Eric Schwitzgebel on the Ethical Behaviour of Ethics Professors

Philosophy Bites

Nigel Warburton

Education, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2013

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You might expect people who specialize in moral philosophy to behave better than other people. Eric Schwitzgebel has done some empirical investigation of whether this is the case, and it doesn't seem to be. What does that show about ethics? Philosophy Bites investigates.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.
0:07.0	If you enjoy Philosophy Bites please support us.
0:10.0	We are currently unfunded and all donations would be gratefully received.
0:14.0	For details go to W.W. philosophy bites.com.
0:19.0	Would you expect professors of moral philosophy to be more ethical than other people.
0:23.2	If it turned out that they didn't behave any better, should that worry us?
0:27.2	Would it open them up to the charge of hypocrisy?
0:30.2	The best man to answer these questions is Eric Switzgabel from UC Riverside.
0:35.0	Eric Schritz Gable, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
0:38.0	Thanks for having me.
0:40.0	The topic we're going to focus on is the ethical behavior of ethics professors.
0:46.0	Now it seems quite reasonable up front to think that people who study ethics or on the whole
0:51.6	to behave reasonably ethically?
0:54.0	Yeah I guess you'd think that. I guess that's what we were attempting to discover.
1:00.0	So when you say discover this sort of implies that you're doing research you're doing some kind of empirical research.
1:06.0	Yeah, that's right. Most of this is collaborative with other people, especially Josh Rust.
1:10.0	We've been looking empirically at how ethicists actually behave.
1:14.0	How do you do that?
1:16.0	Do you put a camera on them?
1:18.0	No, no cameras, but we've done a variety of different ways of looking at it.
1:21.0	We have some self-report measures where we've
1:24.4	sent a survey out to a variety of ethicists and non-ethicist philosophers and
	...

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