A study of ethicists finds they’re no more ethical than the rest of us | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.)

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.

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!

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.

So then, when you're in an evolutionarily unfamiliar situation where these instincts of yours don't work, does anything go? If you're a drone operator shooting missiles at people through a video game, and it's too abstracted for you to feel bad, is that perfectly hunky dory?

Or, I dunno, maybe you might want to work on figuring out a way to think about that kind of decision?

Read what I wrote carefully. I'm saying there is no way of figuring out a RIGHT way of making the decision because there is no real concept of RIGHT.

If I push an innocent fat man in front of freight train (the man is fat so he's heavy enough to stop the train dead, but he dies as a result) to stop the train from running over 20 people tied the tracks am I a murderer or a savior? Am I moral or am I immoral?

I'm saying the answer to the question is irrelevant because there is no RIGHT answer. Any answer a regular person or an ethicist comes up with is ultimately as made up and as arbitrary as the moral instincts that drive our behavior.

The hard questions have no right answer because the question is loaded to begin with. We never evolved a moral instinct on whether I should push the fat man or leave him be. This isn't physical law or logic. Morality is an arbitrary biological phenomena.

If the ethicist tells you, you should push the person to save 20 people, and another layman says you shouldn't murder an innocent, fat bystander, neither answer is more wrong or correct than the other. The difference here is that the ethicist spent years studying something that ultimately has no answer or meaning.

Thus the ultimate argument is, there is no need for a company to hire an ethicist for hard moral problems. Your layman judgment is as good as the ethicists because it's all made up anyway.

The only probable benefit an ethicist can possibly provide is logical consistency. Making sure your current decisions are inline with your past decisions. But is that really a benefit when each decision doesn't have an exact moral answer to begin with? It's not. If I encounter the train problem 50 times at different stages of my life, and I choose to push the fat man 25 times and ignore him another 25 times the question is still loaded and both decisions are still arbitrary and it's still unclear what decision was right or wrong.

Moral instincts were never meant to be consistent, the codification of morality into law was something we made up in attempt to make sense of our moral emotions but is ultimately irrelevant.

Keep in mind I'm not saying that we should get rid of all our morals because it's all pointless. We're human and ultimately humans are moral and we should act human when the moral questions are straightforward and easy. I'm just saying that when the questions become complex you don't need to create an entire field called "ethics" around it because it's all ultimately made up and meaningful study on a made up phenomena is fruitless.

I read what you wrote perfectly carefully. I was merely suggesting, with a small question or two; that:

1. Those of us who take a position like yours nonetheless manage to find themselves experiencing the answers to moral questions as right or wrong on a daily basis, notwithstanding all efforts to deny that they can be true or false, and

2. That in a complex world we often experience ourselves as called upon to make judgments about situations that our instincts don't track. And we don't tend to think that flipping a coin is an adequate way of doing so.

Ultimately, even if you believe that propositions of right and wrong have no truth value---even if you believe "X is the right thing to do" just amounts to "yay X," thinking carefully about right and wrong is a felt human need, deeply embedded into our psychology as a species. And it's embedded in our social relations too, as we make claims of right and wrong, just and unjust, fair and unfair against one another every day and have done so since forever.

And, sure, the root instincts for this are shared by all. But is it so absurd to think that maybe the same economic division of labor principles that generate gains from specialization in every other form of human activity, even those that might not have some foundational truth value, might also apply to ethics? Even if you really think that ethics are a form of art, only with aesthetic value (a view I don't endorse, just to be clear, but I'm taking an extreme view for sake of argument---I actually think moral claims do have truth value, but that's a whole other conversation)---while it's true that any of us can slap paint on a page, and any of us can recognize beauty, I am sure glad that the world contains people who specialize in painting.

1. So? I make decision regardless I don't spend time developing a career around it to claim my answer is better because it isn't.

2. You don't think flipping a coin is adequate and I agree it's not adequate. The problem is, no one has the adequate way of solving the problem. It doesn't exist... the best we can do is as good as flipping a coin. To claim that god exists when we don't know whether he exists is the same instinctual human drive that lays the foundation for the need of an ethicist to come in and answer questions no human knows the answer to.

I don't equate it to painting art. I equate it to fraud or delusion. The artist makes no claim that his creation is real, he exists for entertainment. The incredulous attempt to claim that an ethicists answer is better than a layman is fraudulent. You truly think an ethicist can tell me the right answer to whether you want to murder the fat man to save 20 people? To make a judgment on murder and killing and claim that his answer is better than my answer when no answer exists is not only arrogant but flat out wrong.

Nobody wants to flip a coin on moral decisions such as murder and life. But sometimes for hard ethical questions that's the best outcome. And for someone to claim that they can do better than a coin flip. Well... that's fraud or delusion.

The need for answers causes humanity to make up answers. It's the basis of religion, and only in recent times does the discovery of science, logic and the scientific method are we able to break from this mold and realize our self delusion. Yet this knowledge is hard to obtain and self delusion still permeates our behavior. You're right in the sense that there will probably always be people who think they "need" ethicists just like there will always be people who "need" religion. It's just another lie we tell ourselves to get us through the day.

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-clanto...

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.

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...

[2] https://youtu.be/9qKCl9NL1Cg

Curious why that resulted in misdemeanor probation rather than felony with prison time.

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.

I'm speaking from further knowledge, but grabbed the first article I could quickly find without super-awful ads.

Multiple people got in fights at multiple locations and times, mostly minor. Eric however, was at several of these fights and repeatedly used a weapon with the potential for cracking a skull and causing a brain bleed.

It’s a misconception that the only good political actions are nonviolent. Many great political actions have had a large violent component, including those written down in the history books as nonviolent, such as the Indian independence movement, the American Civil Rights movement, and the South African anti apartheid movement.

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.

I've heard similar arguments but from a religious angle. That without religion there's no morality.

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.

In truth, the educated are more likely to be self-deceived (as well as being deceived by the system).

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.)

Well, both groups are on to something.

(Neither Christian -- too provincial --, nor atheist -- too smug --).

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.

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.h...

We are still so early in the understanding of ourselves and, by extension, society.

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.

Here is the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324670

"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".

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.

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.

>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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The human brain seems not to experience or process reality so much as simulate it, since we know there are myriad ways that memories and perception don't match literal reality. I wouldn't doubt that deep, deep down at whatever amounts to the "bare metal" there isn't a recognized distinction between "fictional" and "real" entities, or even between those and the self.

Perhaps only at higher levels of abstraction that these distinctions are meaningful.

What everyone in this discussion seems to be missing is that the number one source of moral failures is not trying. The inborn human conscience provides so much ignored guidance that trying to help it out with books is pointless. Instead, we need to be thinking about how to get people to put some effort and sacrifice into having morals. It doesn't matter if you know one ethical truth or ten billion if you are not willing to sacrifice anything.

Empathy is not inborn, it is taught. Ask anyone with a toddler. Also people must be taught to broaden their circle of empathy to include foreigners, animals, etc. The capacity may be innate but it must be shaped by education, formal or otherwise.

Is it taught, or does it "grow in?" Toddlers don't get empathy training.

I can't say whether it's what makes the difference or it's a natural development, but they 100% for sure do. Both direct instruction and example behavior.

There are many parent who never instruct their kids to care about other people, and those kids turn out fine. The vast majority of what you have to tell a todller is variants of "don't put that in your mouth," and sometimes "stop hitting your sister." I've never heard of an admonition to "be more caring." (Note: that sounds like a heartwarming idea unless you have met a toddler before)

> Empathy is not inborn, it is taught.

I remember when I was a kid, around 6, I was out hiking with my dog and had gotten on top of this huge boulder and fell off. I fell pretty far, got scraped up bad, probably a concussion and I was laying on the ground moaning. My dog scampered down and he started whimpering and licking my face. He then ran a couple miles to get help, which he brought back.

Cats though don't do this sort of thing.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

Could you elaborate? What do you think the difference is?

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

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.

There are multiple studies (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.

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