Yarden Niv

The moral behavior of philosophers has gained notable attention in recent years as a robust means of exploring the relationship between moral reflection and behavior. These studies post that if philosophers, who are deeply engaged with moral reflection, do not act more ethically, we should not expect moral reflection to affect the behavior of lay people. Overall, these studies find no evidence that philosophers (including moral ones) behave in a more ethical way than others, except for evidence regarding vegetarianism. In this study, we utilize data on philosophers (N = 1,376) from eight European countries, the largest sample to date, to examine this relationship. In line with previous studies, we assume the moral worth of civic engagement but use a wider set of five civic behaviors. In contrast to previous studies, we find systematically higher levels of civic engagement (except in the case of voting) among political philosophers in all eight countries, even after controlling education level, gender, age, and immigration status. We further propose two explanations – the norm and the domain-specific propositions – that might reconcile our findings with those of prior studies. These findings can provide a refreshing direction for future research in this field.

In recent decades, the discipline of bioethics has grown rapidly, as has the practice of ethical consultation. Interestingly, this new recognition of the relevance of moral philosophy to our daily life has been accompanied by skepticism among philosophers regarding the existence of moral expertise or the benefits of philosophical training. In his recent article in Bioethics, William R. Smith suggested that this skepticism is rooted in philosophers' belief that moral expertise is inconsistent with liberal–democratic values, when in fact they are compatible. In this paper, we provide a unique opportunity to empirically examine Smith's observation by utilizing and extending global data on philosophers' beliefs about moral expertise, involving 4087 philosophers from 96 countries. Our findings support Smith's theoretical observation and show that societal levels of support for liberal–democratic values are associated with greater skepticism about moral expertise. We suggest that these findings might be explained by the cognitive process of motivated reasoning and an invalid inference of “is” from “ought.” Consequently, the potential tension between moral expertise and liberal–democratic values is invalidly used for rejecting the existence of moral expertise, while its main and valid implication is for how moral expertise should be applied in liberal–democratic settings.

Considerable attention in bioethics has been devoted to moral expertise and its implications for handling applied moral problems. The existence and nature of moral expertise has been a contested topic, and particularly, whether philosophers are moral experts. In this study, we put the question of philosophers’ moral expertise in a wider context, utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We find that despite the skepticism in recent literature, the vast majority of philosophers do believe in moral expertise and in the contribution of philosophical training and experience to its acquisition. Yet, they still differ on what philosophers’ moral expertise consists of. While they widely accept that philosophers possess superior analytic abilities regarding moral matters, they diverge on whether they also possess improved ability to judge moral problems. Nonetheless, most philosophers in our sample believe that philosophers possess an improved ability to both analyze and judge moral problems and that they commonly see these two capacities as going hand in hand. We also point at significant associations between personal and professional attributes and philosophers’ beliefs, such as age, working in the field of moral philosophy, public involvement, and association with the analytic tradition. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about moral expertise.

Are philosophers moral experts, and if so, what does this imply for their proper role in moral decision-making? The dominant view on this subject argues that philosophers have superior moral understanding, but they are not better judges of what is morally right. Consequently, philosophers cannot and should not have an authoritative role in moral decision-making. In this article, I challenge this view and argue that an examination of the intimate connection between two capacities – to understand and to judge – reveals that it is both inconsistent and simplistic. It is inconsistent because, all things being equal, if philosophers better understand moral problems, they are also better judges of them. It is simplistic because it adopts an all-or-nothing approach to moral expertise, while expertise is in fact conditional. Inspired by the psychological literature on expertise, I claim that we should not ask whether philosophers are moral experts but rather under which conditions they successfully execute their expertise. The conclusion of the dominant view needs to be reconsidered to reflect the conditional nature of philosophers' expertise. Although more empirical research is required, I offer several hypotheses for future endeavours that demonstrate what a conditional view of philosophers' moral expertise could look like.