New in Draft: "Walking the Walk"

Over almost a decade, starting in 2007, I conducted a series of empirical studies (mostly collaboratively with Joshua Rust) on the moral behavior of ethics professors. We consistently found that ethicists don't behave better than professors specializing in other areas of study. What is the philosophical import of this empirical result? I'm not drawn to glib or simplistic interpretations, such as that studying ethics is useless, or motivationally ineffective, or that all of practical ethics is rationalization of what we would have done anyway. Nor do I think we should dismiss the empirical results as irrelevant to ethics, as though ethics were entirely an abstract matter of connecting logical principles and our personal behavior is irrelevant. But I've struggled to find the right middle path between glib dismissal of the value of ethics and glib dismissal of the ethical relevance of the research. I shared part of my thinking about this in my 2019 paper "Aiming for Moral Mediocrity",…