The moral behavior of ethics professors: Relationships among self-reported behavior, expressed normative attitude, and directly observed behavior

Eric Schwitzgebel & Joshua Rust
Philosophical Psychology
DOI:10.1080/09515089.2012.727135

Abstract

Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues, we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with the self-reports. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation. We discuss implications for several models of the relationship between philosophical reflection and real-world moral behavior.

The article is here, hiding behind a paywall.

Is income inequality 'morally wrong'?

By John Sutter
CNN
Originally posted July 25, 2013

Here are some excerpts:

So is extreme inequality amoral?

To think this through, I called up four smart people -- Nigel Warburton, a freelance philosopher and writer, and host of the (wonderful) Philosophy Bites podcast; Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Wealth and Justice"; Thomas Pogge, director of the Global Justice Program at Yale; and Kentaro Toyama, researcher at the University of California at Berkeley.

(cut)

I'll end this list back on John Rawls, the philosopher whose 1971 book, "A Theory of Justice," is a must-read (or at least a must-become-familiar-with) for people interested in this topic. One of Rawls' theories is that inequality can be justified only when it benefits everyone in society, particularly those who are most poor and vulnerable.

The entire story is here.

Not robots: children's perspectives on authenticity, moral agency and stimulant drug treatments

By Ilina Singh
J Med Ethics 2013;39:359-366 doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100224

Abstract

In this article, I examine children's reported experiences with stimulant drug treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in light of bioethical arguments about the potential threats of psychotropic drugs to authenticity and moral agency. Drawing on a study that involved over 150 families in the USA and the UK, I show that children are able to report threats to authenticity, but that the majority of children are not concerned with such threats. On balance, children report that stimulants improve their capacity for moral agency, and they associate this capacity with an ability to meet normative expectations. I argue that although under certain conditions stimulant drug treatment may increase the risk of a threat to authenticity, there are ways to minimise this risk and to maximise the benefits of stimulant drug treatment. Medical professionals in particular should help children to flourish with stimulant drug treatments, in good and in bad conditions.

The entire article is here.

New Report Suggests 'Moral Realism' May Lead To Better Moral Behavior

Medical News Today
Originally published February 1, 2013

Getting people to think about morality as a matter of objective facts rather than subjective preferences may lead to improved moral behavior, Boston College researchers report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

In two experiments, one conducted in-person and the other online, participants were primed to consider a belief in either moral realism (the notion that morals are like facts) or moral antirealism (the belief that morals reflect people's preferences) during a solicitation for a charitable donation. In both experiments, those primed with moral realism pledged to give more money to the charity than those primed with antirealism or those not primed at all.

"There is significant debate about whether morals are processed more like objective facts, like mathematical truths, or more like subjective preferences similar to whether vanilla or chocolate tastes better," said lead researcher Liane Young, assistant professor of psychology at Boston College. "We wanted to explore the impact of these different meta-ethical views on actual behavior."

The entire story is here.

Moral realism as moral motivation: The impact of meta-ethics on everyday decision-making can be found here.

Guilt and Moral Character

Academic Minute

Inside Higher Ed

Originally published January 4, 2012

In today’s Academic Minute, Carnegie Mellon University's Taya Cohen analyzes why our moral nature may depend on our response to guilt. Cohen is an assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon. Find out more about her here.

Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty

Annual Review of Law and Social ScienceVol. 8: 85-104
Max H. Bazerman and Francesca Gino


What makes even good people cross ethical boundaries? Society demands that business and professional schools address ethics, but the results have been disappointing. This paper argues that a behavioral approach to ethics is essential because it leads to understanding and explaining moral and immoral behavior in systematic ways. The authors first define business ethics and provide an admittedly biased history of the attempts of professional schools to address ethics as a subject of both teaching and research. They next briefly summarize the emergence of the field of behavioral ethics over the last two decades, and turn to recent research findings in behavioral ethics that could provide helpful directions for a social science perspective to ethics. These new findings on both intentional and unintentional unethical behavior can inform new courses on ethics as well as new research investigations. Such new directions can meet the demands of society more effectively than past attempts of professional schools. They can also produce a meaningful and significant change in the behavior of both business school students and professionals. Key concepts include:

• Shifting the modes of thought can lead to profound differences in how we make ethical decisions. This has implications at the individual and at the societal level.
• Until recently, little empirical attention was given to how people actually behave when they face ethical dilemmas and decisions or to how their behavior can be improved.
• A behavioral ethics approach does not teach students how they should behave when facing ethical dilemmas, nor inform them about what philosophers or ethicists would recommend. Instead it sees an opportunity in helping students and professionals better understand their own behavior in the ethics domain, and compare it to how they would ideally like to behave.
• Behavioral ethics identifies levers at both the individual and the institutional level to change ethically questionable behaviors when individuals are acting in unethical ways that they would not endorse with greater reflection.
• Prior to the 1990s, it was rare for professional schools to have a significant focus on the area of ethics (or business ethics more specifically) in the courses offered to students. Courses that were taught used philosophical approaches or suggested that morality is a rather stable personality trait that individuals develop by going through differences phases of development.

Abstract

Early research and teaching on ethics focused on either a moral development perspective or philosophical approaches, and used a normative approach by focusing on the question of how people should act when resolving ethical dilemmas. In this paper, we briefly describe the traditional approach to ethics and then present a (biased) review on the behavioral approach to ethics. We define behavioral ethics as the study of systematic and predictable ways in which individuals make ethical decisions and judge the ethical decisions of others that are at odds with intuition and the benefits of the broader society. By focusing on a descriptive rather than a normative approach to ethics, behavioral ethics is better suited than traditional approaches to address the increasing demand from society for a deeper understanding of what causes even good people to cross ethical boundaries.

A version of the paper is here.

Why (Almost) All of Us Cheat and Steal

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely talks about why everyone's willing to cheat a little, why you'll steal a staple from work but not petty cash and whether punishments for cheating actually work

By Gary Belsky

Time Magazine - Business

Originally published June 18, 2012

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who teaches at Duke University, is known as one of the most original designers of experiments in social science. Not surprisingly, the best-selling author’s creativity is evident throughout his latest book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. A lively tour through the impulses that cause many of us to cheat, the book offers especially keen insights into the ways in which we cut corners while still thinking of ourselves as moral people. Here, in Ariely’s own words, are seven lessons you didn’t learn in school about dishonesty. (Interview edited and condensed by Gary Belsky.)

1. Most of us are 98-percenters.

“A student told me a story about a locksmith he met when he locked himself out of the house. This student was amazed at how easily the locksmith picked his lock, but the locksmith explained that locks were really there to keep honest people from stealing. His view was that 1% of people would never steal, another 1% would always try to steal, and the rest of us are honest as long as we’re not easily tempted. Locks remove temptation for most people. And that’s good, because in our research over many years, we’ve found that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest and almost everybody is at some point or another.”

The entire story is here.

Our moral motivations

Humans have evolved from being driven by self-interest to being team players who want their lives to count for something, argues University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

By Kirsten Weir
The Monitor on Psychology
June 2012, Vol 43, No. 6
Print version: page 24

In the midst of a superheated election, in which truth is hard to come by and personal attacks are commonplace, it's hard to imagine politics having much to do with morality. However, in his new book, "The Righteous Mind," positive psychology pioneer Jonathan Haidt, PhD, argues that even our divisive political system arose from a deep-seated human need to work toward a greater good.

In his search for the roots of morality, he explores our species' evolution from our individualistic primate ancestors to deeply cooperative human beings, and describes how religious and political institutions helped enable that transformation.

The Monitor spoke with Haidt about his research and how we might bring politics — and psychology — back to their moral roots.

The entire article is here.

The Ethical Dangers of Rational Decision Making

The Ethical Dangers of Rational Decision Making

Moral Psychology and Information Ethics

Moral Psychology and IE

Posted with permission from C.R. Crowell.