“The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors: A Replication-Extension in German-Speaking Countries”, 2019-03-19 (; backlinks; similar):
What is the relation between ethical reflection and moral behavior? Does professional reflection on ethical issues positively impact moral behaviors? To address these questions, Schwitzgebel and Rust empirically investigated if philosophy professors engaged with ethics on a professional basis behave any morally better or, at least, more consistently with their expressed values than do non-ethicist professors. Findings from their original US-based sample indicated that neither is the case, suggesting that there is no positive influence of ethical reflection on moral action.
In the study at hand, we attempted to cross-validate this pattern of results in the German-speaking countries and surveyed 417 professors using a replication-extension research design. Our results indicate a successful replication of the original effect that ethicists do not behave any morally better compared to other academics across the vast majority of normative issues. Yet, unlike the original study, we found mixed results on normative attitudes generally. On some issues, ethicists and philosophers even expressed more lenient attitudes. However, one issue on which ethicists not only held stronger normative attitudes but also reported better corresponding moral behaviors was vegetarianism.
[Keywords: Experimental philosophy, replication-extension, moral attitudes, moral behavior]
…In a series of studies by Eric Schwitzgebel, co-authored with Joshua Rust (2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014) and Fiery Cushman (2012, 2015), the empirical relations between the normative attitudes and moral behaviors of professional ethicists have been investigated systematically. Their research covered a variety of methodologies and topics like evaluations of peer opinion concerning ethicists’ moral behavior, research on order-effects concerning ethical intuitions in trolley cases, and ethicists’ voting behavior. In their most well-known study (2014), Schwitzgebel and Rust compared the self-reported and directly observed moral behaviors of professional ethicists with their espoused normative views to determine their consistency. As their findings proved to be both empirically informative and highly relevant to how one thinks about the relation between ethical reflection and action, this underscores the value of investigating ethicists to understand the nature and corollaries of ethical reflection. In order to contribute to and validate this pioneering work, we herewith conducted a replication attempt of Schwitzgebel and Rust’s seminal study in German-speaking countries.