Studying Ethics Should Influence Your Behavior (But It Doesn't Seem to)
Some academic disciplines have direct relevance to day-to-day life. Studying these disciplines, you might think, would have an influence on one's practical behavior. Studying nutritional health, it seems plausible to suppose, would have an influence of some sort on your food choices. Studying the stock market would likely have an influence on your investment strategies. Studying parenting styles in developmental psychology would have an influence on your parenting decisions. The effects might not be huge: A scholar of nutrition might not be able to entirely sacrifice Twinkies. A scholar of parenting styles might sometimes lose her temper in ways she knows from her research to be counterproductive. But it would be strange if studying such topics had no effect whatsoever -- if there were a perfect isolation between one's research on nutrition, investment, or parenting and one's personal food choices, investments, and approaches to parenting.
[A doctor doing what doctors in fact don't do very much of.]
Other academic topics have tenuous connections at best to practical matters of day-to-day life: studying the first second of the Big Bang, or mereological approaches to objecthood, or tortoise-shell divination in ancient China. Of course, studying such things could have behavioral effects. Maybe immersion in Big Bang cosmology inspires one to a broader, less parochial worldview. But I don't think we should particularly expect that or think something is strange if it doesn't. It's not strange for a cosmologist to be parochial in the same way it would be for an anti-trans-fat health researcher to not attempt to reduce her own trans-fat intake.
Ethics seems clearly to be in the category of academic disciplines that are directly relevant to scholars' day-to-day lives. Not every sub-issue of every sub-specialization of ethics is so, of course. Some ethical questions are highly abstract or concern matters irrelevant to the immediate choices of the scholars' lives; but few ethicists spend all of their energy on issues of that sort. Issues like our obligations to the poor, the ethics of honesty and kindness, animal rights and environmentalism, prejudice, structural injustices in our society, the proper weighing of selfish concerns against the demands of others, the question of how much to abide by laws or directives with which you disagree -- all seem directly relevant to our lives. It would be odd if devoting a substantial part of one's career to thinking about such issues had no influence of any sort on one's day-to-day behavior.
And yet it's not clear to me that studying ethics does have any influence on day-to-day behavior. Across a wide range of studies, my collaborators and I have found no convincing evidence of systematic behavioral differences between ethicists and non-ethicists of similar social background. Also, impressionistically, in my personal interactions with professional ethicists, my sense is that they behave overall similarly to non-ethicists. Furthermore, there's little evidence that university-level ethics classes influence students' behavior either.
Maybe studying ethics does sometimes have a practical effect. It would, in my mind, be stunning if studying ethics never had any influence of any sort on one's behavioral choices! But the effects, if any, are subtle and difficult to detect empirically.
Why this should be so is an underappreciated puzzle.
The easiest answers -- "academic ethics is all abstract and impractical", "ethics is all post-hoc rationalization of what you were going to do anyway", "our immoral desires are so compelling that no amount of rational thought could lead us to act otherwise" -- don't withstand critical scrutiny as fully adequate answers (although each may have some element of truth).
For several of my imperfect attempts to resolve this puzzle, see:
"The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Power of Reason" (with Joshua Rust), Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology (ed. H. Sarkissian and J. Wright, 2014).
"Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical Thought" (with Jon Ellis), Moral Inferences (ed. J.F. Bonnefon and B. Tremoliere, 2017).
"Aiming for Moral Mediocrity" (manuscript in draft).
I'm still banging my head against it.