Stanley Fish in the New York Times: Philosophy Doesn't Matter
... by which he means something like: Philosophical reflection has no bearing on the real, practical decisions of life. See here and here.
My guess: Most philosophers will react negatively to Fish. When faced with an outsider's attack of this sort, our impulse (my impulse too) is to insist that philosophy does matter to the ordinary decisions of life -- or at least to insist that portions of philosophy, perhaps especially ethics and political philosophy, can matter, maybe should matter.
But that brings us straightaway to the ethics professors problem. If philosophy "matters" in Fish's sense, then it seems that people who frequently and skillfully engage in philosophical thinking should, at least on average and to a modest degree, make better decisions on topics that philosophy touches. They should behave a bit more ethically, perhaps, or show a bit more wisdom. And yet it seems as though people with philosophical training (e.g., ethics professors) are not better behaved or wiser than others of similar social background, even in areas on which there is extensive philosophical literature.
My thought here can be formulated as a trilemma on the conditional A -> C where A is that philosophy matters, in Fish's sense, to certain areas of practical life, and C is that philosophical training improves practical wisdom in those areas of life. We can either deny the antecedent and say philosophy is irrelevant to ordinary life, accept the consequent and say that people with philosophical expertise have more practical wisdom in those areas of life as a result of their philosophical training, or somehow reject the major premise connecting the antecedent and the consequent. All three horns of the trilemma are, I think, a bit uncomfortable. At least I find them uncomfortable. Oddly, most philosophers I speak to seem to be eerily comfortable with one horn -- unreflectively, un-self-critically comfortable, I'm tempted to say -- though they don't always choose the same horn.