Schwitzgebel Eric, Rust Joshua
Rev Philos Psychol. 2010 Jun;1(2):189-199. doi: 10.1007/s13164-009-0011-6. Epub 2009 Dec 1.
If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behavior, one might expect ethics professors to behave morally better than socially similar non-ethicists. Under the assumption that forms of political engagement such as voting have moral worth, we looked at the rate at which a sample of professional ethicists-and political philosophers as a subgroup of ethicists-voted in eight years' worth of elections. We compared ethicists' and political philosophers' voting rates with the voting rates of three other groups: philosophers not specializing in ethics, political scientists, and a comparison group of professors specializing in neither philosophy nor political science. All groups voted at about the same rate, except for the political scientists, who voted about 10-15% more often. On the face of it, this finding conflicts with the expectation that ethicists will behave more responsibly than non-ethicists. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13164-009-0011-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
如果哲学道德反思能改善道德行为，人们可能会期望伦理学教授在道德行为上比社会背景相似的非伦理学家表现得更好。假设诸如投票之类的政治参与形式具有道德价值，我们考察了一个专业伦理学家样本——以及作为伦理学家子群体的政治哲学家——在八年选举中的投票率。我们将伦理学家和政治哲学家的投票率与其他三个群体的投票率进行了比较：非伦理学专业的哲学家、政治科学家，以及既非哲学也非政治科学专业的教授组成的对照组。除了政治科学家的投票率高出约10% - 15%外，所有群体的投票率大致相同。从表面上看，这一发现与伦理学家会比非伦理学家表现得更有责任感的预期相冲突。电子补充材料：本文的在线版本（doi:10.1007/s13164-009-0011-6）包含补充材料，授权用户可获取。
