Does It Matter If Ethicists Walk the Walk?

The Question: What's Wrong with Scheler?

There's a story about Max Scheler, the famous early 20th century Catholic German ethicist. Scheler was known for his inspiring moral and religious reflections. He was also known for his horrible personal behavior, including multiple predatory sexual affairs with students, sufficiently serious that he was banned from teaching in Germany. When a distressed admirer asked about the apparent discrepancy, Scheler was reportedly untroubled, replying, "The sign that points to Boston doesn't have to go there."

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That seems like a disappointing answer! Of course it's disappointing when anyone behaves badly. But it seems especially bad when an ethical thinker goes astray. If a great chemist turns out to be a greedy embezzler, that doesn't appear to reflect much on the value of their chemical research. But when a great ethicist turns out to be a greedy embezzler, something deeper seems to have gone wrong. Or so you might think -- and so I do actually think -- though today I'm going to consider the opposite view. I'll consider reasons to favor what I'll call Schelerian separation between an ethicist's teaching or writing and their personal behavior.

Hypocrisy and the Cheeseburger Ethicist

A natural first thought is hypocrisy. Scheler was, perhaps, a hypocrite, surreptitiously violating moral standards that he publicly espoused -- posing through his writings as a person of great moral concern and integrity, while revealing through his actions that he was no such thing. To see that this isn't the core issue, consider the following case:

Cheeseburger Ethicist. Diane is a philosophy professor specializing in ethics. She regularly teaches Peter Singer's arguments for vegetarianism to her lower-division students. In class, she asserts that Singer's arguments are sound and that vegetarianism is morally required. She openly emphasizes, however, that she herself is not personally a vegetarian. Although in her judgment, vegetarianism is morally required, she chooses to eat meat. She affirms in no uncertain terms that vegetarianism is not ethically optional, then announces that after class she'll go to the campus cafeteria for a delicious cheeseburger.

Diane isn't a hypocrite, at least not straightforwardly so. We might imagine a version of Scheler, too, who was entirely open about his failure to abide by his own teachings, so that no reader would be misled.

Non-Overridingness Is Only Part of the Issue

There's a well-known debate about whether ethical norms are "overriding". If an action is ethically required, does that imply that it is required full stop, all things considered? Or can we sometimes reasonably say, "although ethics requires X, all things considered it's better not to do X"? We might imagine Diane concluding her lesson "-- and thus ethics requires that we stop eating meat. So much the worse for ethics! Let's all go enjoy some cheeseburgers!" We might imagine Scheler adding a preface: "if you want to be ethical and full of good religious spirit, this book gives you some excellent advice; but for myself, I'd rather laugh with the sinners."

Those are interesting cases to consider, but they're not my target cases. We can also imagine Diane and Scheler saying, apparently sincerely, all things considered, you and I should follow their ethical recommendations. We can imagine them holding, or seeming to hold, at least intellectually, that such-and-such really is the best thing to do overall, and yet simply not doing it themselves.

The Aim of Academic Ethics and Some Considerations Favoring Schelerian Separation

Scheler and Diane might defend themselves plausibly as follows: The job of an ethics professor is to evaluate ethical views and ethical arguments, producing research articles and educating students in the ideas of the discipline. In this respect, ethics is no different from other academic disciplines. Chemists, Shakespeare scholars, metphysicians -- what we expect is that they master an area of intellectual inquiry, teach it, contribute to it. We don't demand that they also live a certain way. Ethicists are supposed to be scholars, not saints.

Thus, ethicists succeed without qualification if they find sound arguments for interesting ethical conclusions, which they teach to their students and publish as research, engaging capably in this intellectual endeavor. How they live their lives matters to their conclusions as little as it matters how research chemists live their lives. We should judge Scheler's ethical writings by their merit as writings. His life needn't come into it. He can point the way to Boston while hightailing it to Philadephia.

On the other hand, Aristotle famously suggested that the aim of studying ethics "is not, as... in other inquiries, the attainment of theoretical knowledge" but "to become good" (4th c. BCE/1962, 1103b, p. 35). Many philosophers have agreed with Aristotle, for example, the ancient Stoics and Confucians (Hadot 1995; Ivanhoe 2000). We study ethics -- at least some of us do -- at least in part because we want to become better people.

Does this seem quaint and naive in a modern university context? Maybe. People can approach academic ethics with different aims. Some might be drawn primarily by the intellectual challenge. Others might mainly be interested in uncovering principles with which they can critique others.

Those who favor a primarily intellectualistic approach to ethics might even justifiably mistrust their academic ethical thinking -- sufficiently so that they intentionally quarantine it from everyday life. If common sense and tradition are a more reasonable guide to life than academic ethics, good policy might require not letting your perhaps weird and radical ethical conclusions change how you treat the people around you. Radical utilitarian consequentialist in the classroom, conventional friend and husband at home. Nihilistic anti-natalist in the journals, loving mother of three at home. Thank goodness.

If there's no expectation that ethicists live according to the norms they espouse, that also frees them to explore radical ideas which might be true but which might require great sacrifice or be hard to live by. If I accept Schelerian separation, I can conclude that property is theft or that it's unethical to enjoy any luxuries without thereby feeling that I have any special obligation to sacrifice my minivan or my children's college education fund. If my children's college fund really were at stake, I would be highly motivated to avoid the conclusion that I am ethically required to sacrifice it. That fact would likely bias my reasoning. If ethics is treated more like an intellectual game, divorced from my practical life, then I can follow the moves where they take me without worrying that I'll need to sacrifice anything at the end. A policy of Schelerian separation might then generate better academic discourse in which researchers are unafraid to follow their thinking to whatever radical conclusions it leads them.

Undergraduates are often curious whether Peter Singer personally lives as a vegan and personally donates almost all of his presumably large salary to charitable causes, as his ethical views require. But Singer's academic critics focus on his arguments, not his personal life. It would perhaps be a little strange if Singer were a double-bacon-cheeseburger-eating Maserati driver draped in gold and diamond bling; but from a purely argumentative perspective such personal habits seem irrelevant. The Singer Principle stands or falls on its own merits, regardless of how well or poorly Peter Singer himself embodies it.

So there's a case to be made for Schelerian separation -- the view that academic ethics and personal life are and should be entirely distinct matters, and in particular that if an ethicist does not live according to the norms they espouse in their academic work, that is irrelevant to the assessment of their work. I feel the pull of this idea. There's substantial truth in it, I suspect. However, in a future post I'll discuss why I think this is too simple. (Meanwhile, reader comments -- whether on this post, by email, or on linked social media -- are certainly welcome!)

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Follow-up post:

"One Reason to Walk the Walk: To Give Specific Content to Your Assertions" (Sep 8, 2023)