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djbusby

And Dad is a Law Professor. Hope he's not teaching the ethics course.

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I've known a few people who have taught ethics courses. None of them were ethical by any stretch of the imagination.

Maybe I've just met a bad batch.

There are studies that show ethicists are no more ethical than the general population.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2012.7...

> However, on no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09515089.2019.15...

> Our results indicate a successful replication of the original effect that ethicists do not behave any morally better compared to other academics across the vast majority of normative issues.

I wonder if fundamental ethical values are mostly absorbed in childhood or through genetic instinct. At some point it seems most people would just use greater knowledge of law, ethics, etc to either become better at arguing why what they did was right or wrong or use the details to get better at not getting caught. Teaching a grown adult to internalize a new value system would appear quite difficult from my observation.

I have not met many people who wouldn't compromise their ethics for some benefit. This is especially true if they think nobody will find out. So I am not sure there are fundamental ethical values.

Also, the tendency to do so depends on your financial status. Poor people will happily sell thei ethics, those who are more well off don't have to.

I've usually seen the opposite.

I'd argue that the opposite is more common. People who are well off can often feel that they are entitled to things.

The situation we're discussing involves wealthy folk doing unethical things.

Why would anyone expect this in the first place? It'd be like expecting the pastor to be more or less religious, or more moral than his following. Ultimately they are just going to be a single sampling of the population, which means they have a pretty reasonable probability of being average.

Well idk about you but if I wanted to learn karate I would find an instructor who is better at karate than the average person to learn from.

We are talking about being taught in an academic context, not a practical context. So, a better analogue might be that you wouldn't necessarily expect a martial arts historian to be better at the application of martial arts than the average person.

I think I would?

Well yes, I think the usual intuition is that the people who preach something (religiously or not) should be better at what they are preaching than the ones they are preaching to. Right or wrong, I think that's a pretty common presumption to make.

Might be small sample, but that sample is also biased to have a lot of knowledge about what they are preaching (supposedly), meaning they put higher importance about it compared to other things.

???

You'd expect Pastors or Ethicists to be more moral/ethical because they spend a lot of time thinking about being moral/ethical compared to members of the general population. Seems pretty intuitive to me.

I'd expect ethicists to have thought more about ethics and morals. I wouldn't necessarily expect them to be more moral or ethical. As C. S. Lewis says in The Abolition of Man, it's not theorems that make the difference when the chips are down.

Pastors... it depends on the pastor. Is it a job, or something they actually believe? Is it just a theory to them, or do they have any actual power helping them live it out?

Ok, so imagine that everyone has the about the same propensity to make the correct ethical decision when faced with a circumstance. You might expect there to be some number of circumstances for which the lay person may be wrong about the appropriate ethical decision and thus fail to make it correctly, whereas the ethicist would be better prepared for such. If this were the case, then you'd expect ethicists to be more ethical despite having the same ethical character as regular people.

In fact, on this interpretation, if we find ethicists are no more ethical, then we must conclude they are actually _less_ ethical than normal people, since they have more occasions where they could make an ethical decision but do not. Or we have to admit that most ethical quandaries are trivial, so that being an ethicists doesn't give you any special advantage.

I would in fact expect pastors to be more religious on average than their congregations[1], though not particularly more moral. And I would expect professional ethicists to be more interested in ethics than the population at large, though again not particularly better.

[1] It would depend a bit on what sort of pastor and what sort of congregation.

Ehn, yes. If I see the pope in a strip club, I'll be damn shocked, but not if I see a random catholic. The difference is that the latter is a random member and the former is the literal face of his church, so he has to abide to certain tenets or at least pretend to.

Kinda like how marriage therapists have slightly higher divorce rates than the national average?

https://psychcentral.com/pro/do-marriage-family-therapists-h...

And IT people can't get the printer to work either?

Makes sense to me. I suspect most people are not quick to end a bad marriage, and will hold out hoping things will improve. Marriage therapists might be more likely to act on a bad situation and extricate themselves from it.

How can they claim any could have "unequivocally better behavior"? What is their ground source of truth for morals?

Well, asking the ethicists if the ethicists are acting ethically would not be unbiased.

You've got to know where the line is to teach people not to cross it!

Yeah for most of us, ethics is more of a “know it when you see it, don’t get to close to the line” sort of thing. Although there definitely are hard ethical question out there, so the study of it is good, they just don’t show up that often in day-to-day life.

"None of them were ethical by any stretch of the imagination."

At least they know the course material well. Isn't that the reason why you're really enrolling in the class for?

Naturally Voldemort cosplaying as a "defense against the dark arts" instructor was clearly an implication that regulatory capture is way to hide power.

If I was a student in his ethics course it would be a great opportunity to practice grilling a hostile witness

On his staff page he's described as a "leading scholar in the field of tax law". Maybe he was the one that got FTX on QuickBooks after having been paid for 11 months there.

Ethics course is not supposed to make you better person. It teaches you some theories relevant to law practice and regulations layers are under.

...Actually, it's supposed to equip you to see your actions don't occur in the void; and ensure you at least have some introductory calibration to a moral compass.

Is altering a digital artifact for someone else to be used for financial gain on their part ethical?

Transitive property says no; you're an accomplice intheir deception. The only people who tend to assert Ethics courses aren't there to help you be a better person are those that never started out with an intention to be ethical at all. At least in my experience.

Has anyone ever studied ethics at Stanford? As far as I can tell the subject is not required. CS undergrads must fulfill a "Technology in Society" requirement but it can be satisfied with bullshit like "Technology Entrepreneurship", a series of guest lectures by VCs, which is almost the opposite of studying ethics.

Nothing about a university that would let Condi Rice serve as provost screams "ethics", frankly. Their history is not one that suggests a strong ethical culture.

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