Saturday, February 26, 2011

Does Thinking about Applied Ethics Generate Mainly Remorse Rather Than Behavior Change?

That's what Randy Cohen seems to be saying in his farewell column on ethics for the New York Times Magazine:

Writing the column has not made me even slightly more virtuous. And I didn’t have to be: it was in my contract. O.K., it wasn’t. But it should have been. I wasn’t hired to personify virtue, to be a role model for the kids, but to write about virtue in a way readers might find engaging. Consider sports writers: not 2 in 20 can hit the curveball, and why should they? They’re meant to report on athletes, not be athletes. And that’s the self-serving rationalization I’d have clung to had the cops hauled me off in handcuffs.

What spending my workday thinking about ethics did do was make me acutely conscious of my own transgressions, of the times I fell short. It is deeply demoralizing. I presume it qualifies me for some sort of workers’ comp. This was a particular hazard of my job, but it is also something every adult endures — every self-aware adult — as was noted by my great hero, Samuel Johnson, the person I most quoted in the column: “He that in the latter part of his life too strictly inquires what he has done, can very seldom receive from his own heart such an account as will give him satisfaction.” To grow old is to grow remorseful, both on and off duty.
Consider Cohen's sports-writer analogy. Often when I present my work on the moral behavior of ethicists, people (not a majority, but maybe a majority of ethicists) will respond by tossing out half-baked analogies: Should we expect basketball coaches to be better at basketball? Epistemologists to have more knowledge? Sociology professors to be popular with their peers? The thought behind such analogies appears to be: obviously no, and so also not in the analogous ethics professors case.

First: Is it so obviously no? I wouldn't expect sports writers to out-hit professional baseball players, but that's not the issue. The issue is whether writing about sports has *any* relationship to one's sports skills -- and it's not obvious that it wouldn't: We learn sports skills in part by watching; thinking about strategy is not entirely useless; and sports writers might have and sustain an interest in sports that has positive consequences for behavior. The relevant question isn't: Should we expect sports writers to be baseball stars, but rather should we expect sports writers to be a little bit better at sports, on average, than non-sports writers? Analogously, the question I have posed about ethicists, and that Cohen seems to be posing to himself is not: Should we expect ethicists to be saints -- the major-league sluggers of morality -- but rather should we expect them to be a little morally better behaved than others of similar social background, or (not entirely equivalently, of course) than they would have been had they not studied ethics.

Understood properly, this question is, I think, neither obvious nor trivial. And Cohen notes that his use of the sports-writer analogy is a rationalization -- suggesting, perhaps, that he thinks it might have been reasonable to expect some change for the better in him as a result of his reflections, a change that failed to materialize.

Cohen says his reflections have mainly left him feeling bad about himself. His tone here seems to me to be oddly defeatist. Johnson, in the passage Cohen cites, is expressing the inevitability of remorse about the past, which (being past) is unchangeable. But ethical reflection happens midstream. It is as though Cohen is saying that the only effect of reflecting ethically and discovering that one has done some bad thing is to feel bad about oneself, that it's not realistic to expect actual changes in one's behavior as a result of such reflections. Now, while it might not be realistic to expect Cohen-style applied ethical reflection in ordinary life to transform one overnight into a saint, perhaps we might hope that it would at least nudge one a little bit toward avoiding, in the future, the sort of behavior about which one now feels remorseful. To abandon such hope, to think that such reflection is necessarily behaviorally ineffectual -- isn't that quite a dark view of the relationship between moral reflection and moral behavior?

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

What does it mean to be "better at sports". If you mean "better at playing sports", then no, we should not expect sports writers to be better at playing sports than non-sports writers. Who in their right mind would expect that?

Should we expect that sports writers will be better at understanding sports than non-sports writers? Sure.

I don't get your research. Maybe that's my fault, but I find this attempt at explaining it, well, unilluminating.

Toby said...

I agree with the anonymous poster above -- Eric, I don't find your rebuttal of the sports-writer analogy entirely convincing.

I wouldn't expect a sports writer to be better at sports (even a little) than a non-sports-writer. I would expect him or her to be better at writing about sports. Equally, I wouldn't expect a basketball coach to be better at basketball (even a little) than an average person. I would expect him or her to be better at teaching basketball.

One of my own: I wouldn't expect a military strategist to be better at fighting then an average person. I would expect him or her to be better at analysing and thinking about battles. But to be honest, if I needed someone to grab a gun and defend my country, I think a random guy plucked off the street would probably be better at it than an armchair strategist.

Eric R said...

I think what's interesting here is the distinction between applied ethics and non-applied ethics. The assumption that I am drawing is that if you specialize in APPLYING philosophical data to real cases, you should be better at 'being ethical' in real life, while if your work is mainly theoretical meta-ethics, you are less likely to be held to that high of a standard. (I'm not sure if this was Eric's main point, but I think it follows from Cohen's main claims about thinking about ethical problems-I've not read much of his work, but I haven't seen him doing much normative or meta-ethical thinking in the columns I have read).

Maybe this is what separates the sports writer and the military strategist (from Toby's post) from the athlete and the solider: as long as you work in the theoretical weeds and not in the trenches, you aren't expected to do as much in 'real life'.

I wonder, though, if this argument works, why ethicists are the only ones who have to practice what they preach? Why shouldn't an epistemologist who specialized in false beliefs be held to a higher standard as far as the number of her personally held false beliefs? Why wouldn't it be fair to expect a psychologist to be fairly psychologically well-rounded? Maybe the argument is merely focused on ethicists, but isn't specific to them, but it seems that shrugging off the false beliefs of an epistemologist implies that they get a pass that ethicists don't.

Eric R said...

Something occurred to me after I posted my comment-there was a recent study (I think it was a Pew study, but I'm not sure) that indicated that people who self-identified as 'religious' were less likely to know facts about religion (including their own) than people who didn't self-identify as religious. The 'take-away' from this study could be that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than the people who practice religion. I don't know if the measurement would be the same if they were tested not for knowledge but for behavior, but I wonder if it would.

I guess, trying to make my point more clear, I would ask this: if the claim is that more knowledge about ethics leads to less ethical behavior (and more remorse about your failings), maybe religious belief provides some support for the thesis by a parallel argument that says more knowledge about religion leads to less inclination to believe/practice a religion.

GNZ said...

I mean that you are accidentily making the soldier/strategist comparison. For example the average person off the street will quote likely shoot themselves or one of your men by accident if you give them a gun an put them on a battle feild.

Brad said...

The two elements in Cohen's closing sentence that resonated with me were "old" and "remorseful." That Cohen is an ethicist seemed secondary. At 65, I've been experiencing free-floating feelings of regret, even though I have worked hard at leading a moral life. I have been cheerful, and am now more somber. I wondered if Cohen was pointing to some inherent feature of aging. Brad

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Anon 10:12 and Toby: Yes, I meant better at playing sports. Put together a baseball or football team of sports writers and put together an age-matched team of randomly selected, otherwise socially similar people who don't write about sports (perhaps people who write on celebrity gossip), and I'll make you the wager. I would probably even be willing to wager against an age- and gender-matched randomly selected pool of Americans, though I think that tilts the playing field somewhat against me, since being a writer may, in general, have a negative correlation with sports participation. (The reason such a tilt is a bug rather than a feature is that there is -- I think -- no corresponding reason to think being a writer negatively correlates with moral behavior.)

I'm not sure the basis of your confidence. Do you disagree that you can learn about sports, to some extent, simply by watching -- e.g., what the right stance is for hitting a baseball? Do you think that strategic knowledge is irrelevant to sports success? Do you think that sports writers have no higher rates of participation in sports than to other socially similar people who don't write about sports?

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Eric R & GNZ: I would rather have the gun in a general's hands than in a socially similar, age- and gender-matched, randomly chosen civilian. (Here I am agreeing, I think, with GNZ, though I wonder if part of his comment disappeared.) Theory and practice aren't entirely unconnected. I'm not sure about a general vs. a randomly-selected 20-year-old male, but that's not the relevant comparison. (Maybe I'd still go with the general.) I'd definitely take the future general at 20 years old over the random 20-year-old. Of course all this is just odds.

On other such comparisons: I think we should consider them on a case-by-case basis rather than attempting a general theory of all such cases. The epistemologist and psychologist cases you mention might break your way, but I would expect a logician to be less taken in by formal fallacies, a specialist in feminism to exhibit less sexist behavior, an economist to invest a little more in accord with standard economic principles -- all only on average, let me emphasize, vs. socially similar peers not specializing in those areas.

The religiosity study you mention is interesting, but I think potentially misleading. In the U.S., at least, most people are born into a religion, and many people who become atheists go through a period of struggling with religion. It might not be surprising, then, if they acquire some theoretical knowledge of religion during that period of struggle that they would not have acquired had they remained a bland, half-hearted participant in the religion. I confess also to being worried about the tilt of questions in surveys of this sort. For example, surveys purporting to show that political conservatives in the U.S. are more ignorant than liberals seem to choose questions that one might expect liberals to be especially attuned to. It matters a lot exactly what questions one chooses.

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Brad: As I read Cohen here, ageing is relevant here primarily because it implies (in his own case, and presumably in the case of other remorseful old people) a long history of disappointment at one's own actions -- so the key driver being the ageing-correlated remorse is the history of moral reflection. It's a compressed discussion, though, so it may admit of multiple legitimate interpretations.

Matthew Pianalto said...

The sports writer analogy is interesting but it might be worth thinking also about the disanalogies, e.g. between "sports behavior" and "ethical behavior" and perhaps also how much of what is relevant to ethics (especially if one thinks about the internal features of virtuous action) can be cashed out in terms of "behavior." What I have in mind is the idea that ethical reflection might have an impact on one's sensibility--e.g. the kinds of motives one has, etc.--that can be a little hard to track by certain behavior measurements. Iris Murdoch, for example, seemed to suggest that a lot of what counts as "moral vision" (and improvements in moral vision) take place beneath the (behavioral) surface. Of course, if there is no influence here on behavior, then one might say, "Who cares?" But I think we can imagine someone making, as it were, moral improvements, where external behavior stays pretty much the same (e.g. a person volunteers once a week at a homeless shelter), but there is an improvement in motive (e.g. a person realizes that her own self-interest in getting community service credit is a questionable motive, and as she pays more attention to the suffering of those she helps, comes to see herself as engaged in this activity for the sake of those others, out of a more attuned sympathy for them, for example).

Now if moral reflection does improve (or contributes to the improvement of) moral sensitivity, there's still the question about whether it improves/changes behavior, but one might think that it's better at one than the other. And this might be because of the various time pressures, excuses, etc. that all of us have for not changing our behavior. (Habits are harder to change than thoughts.) So, one result might be, as it were, more "remorse" than behavioral change. That might imply that moral philosophers aren't necessarily any better at aligning their behavior with their thinking--they (we) are human, all-too-human, too. If you think about Aristotle's insistence on the distinction between theory and practice, this makes sense. One could be good at thinking about moral issues, but akratic in the doing. So maybe moral philosophy itself can't make one less akratic. There can, of course, be something embarrassing about that (having to do with "practicing what one preaches"), but maybe some remorse--insofar as there's still the change, on the basis of that recognition, to do better next time--is better than nothing!

Autumnal Harvest said...

I agree that I would expect the average sports writer to be better at sports than the average non-sports writer, despite the fact that I don't expect ethicists to be more ethical than non-ethicists. Doing well at sports is a combination of two components: (1) knowledge and (2) raw ability. I expect the sports writer to have more knowledge, so that he or she should know what constitutes a foul in basketball, or when it's good to bunt in baseball, and that should give them an advantage over non-sports-writers. On the other hand, I don't expect sports writers to have better raw sports ability than non-sports-writers, by which I mean, for example, that I don't expect them to be much better at bunting in situtation where both writers and non-writers know that you should bunt. (This is not quite true, because I'd also expect sports writers to be more likely to play sports in their spare time, and thus to have some greater raw ability, but my guess is that this effect would be marginal.)

With ethics, it seems to me that 99.9% of the situations I, and most other people, deal with, the first knowledge component is not particularly tricky, and the difficult is with the "raw ability" --- the ability to do what you know you should. This is particularly true in the cases you've tested, since you've picked examples in which there's a strong consensus as what the ethical thing to do is. e.g. Everyone knows they should answer students' e-mails, but not everyone has the "ability" to do so when it means giving up other things they would rather do. Or for things where there isn't a consensus, such as eating meat, you've accepted each person's beliefs as the ground truth for testing things, making the question of whether their knowledge of ethics is correct irrelevant. So your tests seem like the test of "can you bunt when you know you should bunt," where I don't expect sports writers to have much, if any, of an advantage. If on the other hand, you tested ability of ethicists to make correct decisions in cases involving runaway trolleys, I might expect ethicists to be more likely to make the correct decision. (Good luck figuring out how to decide which decisions are correct! Also, good luck with IRB approval! :) )

I've made similar comments on this blog before, and I understand your view that you might expect think ethicists might care about ethics more than the average person, or that ethics might be more salient for them. While that view isn't my gut expectation, it makes sense to me, so I'm not really arguing; I just thought it interesting to work out this analogy a little more.

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Matthew and Autumnal!

Matthew: You have already anticipated, I think, my response: Ethics is about how one behaves, not about one's private thoughts. Some behaviors are subtle and difficult to measure, though, like whether there is a layer of kindness in one's interaction with person X. I think that might show up in peer evaluations of moral character (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2009) or subtle measures like whether one allows the door to slam when entering or exiting in the middle of a conference talk (Schwitzgebel et al. forthcoming).

Pure akrasia is, I think, fairly rare: Your actions reveal your values, even if your inner and outer speech protest.

Autumnal: I completely disagree about the moral knowledge issue. For example, on vegetarianism my view is that the proper measure is not the person's own attitudes but rather the moral truth. To measure morality by measuring coherence to one's own attitudes rewards the Eichmanns and punishes the impossibly-high-standards saints. Since I don't know the moral truth about vegetarianism, however, my conclusion is conditional: IF vegetarianism is morally better, ethicists are closer to the truth about that but their behavior mostly fails to reflect that fact.

One huge area of moral facts is the concrete application of widely accepted principles: Is *this* an example of objectionable sexism, is *that* an unobjectionable lie or distortion. Moral reflection, I would hope, would help give us insight into such matters. And if ethicists like Randy Cohen apply moral reflection more frequently and more skillfully to such questions in their lives than do non-ethicists, then ceteris paribus it seems that they should behave on average morally better.

Oh, and on runaway trolleys: I actually have some data on professional philosophers' (and professional ethicists') answers to "trolley problems" and related moral puzzles compared to non-philosophers. Fiery Cushman and I measured how stably people's responses were grounded in general principles by looking at how much order of presentation affected respondents' judgments about such scenarios. Philosophers in general and ethicists in particular showed no lower, and possibly higher, order effects than did academic non-philosophers and non-academic respondents.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Anon Sept 28 that today being virtuous is not considered as important as it probably was in ancient times. In fact, people seem to care very little about the character and virtues of their friends and coworkers. What seems to matter more is whether a person is fun, upbeat, a good conversation partner, well-connected to the business network etcetcetc. One can be quite unvirtuous and still have tons of friends and be well-liked by people. Of course the said person has to be reliable and consistent to a certain degree, so that people will not drop her for lack of these qualities--but only as much as it is beneficial. Apparently this was not really the case a few generations ago; my grandparents & their peers seem to have much higher standards when it comes to character and virtue--at least this is what they report, which actually reflects how they expect their grandchildren to behave. So, I tend to think that society as a whole cares much less about virtue, and much more about appearance, fun, and entertainment. To me it is no surprise that philosophers also have lower standards, since they are also members of society.

Perhaps, if not the same, a similar kind of thing was also going on in ancient times & for this reason philosophers chose to live together in groups to avoid too much interaction with "outer world." But the thing is, philosophers made a choice and lived with like-minded peers to be able to stick to their life style better. Clearly, this is not the case today. Plus, it is much more important today to fit in, to be well-liked and popular in your community, which makes it much harder for one to stick to standards different from/higher than society's.

Also note that philosophy today is basically a occupation like any other. You do not get your Ph.D. in ethic/philosophy because you have mastered high ethical standards as a person, but you work hard, produce high-quality articles on a regular basis, present at conferences etc. Once you get a job, you keep doing these things while you are extremely busy with networking, socializing, and improving your teaching evaluations. I do not want to sound cynical, but no one hires you because of your virtue, but because of the concrete work you produce and your collegiality, which does not have anything to do with practicing what you preach or being a virtuous person. Professional philosophy today has nothing to do with that, it is an academic discipline like any other. I am sure there are philosophers who practice what they preach, but they do not necessarily end up teaching in a classroom, partly due to the shortage of jobs.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Anon Sept 28 that today being virtuous is not considered as important as it probably was in ancient times. In fact, people seem to care very little about the character and virtues of their friends and coworkers. What seems to matter more is whether a person is fun, upbeat, a good conversation partner, well-connected to the business network etcetcetc. One can be quite unvirtuous and still have tons of friends and be well-liked by people. Of course the said person has to be reliable and consistent to a certain degree, so that people will not drop her for lack of these qualities--but only as much as it is beneficial. Apparently this was not really the case a few generations ago; my grandparents & their peers seem to have much higher standards when it comes to character and virtue--at least this is what they report, which actually reflects how they expect their grandchildren to behave. So, I tend to think that society as a whole cares much less about virtue, and much more about appearance, fun, and entertainment. To me it is no surprise that philosophers also have lower standards, since they are also members of society.

Perhaps, if not the same, a similar kind of thing was also going on in ancient times & for this reason philosophers chose to live together in groups to avoid too much interaction with "outer world." But the thing is, philosophers made a choice and lived with like-minded peers to be able to stick to their life style better. Clearly, this is not the case today. Plus, it is much more important today to fit in, to be well-liked and popular in your community, which makes it much harder for one to stick to standards different from/higher than society's.

Also note that philosophy today is basically a occupation like any other. You do not get your Ph.D. in ethic/philosophy because you have mastered high ethical standards as a person, but you work hard, produce high-quality articles on a regular basis, present at conferences etc. Once you get a job, you keep doing these things while you are extremely busy with networking, socializing, and improving your teaching evaluations. I do not want to sound cynical, but no one hires you because of your virtue, but because of the concrete work you produce and your collegiality, which does not have anything to do with practicing what you preach or being a virtuous person. Professional philosophy today has nothing to do with that, it is an academic discipline like any other. I am sure there are philosophers who practice what they preach, but they do not necessarily end up teaching in a classroom, partly due to the shortage of jobs.