Why Aren’t Ethicists More Ethical?

Eric Schwitzgebel, a philosopher at University of California, Riverside, and a prolific blogger, has stirred up some controversy by studying whether ethics professors are morally better than others. As you might imagine, this is not a straightforward task. How do you measure how moral someone is? Schwitzgebel looks at indicators that are common and easy to quantify, such as how often someone calls their mother, whether they return library books on time, and so on. So far he has found no evidence that ethics professors—people who study, teach, and write about ethics for a living—are any better than the average person. Other researchers have confirmed this finding.

This has bothered me ever since I first came across Schwitzgebel’s research back in 2010. The results don’t surprise me: I’ve always sensed that we philosophers, if we differ from others at all, are maybe a little worse than average—more petty, more arrogant, and maybe less forgiving than most. But I’m bothered by why that should be so. After all, doctors, who are experts on human health, are on average healthier than the rest of us. Their education and practice help them to make better health-related decisions and to avoid risky behaviors. Why shouldn’t the same be true of ethics professors with respect to their expertise?

The philosophers I’ve spoken to about Schwitzgebel’s work typically have two responses, each expressing skepticism about the idea of measuring morality. Some just deny that morality is the sort of thing that can be measured (What’s the moral analogue to blood pressure or the body-mass index?). Others allow that it can be measured, but we don’t know what to measure and there’s no consensus as to what that should be. (Consequences? Intentions? Character?) Unlike doctors—who mostly agree about what a healthy person is like—there’s no agreement among philosophers about what a good person is like.

Yet I don’t buy either response. As I said, Schwitzgebel’s findings ring true to me—while trying to measure morality by calls to Mom is rough and suggestive at best, I’m convinced it points to a genuine truth: Professional ethicists don’t seem to be made any better by their research. But it’s the truth of this claim—not how it is established—that bothers me, and it’s taken me a long time to find an answer. Recently, however, while preparing for yet another semester teaching ethics, an explanation dawned on me. There’s a kind of thinking that we do when we are trying to prove something, and then a kind of thinking we do when we are trying to do something or become a certain kind of person—when we are trying to forgive someone, or be more understanding, or become more confident in ourselves. Becoming a better person relies on thinking of the latter sort, whereas most work in professional ethics—even in practical ethics—is exclusive to the former.

This needs some explanation. If you review the table of contents of a typical ethics textbook, you’ll find section headings on topics such as abortion, torture, charity, meat eating, prostitution, organ markets, climate change, poverty, gun control, procreation, reproductive rights, and so forth. These topics fill the pages of ethics textbooks because they are also, by and large, the kind of topics professional ethicists work on and write about. And when professional ethicists are not writing on these topics directly, they are trying to figure out what it means to argue over them in the first place. (This is a field called ‘meta-ethics,’ which tries to answer questions like: what kind of evidence supports a moral claim? What are moral claims about anyway? Are the values expressed by moral claims objective, subjective, or something else?).

Yet being right about topics like abortion, prostitution, climate change, and so on, does not make you good even when you have all the right opinions and act on them perfectly. On the face of it that might seem like an odd claim: Surely it is good to be right about abortion, meat consumption, climate change, and procreation! That may be true, but it mostly misses the point.

For one thing, the difficult ethical issues discussed in textbooks typically pertain to one-off, rare, or extraordinary situations. Very few of us will seriously consider selling an organ, and basically none of us will face the choice of whether to kill or torture someone. Even decisions about procreation and abortion are made at most a few times in life, if at all. This means that professional ethicists working on these issues spend most of their time thinking about decisions they’ll rarely or never have to make.

Issues like climate change, vegetarianism, and poverty are different of course. We all make decisions each day that have an impact on these phenomena. But notice that these are mainly issues of public, not personal, concern. I mean this in two ways: first, they are public in the sense that it is not individual decisions per se that matter, but collective patterns of individual decisions over time—or at least that’s true for climate change, gun control, and poverty. Meat eating—and this gets to the second sense—is different since it is a matter of both collective and personal morality, but it is still a largely impersonal moral issue in the sense that the moral reasons to refrain from eating meat do not arise from the unique commitments and substance of a particular person’s life, but from principles that purport to hold true for anyone.

Many philosophers will reply that this is exactly what ethics is about—universal principles that apply to every person as such. But that’s the whole point of what I’ve come to realize: This assumption is wrong, and the irrelevance of a lot contemporary moral philosophy to one’s personal life is a direct result of that mistaken assumption. Ethical thinking that aims to be public and impersonal, and ethical thinking that arises from the substance and particularity of an individual’s real life, are not the same thing.

To see the difference, compare a personal and impersonal approach to the decision to procreate. Procreation is one of the hottest topics in ethics right now. The top journals seem to publish something on it nearly every issue. Most of this research examines questions such as whether it is morally permissible to create another human being, whether it is a harm to be born, whether children have a right to be loved, and whether it’s permissible to have a child when there is a high likelihood of it being born disabled. These are interesting and maybe even important questions, but they are all impersonal. They require no grounding in the specific circumstances of unique individual lives, and therefore don’t require one to think from the position of who one actually is.

Now consider the way an actual person thinks through whether to have a child. My wife and I had our first child almost five years ago and now have three. This didn’t just happen. We had to think—and continue to have to think—about why we wanted a family. Did we want a family only because many of our friends were having children around the same time? Was it because our own parents were hoping for grandchildren? Was it because it simply felt like the right time to move on to the next phase of life? Would it have mattered if it were for any of those reasons? Or did it have to be because we thought it was good—for us? For the child? For the world? Intrinsically?—to make a family?

When these questions emerge from the personal circumstances of your actual life, and you struggle with them from within those circumstances, the results of that thinking cannot but alter your attitudes and behavior. This is because thinking at this level requires thinking with your feelings, desires, motivations, values, and so on. Having a child radically reorients one’s life, and so the choice of whether to have a child naturally requires deep, personal thought about what matters in life. Answers to these questions will depend on your particular history, circumstances, and values. As my wife and I worked our way through this process, we had to put a lot of thought into how we should raise our children, what sort of values we should encourage, and what sort of priorities we should set for ourselves. We both grew up in religious households—should we raise our children in the same way? We had to think about questions such as: How often should we try to see grandparents who live out of state? Should we move for a school? Are family vacations worth spending a lot of money on, or should we save that money for their education?

We had to think a lot about ourselves as well. One of the hardest things to deal with as a parent is fatigue and frustration, which tend to bring out the worst in yourself. One of the main ethical struggles with being a parent is learning to navigate fatigue and frustration, and not allow them to fray your relations with your spouse, your children, or yourself. We had to learn to see new ways to value and manage our free time, our home, our friends, and each other.

These are all deeply ethical questions. They are not just about figuring out what you want, but about what is good and valuable in life. Yet because they allow no universal answers, some philosophers conclude that they are beyond the business of academic philosophy. But again, that is wrong. Some of the best philosophy is best not because of what it proves but because of how it models ways of thinking through the deepest problems in life. The ancient world embraced this kind of philosophy, and personally, I have found a lot of wisdom in philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Anthony Appiah, and Martin Heidegger who write in a personal mode, yet sustain decades of rich academic research.

In a recent article, Schwitzgebel confesses dismay over the moral efforts of his colleagues. He accuses them—and himself—of settling for moral mediocrity. But his idea of moral mediocrity is simply this: allowing personal interests and pleasures to reduce one’s compliance with impersonal moral principles. He thinks that if you’re not giving a lot to charity and eating vegan, you’re choosing to be morally mediocre. But this sort of accusation is only possible given a very thin idea of what it means to be good. After all, it is perfectly possible to be a strict vegan, donate liberally to charity, track one’s carbon footprint, and have all the right opinions about abortion, gun control, organ donation, and so on, yet be a morally horrible person. I conclude from this that being right on questions of impersonal ethics has little to do with being a good person.

I don’t think that ethicists today are morally mediocre. Instead they may reflect an ethical culture that has mostly lost sight about what being good is really about. Being vegan or donating a kidney lie at the remote perimeter of being a good person. Being good is mainly about things like showing compassion to a difficult colleague, finding affection for one’s spouse even when they let you down, knowing how to care less about what is less important, guarding against destructive anger, learning to forgive, and so on. It is about personal wisdom, something Schwitzgebel says we have moved beyond, but I think is more likely something we have forgotten.  

Michael J. Sigrist

Michael J. Sigrist taught philosophy at George Washington University for more than a decade. His work specializes in phenomenology, value theory, and personal identity. He is the co-editor, along with Roman Altshuler, ofTime and the Philosophy of Action(Routledge, 2016). He is now teaching at Bard High School Early College in Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife and three young children.