Are ethicists more moral than the rest of us? This result should warm the heart of Richard Posner:
I noted that ethics books are more likely to be stolen than non-ethics
books in philosophy (looking at a large sample of recent ethics and
non-ethics books from leading academic libraries). Missing books as a
percentage of those off shelf were 8.7% for ethics, 6.9% for
non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1.
There is further data analysis at the link, hat tip to Bookslut.
What counts as “theft”? If it’s just that the book has been missing a certain number of days past due, it might be simply that ethics professors are more lazy or forgetful than the rest of us. I, personally, tend to rack up fines because I keep books checked out for months and occasionally forget I have them.
Not sure how the stats were done but it may be a simple question of speed with which books missing are replaced. Within the general category are books that are probably replaced rapidly when it is noticed they are missing and this may skew the results. It seems unlikely that missing books on ethics are replaced as assiduously as say the latest book on charting techniques for day trading, to pull an ironic example out of the air. A possible explanation.
A note for those not familiar with Posner’s morality stuff:
Just over xmas I downloaded his lecture “Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory” from the harvard law review. The writing is (as usual) clear and accessible. Just read the first 60 pages for the bit on morality.
If you have a gut feeling that moral relativism is the case, you’ll find a good defense of it there. In addition, he argues that whether moral theory is about anything or not, it’s definitely ineffective since it provides no incentives. Plus you get a glimpse of his theory of moral entrepreneurship—but that’s spelled out better in the book of the same title as the lecture.
Bottom line: I, a nonspecialist, recommend it to you other nonspecialists. It’s a good read.
I find it ironic whenever I observe university Professors who teach ethics (mostly in Marketing and Management Depts.) dismissing their lectures early on a regular basis.
These same Professors are typically the ones that misquote Milton Friedman’s approach to ethics as being just to “maximize profits” (never mind that Milton Friedman’s statement also makes it explicit that the pursuit of profit must be “within the rules of the game” by which he means “engaging in free and open competition” with neither “fraud” nor “deception”)
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