Pacific Division. (The Pacific Division meeting is the best choice for several reasons, and both of the recent Secretary-Treasurers, Anita Silvers and Dom Lopes have been generous in supporting my research.)

Let me emphasize one point before continuing: The data were provided to me with all names encrypted so that I could not determine the registration status of any particular individual. This was a condition of the Pacific Division's cooperation and of UC Riverside's review board approval. It is also very much my own preference. I am interested only in group trends.

To keep this post to manageable size, I've put further details about coding here.

Here, then, are my preliminary findings:

Overall, 76% of program participants paid their registration fees: 75% in 2006, 76% in 2007, and 77% in 2008. (The increasing trend is not statistically significant.)

74% of participants presenting ethics-related material (henceforth "ethicists": see the coding details) paid their registration fees, compared to 76% of non-ethicists, not a statistically significant difference (556/750 vs. 671/885, z = -0.8, p = .43, 95% CI for diff -6% to +3%).

Other predictors:

* People on the main program were more likely to have paid their fees than were people whose only participation was on the group program: 77% vs. 65% (p < .001).

* Gender did not appear to make a difference: 75% of men vs. 76% of women paid (p = .60).

* People whose primary participation was in a (generally submitted and blind refereed) colloquium session were more likely to have paid than people whose primary participation was in a (generally invited) non-colloquium session on the main program: 81% vs. 74% (p = .004).

* There was a trend, perhaps not statistically significant, for faculty at Leiter-ranked PhD-granting institutions to have been less likely to have paid registration fees than students at those same institutions: Leiter-ranked faculty 73% vs. people not at Leiter-ranked institutions (presumably mostly faculty) 75% vs. students at Leiter-ranked institutions 81% (chi-square p = .11; Leiter-ranked faculty vs. students, p = .03).

* There was a marginally significant trend for speakers and commentators to have been more likely to have paid their fees than people whose only role was chairing: 76% vs. 71% (p = .097).

Ethicists differed from non-ethicists in several dimensions.

* 33% of ethicists were women vs. 18% of non-ethicists (p < .001).

* 63% of participants whose only appearance was on the group program were ethicists vs. 42% of participants who appeared on the main program (p < .001).

* Looking only at the main program, 35% of participants whose highest level of participation was in a colloquium session were ethicists vs. 49% whose highest level of participation was in a non-colloquium session (p < .001). (I considered speaking as a higher level of participation than commenting and commenting as a higher level of participation than chairing.)

* Among faculty in Leiter-ranked departments, a smaller percentage were ethicists (38%) than among participants who were not Leiter-ranked faculty (49%, p < .001). (I've found similar results in another study too.)

I addressed these potential confounds in two ways.

First, I ran split analyses. For example, I looked only at main program participants to see if ethicists were more likely to have registered than were non-ethicists (they weren't: 77% vs. 77%, p = .90), and I did the same for participants who were only in group sessions (also no difference: 65% vs. 64%, p = .95). No split analysis revealed a significant difference between ethicists and non-ethicists.

Second, I ran logistic regressions, using the following dummy variables as predictors: ethicist, group program participant, colloquium participant, student at Leiter-ranked institution, chair. In one regression, those were the only predictors. In a second regression, each variable was crossed as an "interaction variable" with ethicist. No interaction variable was significant. In the non-interaction regression, colloquium role and main program participation were both positively predictive of having registered (p < .01) and participation only as chair was negatively predictive (p < .01). Being a student at a Leiter-ranked institution was not predictive (p = .18) and -- most importantly for my analysis -- being an ethicist was also not predictive (logistic beta = .04, p = .72), confirming the main result of the non-regression analysis.

[Thanks to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association for providing access to their data, anonymously encoded, on my request. However, this research was neither solicited by nor conducted on behalf of the APA or the Pacific Division.]

Update March 17, for those concerned about privacy: See the comments section for a bit more detail on the methods used to ensure that no one outside the APA was able to determine any individual's registration status.