Wednesday, October 18, 2006

A Plea for Stories about Virtue and Wickedness in Ethicists

I beg a favor. Tell me stories about the ethics professors you've known -- stories of their virtue or malfeasance, the more detail the better. Post them as comments on this post, or email me at eschwitz at domain: ucr.edu.

I ask you this not out of pure gossip-love, but to good philosophical ends -- in connection, that is, with my reflections on the relationship between moral reflection and moral behavior.

I'm interested in anecdotes here, not generalizations (to get generalizations, I will be conducting a survey in December), with enough detail to give a real flavor of the incident.

(If you write a long comment, I recommend that you do so first in your word processing program, then paste it into the comments section. Occasionally Blogger crashes posting a comment, and it can be frustrating when that comment is long!)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I once had a ethic professor who is quite established and (thus?) quite arrogant.

So some time ago I had an undergraduate-seminar given by her and I visited her consultation-hour. Then, I wanted to introduce myself and reached her my hand to shake hands. But even in this very first second I invited trouble… VERY demandingly she said: “Don’t you know, it’s winter-time and hence it’s very easy to contract a common cold. So put away your hand!”

Uff. The tone stayed this demandingly the whole semester… but we continued to work an Plato and friendship.

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Thanks for the story!

Anonymous said...

When I was in graduate school, one of my fellow graduate students was arrested, on his way in to teach an Ethics course, for interstate drug trafficing (perhaps all the more amusing, or sad, because it was a Catholic university).