Reading the study (<a href="https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2019.1587912" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2019.158...</a>) the questions don't sound overly morally charged. They're certainly what I'd imagine a normal person may find moral questions, but are otherwise fairly middling in terms of moral impact. Other than vegetarianism, I'd say many of the don't have moral weight, at least not how they were asked. And even if you had considered them moral, it would only be from a deontological, or possibly virtue, ethics perspective.<p>The behaviour is a little more damning, but they only show evidence from two different scenarios. One of those scenarios had to do with charity and once again I feel like donating to charity is not overly morally charged. And if it is, it's certainly not the way they presented it.
If I were hiring someone to do a job requiring major ethical judgment, exposure to academic thinking on ethics would be immediately disqualifying. My experience is that it is corrupting: it equips a student with a vast array of theories they can use to justify anything.
I have observed a similar effect for constitutional lawyers. There are many whose ethics make it abundantly clear that they pursued the field not out of a desire to defend rights but how to justify abuses and find loopholes.
> 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<p>The first investigation is just begging the question. The whole point of moral philosophy is that how to live is an open question.<p>The second investigation sounds more interesting, but it doesn’t prove much either. ”Knowing that” and ”knowing how” are different. Doctors smoke more than the baseline.
I am not confident in this study.<p>Anyone who has studied in the area knows that there's self-sorting by field, which runs, from most to least conservative: Ethics < political philosophy < political theory. Most 'activist' philosophers are in politics and sociology departments, not philosophy departments. In both cases the tendency runs from the most abstract and rationalist, to the most concrete and political.<p>The study also begs the question about what is and is not moral. It finds that professional ethicists judge that not keeping in contact with one's mother is less morally reprehensible than do other academics. And, on the strength of this and other, similar judgements, conclude that non-ethicist academics have more stringent moral beliefs. Well - maybe the ethicists are right? Whether greater 'leniency' or 'stringency' is appropriate in any given case is relative to one's ethical beliefs, not a scientific given to be assumed at the outset of the study.
There's an old joke about a professor of moral philosophy caught cheating on his wife. When asked how his conduct suits his professional title, he shrugs and says, "And if I taught mathematics, would I have to be a triangle?"
Becoming ethical, letting reason permeate throughout one's life, is a job for the individual.<p>If someone deigns to explain to me the moral implications of this and that, I have to ask - what special abilities do they have? How do they know the truth better than I do?<p>If someone believes they know what another adult ought to do, that, to me, would be an indication that they don't really have much of a clue at all!