Ethicists’ Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Ethicists’ Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences (2011)

tandfonline.com

29 pointsbenbreen14 comments

This is a hilarious study that lends some support to something I've often found frustrating in the moral-philosophy community. People spend so much time nitpicking at moral theories, that they often don't advocate for a theory that they themselves actually believe in. In fact, an alarming number of moral philosophers don't even believe in objective morality, even when it comes to extreme behaviors such as murder.

Ask an average person about how they make moral decisions, and you'll get a jumble of inconsistent beliefs centered around appeal-to-authority and gut feelings. Ask a moral philosopher about how they make moral decisions, and you'll hear 5 different interpretations from 5 different moral theories, and no advocacy for which one is correct. Hardly surprising then that they feel lost and nihilistic in their own day-to-day lives.

> ..an alarming number of moral philosophers don't even believe in objective morality, even when it comes to extreme behaviors such as murder

There is a lot more to ethics than objective morality. There are plenty of approaches to morality that do not universalize values. Don't let me get in the way of your grand generalizations though.

Everything Schwitzgebel writes is worth reading: http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/

including his blog, The Splintered Mind: https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/

I got into him because of his thoughts on conscious experience and introspection, such as Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White? and How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience: The Case of Human Echolocation. He ended up getting me (indirectly) into Mozi.

Link to PDF http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Courtesy-...

(..or pay US$45 to read its 10 pages at the given link.)

I read the offenders were a rogue group of moral relativists. They said under the circumstances they did nothing wrong.

A suggested article linked at the bottom has an even catchier abstract: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/095150809034099...

On the subject of book-stealers, I just came across this discussion of curses for such by scribes:

https://www.openculture.com/2021/08/medieval-scribes-discour...

> If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving one's seat tidy).

It seems like there’s a pretty big logical leap conflating “moral behavior” with “courteous behavior”. All of the behaviors measured could indicate someone is absent-minded, lacks social awareness, or is perhaps rude. But they all could just be honest mistakes. Moral (or amoral) behavior, I would think, requires intent.

Sometimes you think a door will slowly close quietly and instead it slams. Such is life. I don’t think it’s fair or honest to use these behaviors as a proxy for morality.

>"Moral (or amoral) behavior, I would think, requires intent."

That itself is not something all ethicists would agree with. Finally, my bachelor's in philosophy comes in handy.

I don't understand the point in even writing an article like this because it's impossible to begin without staking out your moral positions, and at that point 99% of the work is just writing a philosophy paper. I don't think you can even say that most philosophers would agree that moral reflection promotes moral behavior, because you'd have to get them all to agree on what moral behavior is - or in other words, you'd have to solve the problem the field has been trying to solve for the entirety of its existence.

> I don't think you can even say that most philosophers would agree that moral reflection promotes moral behavior, because you'd have to get them all to agree on what moral behavior is - or in other words, you'd have to solve the problem the field has been trying to solve for the entirety of its existence.

I don't have the philosophy creds, but I don't think you really need to agree on what's moral behavior to think that thinking about it may promote behavior inline with the moral framework of the contemplator, whatever that happens to be. Or if the behavior didn't change, perhaps the contemplator wasn't really reflecting on morals after all.

It does make sense to use "whatever the contemplator thinks to be moral" as a stand-in for moral behavior. My only quip would be that whatever the contemplator thinks to be moral and what actually is moral are not necessarily the same thing though. I suppose in that case the study would just be asking if ethicists follow their own rules - I've been out of college for a bit but I don't think common courtesy is a hot topic in ethics at the moment.

That's certainly an aspect that would make it hard to interpret the behavior; if few ethicists feel it's immoral to let doors close loudly, then all of their reflection wouldn't change their behavior; and it would be hard to determine people's beliefs.

That's how Schwitzgebel would see it: http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ActBel.htm

Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs, or The Gulf Between Occurrent Judgment and Dispositional Belief

An old moral philosophy joke, I heard, is: utilitarianism is probably true, but it's probably best that nobody actually believes it.

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