The Problem of the Ethics Professors
Here's a question to consider: Why don't ethics professors behave better than they do?
The vast majority of philosophers I've polled think that ethics professors, on average, behave just about as ethically as their peers in logic, metaphysics, etc., and others of their socio-economic class generally, or they behave considerably worse. What might explain this fact, if it is a fact? The only explanations I can think of are either empirically implausible or disturbing in one way or another.
Here are some of the most obvious possible explanations:
(1.) Ethical reflection does not lead to ethical behavior. This might be because: (1a.) Ethical reflection reveals that moral behavior is not particularly advisable, or (1b.) Ethical reflection is impotent to effect one's general patterns of responding morally to the world.
(2.) Moral philosophers do not engage in ethical reflection -- or at least not the kind of ethical reflection relevant to everyday moral living. (This might seem plausible, in a way, since so much of ethics and moral philosophy is so abstract -- and yet still one might think or expect or at least hope that ethicists would be especially primed to see the moral dimensions in the everyday decisions they face.)
(3.) Ethical reflection does indeed lead to moral improvement, and the reason ethicists don't behave better than others is that they start out morally worse than the rest of us. They are, perhaps, drawn to ethics because morality is, as it were, a problem area in their lives. (There's something appealing in this thought -- and it harmonizes with the old joke that in psychology the crazy ones go into clinical psychology, the socially awkward ones into social psychology, etc., but really -- do you think we'll find patterns of, say, juvenile deliquency in the early behavior of ethics professors? Somehow I doubt it.)
Is there an appealing and plausible way out of this problem?