Why do ethicists eat their greens?

ABSTRACT

Eric Schwitzgebel, Fiery Cushman, and Joshua Rust have conducted a series of studies of the thought and behavior of professional ethicists. They have found no evidence that ethical reflection yields distinctive improvements in behavior. This work has been done on English-speaking ethicists. Philipp Schönegger and Johannes Wagner (2019) replicated one study with German-speaking professors. Their results are almost the same, except for the finding that German-speaking ethicists were more likely to be vegetarian than non-ethicists. The present paper devises and evaluates eleven psychological hypotheses (along with one from Schönegger and Wagner) aimed at explaining why ethical reflection might have motivational influence for this topic but not for others. Three hypotheses are judged to be plausible at this initial stage: generic emotional support, perception of cost as a source of emotional obstacles, and social categorization.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethical reflection
• emotion
• reason
• categorization
• behavior of ethicists
• vegetarianism
• eric Schwitzgebel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Strictly speaking, an even more fine-grained question is appropriate: why is this pattern of judgment and behavior found for German-speaking ethicists but, apparently, not for English-speaking ones? In what follows, I will put aside cultural-linguistic specificity and ask only about the psychology of ethicists, but the ruminations should be understood to apply first to this specific subset and only second to a wider group of ethicists. In this, I follow Schönegger and Wagner, whose own speculation about what might account for their results is not framed in cultural or linguistic terms. I discuss this in the next section. The more that German-speaking ethicists turn out to have an education and a profession integrated with English-speakers, the less significant the linguistic and cultural differences.

2. What follows is a tour of some psychological hypotheses, but note, “psychological” does not here mean “individualistic.” In Section 3.4, explicitly social, and hence widely distributed, processes are considered. See Sneddon (2007, 2008, 2011)) for discussion of some forms that externalist hypotheses can take. That said, there might be externalist possibilities not well represented by the array of topics addressed below. In particular, what might be thought of as “cultural” possibilities – albeit ones realized in professional “cultures” such as the study of ethics – are worthy of exploration. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing the significance of this point.

3. The work of Buckwalter and Phelan (2013), Buckwalter & Phelan (2014)), which suggests that the phenomenal and intentional stances are not as dissociable as other work suggests, accords with this position.

4. No surprise here: see A. Sneddon (2007, 2008, 2011)).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Sneddon

Andrew Sneddon is professor of philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He studies ethics and philosophical psychology. His books includeLike-Minded: Externalism and Moral Psychology  (MIT 2011), Autonomy (Bloomsbury 2013), and Offense and Offensiveness: A Philosophical Account (Routledge, forthcoming).