8 ms·

A study of ethicists finds they’re no more ethical than the rest of us

72 points by EndXA 8y ago

droithomme 8y ago
Thanks. There was a thread on HN yesterday about the benefits of a college education. There was a subthread arguing that without going to a formal college process of study of topics such as ethics and philosophy, a person could not hope to become a moral person, and therefore, the implication goes, college is not only necessary but fundamental to a moral society, and also obviously graduates are more moral and ethical than non-graduates. This argument that morality comes exposure to higher education and is thus an imperative for civilization can perhaps be considered a modernist successor to the argument that morality comes from exposure to one or another particular religion and is thus an imperative for civilization. Several people objected to these claims. This study you post is a very good formal rebuttal. In the best case scenario, where the person intentionally focuses on the study of ethics in college, it has no effect on personal moral/ethical advancement.
- deleted 8y ago
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- lawn 8y ago
  I've heard similar arguments but from a religious angle. That without religion there's no morality.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
  a formal college process of study of topics such as ethics and philosophy In the Soviet Union there was a mandatory college course in scientific communism. It was what it said on the box: studying of a scientific proof that communism is the next logical step of capitalism and the soon death of capitalism is inevitable. The amount of hypocrisy was unbelievable and many skeptics were made this way.
- loco5niner 8y ago
  In truth, the educated are more likely to be self-deceived (as well as being deceived by the system).
  - apocalypstyx 8y ago
    When I was young, I heard this from Christian fundamentalists. As an adult, I hear it from atheists. (Along with the phrase 'keep your mind open, but not so open your brains fall out', which both groups really seem to like.)
    - coldtea 8y ago
      Well, both groups are on to something. (Neither Christian -- too provincial --, nor atheist -- too smug --).
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    That isn't that meaningful without the overall rate of deception for all parties. If nobody else can deceive you who is left to deceive you but yourself? It would be like dealing with people immune to all diseases and aging and noting that they tend to die more often from violence - of course they would it is the only thing left to kill them! It doesn't imply that they are more violent.
- dpatrick86 8y ago
  That's awfully late in life to be developing a foundation for morality. It seems far more likely to be extremely influenced by early upbringing. More controversially, there may even be a genetic component too. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190225145632.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190225145632.h... We are still so early in the understanding of ourselves and, by extension, society.
- mcguire 8y ago
  I disbelieve. I apparently missed the thread yesterday, but I doubt anyone seriously suggested that formal college classes were a requirement for moral behavior. If they did, they're fools. Higher education, philosophy, and ethics classes are beneficial because they put the student in an environment where they can be exposed to a variety of ideas, in an efficient manner. But, you cannot make a horse drink even if you lead them to the water, and they'll find something to drink some of the time even if you don't hold the harness.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Here is the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324670
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    "Higher education, philosophy, and ethics classes are beneficial because they put the student in an environment where they can be exposed to a variety of ideas, in an efficient manner." I think that the modern higher educational experience has done away with a "variety of ideas" in favor of "the single set of idea almost all academics politically align with".
- grawprog 8y ago
  The main lesson I learned in my mandatory ethics class was that formal ethics can be used to justify anything. I'm not sure if the teacher we had was just not very good or if ethics classes are just like this. But, we ended up arguing with her a lot, we were all in ecological restoration and a whole lot of the case study examples we were given were to show how various corporations were ethically correct in doing some pretty terrible things. As you can imagine, this is pretty much in direct opposition for everything we had been going to school for for the previous three years and we'd recently come back from a trip involving some wetlands, a copper mine and a golf course that had jaded us pretty heavily towards any kind of ethical reasoning to the actions of industry. There was one evening(we were forced to take this in the evening) she ended up screaming at us to shut the fuck up we just didn't understand and sat in her desk and didn't speak for the rest of the class. Ethics was by far my least favourite course in university.
  - Mirioron 8y ago
    I think the reason you can end up justifying anything you want in ethics is because you're trying to explain something that's undecidable. You need to pit different interests of people against one another and then find out which one is more important. It's like comparing apples and oranges - you can do it, but the result is going to be colored by the biases you think are important to compare. It's not going to be a fully objective comparison. The real world is a highly complex system. So complex in fact that the basic principles get lost in the noise of everything going on in the world.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >There was a subthread arguing that without going to a formal college process of study of topics such as ethics and philosophy, a person could not hope to become a moral person, and therefore, the implication goes, college is not only necessary but fundamental to a moral society, and also obviously graduates are more moral and ethical than non-graduates. Only someone born and raised quite removed from contact with most layers of humanity, and grown in some sterile environment (rich country clubs? flown from school to home and back? self-schooled? raised in some academic microcosm), would ever believe such BS.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  >This study you post is a very good formal rebuttal. In the best case scenario, where the person intentionally focuses on the study of ethics in college, it has no effect on personal moral/ethical advancement. The argument made seems to have been that college helped improve ethical behavior, not necessarily that specialization was necessary. As all participants in this study were academics, it is not disputing any part of the argument.
- usrusr 8y ago
  If college has an influence on being ethical, it won't be because of some formal ethics class. It will in first degree be because a degree and/or actual knowledge makes it easier to fulfil ambition in an ethical way (except when college overperforms at fostering ambition, well then it also has an influence on being ethical I guess) and in second degree because now people will be more likely to give a threshold level of default trust. Interestingly, being trusted makes both ethical and unethical behavior easier. It's certainly not fair at all.
winchling 8y ago
>The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. http://tao-in-you.com/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-chapter-1/ http://tao-in-you.com/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-chapter-1/ A lot of people say that fantasy fiction has helped them learn morality. A modern form of parables?
- krapp 8y ago
  Fairy tales, urban legends, myths and stories have been used to teach morality and ethics probably since humans were capable of abstract thought and language. Fantasy fiction is just a commercialized version of the same. To me there's little difference between finding moral lessons in the Beatitudes versus the Jedi Code, which some people do.
  - zeulhex 8y ago
    Steven Pinker also makes an interesting case that widespread reading of fiction has made people in general more empathetic as they put themselves into a greater variety of shoes.
    - apocalypstyx 8y ago
      This was claimed long before Pinker. But the general proposition brings with it one huge (moral? / ethical?) problem: at its heart its the argument that feeling sad for fictitious entities helps us to in some way interface better with non-fictitious entities. Terry Eagleton argues against the idea of considering fictitious people as in any way relating to real people, but I think he's wrong. The argument needs to be expanded and reversed. In reality, we regard all or almost all) other entities as fictitious. So in this way such a Humanities / Pinker argument but correct in the sense that we are as much inventing entities. However, then, a potential (moral? / ethical?) dilemma arises in that we will then expose this conceptualization on these entities to whatever degree is possible, giving us a panoply of common cultural practices such as --- but not limited to --- the attempted elimination of homosexuality, the confinement of women to the home, etc. So that which claims to liberate instead provides a superstructure for oppression.
salawat 8y ago
Not so fast! Any ethicist or philosopher who claims ethical or moral superiority in day to day conversation is a bit like the Buddha you cross paths with during your lifetime. You brutally murder him, and continue on the road to true enlightenment. What exposure to philosophical and ethical studies does for a person is to open their eyes to the fact that, guess what? There's more than one way to look at ethics, and none of them is necessarily any more correct than any of the others (Except whatever one appeals most to the student, which may change over time). It also equips you with a framework for beginning to articulate and come to grips with the unknown or inarticulable. It allows self-examination and can lead to fairly non-intuitive discoveries over one's lifetime. In short, it doesn't justify being a smug arse about anything, and you could live life without it. But honestly, where's the fun in that?
apocalypstyx 8y ago
Contemporary ethicists tendency to employ the terms ethics and morality interchangeably may be the most unethical and immoral act of the profession in general.
- effie 8y ago
  Could you elaborate? What do you think the difference is?
jorgesborges 8y ago
Morality isn't supposed to be an intellectual edifice from which experts expound rational arguments. It's a living practice. It's unsurprising to me that the people who devote their lives to making useful distinctions between words, or cooking up situations with babies and trains, aren't as moral as we might think. There's a reason Jesus was more influential than Socrates.
- hopler 8y ago
  Jesus (unwittingly) had armies killing and subjugating people in his name to spread his influence, and promising impossible rewards. Jesus isn't popular because people lived his practice.
  - jorgesborges 8y ago
    I'm admittedly not an expert in this area but my point is that Jesus didn't write anything down or intellectualize his teaching: he led by example. That was the foundation of his influence. The subsequent centuries of writing and hermeneutics over his life and teaching is another matter entirely.
- aitchnyu 8y ago
  Cato the Elder was very pleased when a philosopher gave a moving speech in favour of an ethical life. He was later shocked when he listened to another speech where he argued the opposite. He used his power as Censor to exile him. Source: The Daily Stoic, a witty book with anecdotes.
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amelius 8y ago
Could they be worse? The abuse in certain religious circles comes to mind.
- ars 8y ago
  Rate in religious circles is not higher then in the general population. The issues are about coverup and things like that, but that happens in all organizations, it's not specific to religious groups.
RickJWagner 8y ago
Not surprising. Ethicists, preachers, politicians, software developers. We're all human, and all subject to human frailty.
Proven 8y ago
LOL. It's like with the government - people are greedy and corrupt so we have to elect greedy and corrupt people to keep things under control.
paultopia 8y ago
This is consistent with a few previous studies along the same lines, but also shouldn't be that surprising. Ethical knowledge or reasoning not only isn't sufficient for ethical behavior (weakness of will exists!), it might not even be necessary. It's easy to believe, e.g. with Hume (more or less) that we have a pretty good natural sense of right and wrong in day to day behavior. But this doesn't mean ethical philosophy is useless. We might have a pretty good innate sense of what we ought to do on a day-to-day basis as individuals, but there are lots more complex situations---in politics, in business, in science (bioethics, e.g.)---where our innate sense of right and wrong leads us to conflicting judgments or might mislead us altogether. Those situations are where we need professionals. Not in asking whether we ought to steal candy from babies or cheat on our spouses. (Bias/credibility check: credentialed political theorist, has been paid to help companies figure out ethical things.)
- Judgmentality 8y ago
  How do you get paid as a consultant for ethics? Sounds like a really interesting job and I'm curious how you found your way into this position.
  - paultopia 8y ago
    Not my main gig (which is professoring at the moment), but: sort of the same way one does any kind of consulting thing: know people at companies that have a problem that needs solving, and be known to have the relevant expertise!
- deleted 8y ago
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- crimsonalucard 8y ago
  Our intuition of right and wrong is the result of millions of years of evolution that helps the survivability of individuals and groups. This is the key criteria: survivability. Other than that, our intuition on right and wrong was never meant to be logical, internally consistent and most of the rules are arbitrary and situational at best. These moral drives we feel do not exist outside of the human experience. They are instincts created as a product of natural selection. I am motivated to save a drowning baby in the pool next to me but I can't care enough to donate a dime to save a starving baby in africa. We all would save the drowning baby when the opportunity arises yet most of us haven't donated a single dollar to Africa. Why? Because one situation is relevant to survivability of the local clan/tribe, the other is not. Saving the baby near me benefits my tribe while the baby in Africa is irrelevant to my survivability. Thus natural selection has only evolved a sense of panic when I see a dying baby with my eyes and not when I hear about one dying in africa. This contradiction in our moral drive offers evidence that morality is evolved and not logically consistent. Although we possess these moral drives, there is no evolutionary pressure that requires us to know why these drives exist or why they are inconsistent, and why they fail to solve more complex moral problems. Knowing why or how does not lend to our survivability that's why we evolved a moral drive without the correct reasoning to understand it. Hence humans are left with instinctual drives that influence our behaviors, but we are left to our own devices to figure everything out why they exist in the first place. The biggest mistake you can make as a human is to assume that your moral drive has origins that are beyond biological. Most of us assume this is the case, but from a logical standpoint... it is not. Our intuition of what is right and what is wrong is just an arbitrary set of illogical instinctual drives and it is completely pointless to make sense of these things in a consistent way other than to know that the drives are arbitrary rules that increase survivability. Ethics represents our attempt to codify these arbitrary drives that are fundamentally inconsistent into a set of rules that are internally consistent. It's an utterly pointless and uninteresting endeavor. Ethics doesn't truly exist as a fundamental framework of the universe, we are making literally making it up. Because we are making it up, an ethicist is just spouting a bunch of made up nonsense. There isn't truly a moral right or a moral wrong in the universe and thus the philosophical study of ethics is pointless. The actual study of morality is a scientific endeavor into how evolutionary pressures of group dynamics and individual dynamics formulates behaviors that help with survivability. The field of evolutionary psychology is the closest thing to a legitimate study of ethics. An ethicists is one of those pointless "sciences" where humans in attempt to systemize everything they see jump to incorrect conclusions. Our old theory of humors in medical science or the chinese theory of Chi flows in our body and yin and yang are attempts to find systems where systems don't exist and are now relegated to junk science. The study of ethics is in the exact same camp.
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AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
There are multiple studies (https://qz.com/work/1170682/employees-at-socially-conscious-companies-are-more-likely-to-lie/ https://qz.com/work/1170682/employees-at-socially-conscious-... being an example) which point to existence of some kind of a "good deed pool" in humans. Once you've filled it by doing your share of good stuff for today, you can relax and become a true awful self. For a lot of people doing something good (giving to charity, writing a post condemning racism, saying a morning prayer) grants an indulgence to be nasty for the rest of the day.
burfog 8y ago
Missed the prime example: Eric Clanton He taught ethics at a couple colleges in California. He evidently thought that it would be ethical, in his properly educated professional opinion, to attempt to murder people with different political views. Over multiple days and locations, he bashed a half dozen people in the head with a heavy metal bicycle lock. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/26/eric-clanton-former-calif-professor-arrested-in-vi/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/26/eric-clanto...
- rudiv 8y ago
  The link says it was three people, during confrontations at/near a political tally. I don't know if you're speaking from further knowledge and the link is a preliminary report or something like that.
  - grandmczeb 8y ago
    It was seven people[1] over multiple separate incidents during protests at Berkeley. The most famous video of one of the assaults is this one[2]. [1] https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3-year-probation-deal-in-berkeley-rally-bike-lock-assault-case https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3... [2] https://youtu.be/9qKCl9NL1Cg https://youtu.be/9qKCl9NL1Cg
    - jeffdavis 8y ago
      Curious why that resulted in misdemeanor probation rather than felony with prison time.
      - burfog 8y ago
        His violent actions are aligned with the prevailing politics in that area. He is thus protected. The politics also go against a meritocracy, and this is extended even to the court system. The merits of the case were less important, while the values espoused were more important. IMHO this is corrupt and is a path toward being 3rd-world country.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
And physicists presumably aren't better at riding bicycles or playing basketball than non-physicists.
- mping 8y ago
  Doesn't really apply because you need a good physical condition to be better at sports (besides knowing how the sports work), an ethicist doesn't need anything to be more ethical.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    Ok, take more simply figuring out how balance yourself on a bicycle (rather than anything like being a professional cyclist). Studying physics isn't likely to make much difference in how long it takes you learn how to balance on a bike and not fall over.
otakucode 8y ago
The cobbler's children always go shoeless. This sort of observation is that old.
mcstafford 8y ago
I don't believe that any widespread group (as a whole) tends to avoid fallibility at an unusual rate. So psychologists aren't more sane, police more lawful, judges more just ... People are people.

72 points by EndXA 8y ago

Thanks. There was a thread on HN yesterday about the benefits of a college education. There was a subthread arguing that without going to a formal college process of study of topics such as ethics and philosophy, a person could not hope to become a moral person, and therefore, the implication goes, college is not only necessary but fundamental to a moral society, and also obviously graduates are more moral and ethical than non-graduates. This argument that morality comes exposure to higher education and is thus an imperative for civilization can perhaps be considered a modernist successor to the argument that morality comes from exposure to one or another particular religion and is thus an imperative for civilization. Several people objected to these claims. This study you post is a very good formal rebuttal. In the best case scenario, where the person intentionally focuses on the study of ethics in college, it has no effect on personal moral/ethical advancement.

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lawn 8y ago
I've heard similar arguments but from a religious angle. That without religion there's no morality.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
a formal college process of study of topics such as ethics and philosophy In the Soviet Union there was a mandatory college course in scientific communism. It was what it said on the box: studying of a scientific proof that communism is the next logical step of capitalism and the soon death of capitalism is inevitable. The amount of hypocrisy was unbelievable and many skeptics were made this way.
loco5niner 8y ago
In truth, the educated are more likely to be self-deceived (as well as being deceived by the system).
- apocalypstyx 8y ago
  When I was young, I heard this from Christian fundamentalists. As an adult, I hear it from atheists. (Along with the phrase 'keep your mind open, but not so open your brains fall out', which both groups really seem to like.)
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Well, both groups are on to something. (Neither Christian -- too provincial --, nor atheist -- too smug --).
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  That isn't that meaningful without the overall rate of deception for all parties. If nobody else can deceive you who is left to deceive you but yourself? It would be like dealing with people immune to all diseases and aging and noting that they tend to die more often from violence - of course they would it is the only thing left to kill them! It doesn't imply that they are more violent.
dpatrick86 8y ago
That's awfully late in life to be developing a foundation for morality. It seems far more likely to be extremely influenced by early upbringing. More controversially, there may even be a genetic component too. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190225145632.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190225145632.h... We are still so early in the understanding of ourselves and, by extension, society.
mcguire 8y ago
I disbelieve. I apparently missed the thread yesterday, but I doubt anyone seriously suggested that formal college classes were a requirement for moral behavior. If they did, they're fools. Higher education, philosophy, and ethics classes are beneficial because they put the student in an environment where they can be exposed to a variety of ideas, in an efficient manner. But, you cannot make a horse drink even if you lead them to the water, and they'll find something to drink some of the time even if you don't hold the harness.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Here is the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324670
- malvosenior 8y ago
  "Higher education, philosophy, and ethics classes are beneficial because they put the student in an environment where they can be exposed to a variety of ideas, in an efficient manner." I think that the modern higher educational experience has done away with a "variety of ideas" in favor of "the single set of idea almost all academics politically align with".
grawprog 8y ago
The main lesson I learned in my mandatory ethics class was that formal ethics can be used to justify anything. I'm not sure if the teacher we had was just not very good or if ethics classes are just like this. But, we ended up arguing with her a lot, we were all in ecological restoration and a whole lot of the case study examples we were given were to show how various corporations were ethically correct in doing some pretty terrible things. As you can imagine, this is pretty much in direct opposition for everything we had been going to school for for the previous three years and we'd recently come back from a trip involving some wetlands, a copper mine and a golf course that had jaded us pretty heavily towards any kind of ethical reasoning to the actions of industry. There was one evening(we were forced to take this in the evening) she ended up screaming at us to shut the fuck up we just didn't understand and sat in her desk and didn't speak for the rest of the class. Ethics was by far my least favourite course in university.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  I think the reason you can end up justifying anything you want in ethics is because you're trying to explain something that's undecidable. You need to pit different interests of people against one another and then find out which one is more important. It's like comparing apples and oranges - you can do it, but the result is going to be colored by the biases you think are important to compare. It's not going to be a fully objective comparison. The real world is a highly complex system. So complex in fact that the basic principles get lost in the noise of everything going on in the world.
coldtea 8y ago
>There was a subthread arguing that without going to a formal college process of study of topics such as ethics and philosophy, a person could not hope to become a moral person, and therefore, the implication goes, college is not only necessary but fundamental to a moral society, and also obviously graduates are more moral and ethical than non-graduates. Only someone born and raised quite removed from contact with most layers of humanity, and grown in some sterile environment (rich country clubs? flown from school to home and back? self-schooled? raised in some academic microcosm), would ever believe such BS.
boomboomsubban 8y ago
>This study you post is a very good formal rebuttal. In the best case scenario, where the person intentionally focuses on the study of ethics in college, it has no effect on personal moral/ethical advancement. The argument made seems to have been that college helped improve ethical behavior, not necessarily that specialization was necessary. As all participants in this study were academics, it is not disputing any part of the argument.
usrusr 8y ago
If college has an influence on being ethical, it won't be because of some formal ethics class. It will in first degree be because a degree and/or actual knowledge makes it easier to fulfil ambition in an ethical way (except when college overperforms at fostering ambition, well then it also has an influence on being ethical I guess) and in second degree because now people will be more likely to give a threshold level of default trust. Interestingly, being trusted makes both ethical and unethical behavior easier. It's certainly not fair at all.

winchling 8y ago

>The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. http://tao-in-you.com/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-chapter-1/ http://tao-in-you.com/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-chapter-1/ A lot of people say that fantasy fiction has helped them learn morality. A modern form of parables?

krapp 8y ago
Fairy tales, urban legends, myths and stories have been used to teach morality and ethics probably since humans were capable of abstract thought and language. Fantasy fiction is just a commercialized version of the same. To me there's little difference between finding moral lessons in the Beatitudes versus the Jedi Code, which some people do.
- zeulhex 8y ago
  Steven Pinker also makes an interesting case that widespread reading of fiction has made people in general more empathetic as they put themselves into a greater variety of shoes.
  - apocalypstyx 8y ago
    This was claimed long before Pinker. But the general proposition brings with it one huge (moral? / ethical?) problem: at its heart its the argument that feeling sad for fictitious entities helps us to in some way interface better with non-fictitious entities. Terry Eagleton argues against the idea of considering fictitious people as in any way relating to real people, but I think he's wrong. The argument needs to be expanded and reversed. In reality, we regard all or almost all) other entities as fictitious. So in this way such a Humanities / Pinker argument but correct in the sense that we are as much inventing entities. However, then, a potential (moral? / ethical?) dilemma arises in that we will then expose this conceptualization on these entities to whatever degree is possible, giving us a panoply of common cultural practices such as --- but not limited to --- the attempted elimination of homosexuality, the confinement of women to the home, etc. So that which claims to liberate instead provides a superstructure for oppression.

salawat 8y ago

Not so fast! Any ethicist or philosopher who claims ethical or moral superiority in day to day conversation is a bit like the Buddha you cross paths with during your lifetime. You brutally murder him, and continue on the road to true enlightenment. What exposure to philosophical and ethical studies does for a person is to open their eyes to the fact that, guess what? There's more than one way to look at ethics, and none of them is necessarily any more correct than any of the others (Except whatever one appeals most to the student, which may change over time). It also equips you with a framework for beginning to articulate and come to grips with the unknown or inarticulable. It allows self-examination and can lead to fairly non-intuitive discoveries over one's lifetime. In short, it doesn't justify being a smug arse about anything, and you could live life without it. But honestly, where's the fun in that?

apocalypstyx 8y ago

Contemporary ethicists tendency to employ the terms ethics and morality interchangeably may be the most unethical and immoral act of the profession in general.

effie 8y ago
Could you elaborate? What do you think the difference is?

jorgesborges 8y ago

Morality isn't supposed to be an intellectual edifice from which experts expound rational arguments. It's a living practice. It's unsurprising to me that the people who devote their lives to making useful distinctions between words, or cooking up situations with babies and trains, aren't as moral as we might think. There's a reason Jesus was more influential than Socrates.

hopler 8y ago
Jesus (unwittingly) had armies killing and subjugating people in his name to spread his influence, and promising impossible rewards. Jesus isn't popular because people lived his practice.
- jorgesborges 8y ago
  I'm admittedly not an expert in this area but my point is that Jesus didn't write anything down or intellectualize his teaching: he led by example. That was the foundation of his influence. The subsequent centuries of writing and hermeneutics over his life and teaching is another matter entirely.
aitchnyu 8y ago
Cato the Elder was very pleased when a philosopher gave a moving speech in favour of an ethical life. He was later shocked when he listened to another speech where he argued the opposite. He used his power as Censor to exile him. Source: The Daily Stoic, a witty book with anecdotes.

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amelius 8y ago

Could they be worse? The abuse in certain religious circles comes to mind.

ars 8y ago
Rate in religious circles is not higher then in the general population. The issues are about coverup and things like that, but that happens in all organizations, it's not specific to religious groups.

RickJWagner 8y ago

Not surprising. Ethicists, preachers, politicians, software developers. We're all human, and all subject to human frailty.

Proven 8y ago

LOL. It's like with the government - people are greedy and corrupt so we have to elect greedy and corrupt people to keep things under control.

paultopia 8y ago

This is consistent with a few previous studies along the same lines, but also shouldn't be that surprising. Ethical knowledge or reasoning not only isn't sufficient for ethical behavior (weakness of will exists!), it might not even be necessary. It's easy to believe, e.g. with Hume (more or less) that we have a pretty good natural sense of right and wrong in day to day behavior. But this doesn't mean ethical philosophy is useless. We might have a pretty good innate sense of what we ought to do on a day-to-day basis as individuals, but there are lots more complex situations---in politics, in business, in science (bioethics, e.g.)---where our innate sense of right and wrong leads us to conflicting judgments or might mislead us altogether. Those situations are where we need professionals. Not in asking whether we ought to steal candy from babies or cheat on our spouses. (Bias/credibility check: credentialed political theorist, has been paid to help companies figure out ethical things.)

Judgmentality 8y ago
How do you get paid as a consultant for ethics? Sounds like a really interesting job and I'm curious how you found your way into this position.
- paultopia 8y ago
  Not my main gig (which is professoring at the moment), but: sort of the same way one does any kind of consulting thing: know people at companies that have a problem that needs solving, and be known to have the relevant expertise!
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crimsonalucard 8y ago
Our intuition of right and wrong is the result of millions of years of evolution that helps the survivability of individuals and groups. This is the key criteria: survivability. Other than that, our intuition on right and wrong was never meant to be logical, internally consistent and most of the rules are arbitrary and situational at best. These moral drives we feel do not exist outside of the human experience. They are instincts created as a product of natural selection. I am motivated to save a drowning baby in the pool next to me but I can't care enough to donate a dime to save a starving baby in africa. We all would save the drowning baby when the opportunity arises yet most of us haven't donated a single dollar to Africa. Why? Because one situation is relevant to survivability of the local clan/tribe, the other is not. Saving the baby near me benefits my tribe while the baby in Africa is irrelevant to my survivability. Thus natural selection has only evolved a sense of panic when I see a dying baby with my eyes and not when I hear about one dying in africa. This contradiction in our moral drive offers evidence that morality is evolved and not logically consistent. Although we possess these moral drives, there is no evolutionary pressure that requires us to know why these drives exist or why they are inconsistent, and why they fail to solve more complex moral problems. Knowing why or how does not lend to our survivability that's why we evolved a moral drive without the correct reasoning to understand it. Hence humans are left with instinctual drives that influence our behaviors, but we are left to our own devices to figure everything out why they exist in the first place. The biggest mistake you can make as a human is to assume that your moral drive has origins that are beyond biological. Most of us assume this is the case, but from a logical standpoint... it is not. Our intuition of what is right and what is wrong is just an arbitrary set of illogical instinctual drives and it is completely pointless to make sense of these things in a consistent way other than to know that the drives are arbitrary rules that increase survivability. Ethics represents our attempt to codify these arbitrary drives that are fundamentally inconsistent into a set of rules that are internally consistent. It's an utterly pointless and uninteresting endeavor. Ethics doesn't truly exist as a fundamental framework of the universe, we are making literally making it up. Because we are making it up, an ethicist is just spouting a bunch of made up nonsense. There isn't truly a moral right or a moral wrong in the universe and thus the philosophical study of ethics is pointless. The actual study of morality is a scientific endeavor into how evolutionary pressures of group dynamics and individual dynamics formulates behaviors that help with survivability. The field of evolutionary psychology is the closest thing to a legitimate study of ethics. An ethicists is one of those pointless "sciences" where humans in attempt to systemize everything they see jump to incorrect conclusions. Our old theory of humors in medical science or the chinese theory of Chi flows in our body and yin and yang are attempts to find systems where systems don't exist and are now relegated to junk science. The study of ethics is in the exact same camp.

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AlexTWithBeard 8y ago

There are multiple studies (https://qz.com/work/1170682/employees-at-socially-conscious-companies-are-more-likely-to-lie/ https://qz.com/work/1170682/employees-at-socially-conscious-... being an example) which point to existence of some kind of a "good deed pool" in humans. Once you've filled it by doing your share of good stuff for today, you can relax and become a true awful self. For a lot of people doing something good (giving to charity, writing a post condemning racism, saying a morning prayer) grants an indulgence to be nasty for the rest of the day.

burfog 8y ago

Missed the prime example: Eric Clanton He taught ethics at a couple colleges in California. He evidently thought that it would be ethical, in his properly educated professional opinion, to attempt to murder people with different political views. Over multiple days and locations, he bashed a half dozen people in the head with a heavy metal bicycle lock. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/26/eric-clanton-former-calif-professor-arrested-in-vi/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/26/eric-clanto...

rudiv 8y ago
The link says it was three people, during confrontations at/near a political tally. I don't know if you're speaking from further knowledge and the link is a preliminary report or something like that.
- grandmczeb 8y ago
  It was seven people[1] over multiple separate incidents during protests at Berkeley. The most famous video of one of the assaults is this one[2]. [1] https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3-year-probation-deal-in-berkeley-rally-bike-lock-assault-case https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3... [2] https://youtu.be/9qKCl9NL1Cg https://youtu.be/9qKCl9NL1Cg
  - jeffdavis 8y ago
    Curious why that resulted in misdemeanor probation rather than felony with prison time.
    - burfog 8y ago
      His violent actions are aligned with the prevailing politics in that area. He is thus protected. The politics also go against a meritocracy, and this is extended even to the court system. The merits of the case were less important, while the values espoused were more important. IMHO this is corrupt and is a path toward being 3rd-world country.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

And physicists presumably aren't better at riding bicycles or playing basketball than non-physicists.

mping 8y ago
Doesn't really apply because you need a good physical condition to be better at sports (besides knowing how the sports work), an ethicist doesn't need anything to be more ethical.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Ok, take more simply figuring out how balance yourself on a bicycle (rather than anything like being a professional cyclist). Studying physics isn't likely to make much difference in how long it takes you learn how to balance on a bike and not fall over.

otakucode 8y ago

The cobbler's children always go shoeless. This sort of observation is that old.

mcstafford 8y ago

I don't believe that any widespread group (as a whole) tends to avoid fallibility at an unusual rate. So psychologists aren't more sane, police more lawful, judges more just ... People are people.