New in Draft: "Walking the Walk"

Over almost a decade, starting in 2007, I conducted a series of empirical studies (mostly collaboratively with Joshua Rust) on the moral behavior of ethics professors. We consistently found that ethicists don't behave better than professors specializing in other areas of study.

What is the philosophical import of this empirical result? I'm not drawn to glib or simplistic interpretations, such as that studying ethics is useless, or motivationally ineffective, or that all of practical ethics is rationalization of what we would have done anyway. Nor do I think we should dismiss the empirical results as irrelevant to ethics, as though ethics were entirely an abstract matter of connecting logical principles and our personal behavior is irrelevant.

But I've struggled to find the right middle path between glib dismissal of the value of ethics and glib dismissal of the ethical relevance of the research.

I shared part of my thinking about this in my 2019 paper "Aiming for Moral Mediocrity", which argues that most people (including most ethicists) don't aim to be morally good by absolute standards; rather, they aim only to be about as morally good as their peers. Thus, an ethical discovery might not change your behavior at all, if your peers' behavior remains mostly the same. You keep calibrating toward the middle, only you now have a revised opinion about the moral quality of that middle.

I began thinking about the current paper, "Walking the Walk", in 2018. It has been through many redrafts and false starts. I have always felt it didn't quite work. Today's version is hopefully closer to working, and I'm finally comfortable circulating it. As always, comments welcome -- either by email, as comments on this post, or as comments to my links on social media.

Abstract: Ethicists who advocate moral principles without trying to live by them will generally have a deficient understanding of what they recommend, for two reasons. First, abstract mottos like "act on the maxim you can will to be a universal law", "maximize good consequences", or "be generous" lack specific practical content without an array of concrete examples to flesh them out. For broad principles that can be lived by, everyday choices are generally the best source of such examples. Paragraph-length thought experiments are impoverished in comparison. Second, even a principle with fairly specific practical content, such as "don't eat meat", is difficult to fully understand without living by it: A meat-eating professor who recommends vegetarianism will generally have only a thin grasp of the way of life they recommend. These limitations give us reason to discount the understanding of ethicists who don't attempt to live by their principles, even when their arguments are beautiful on the page.

Here: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Walk.htm