I’m certainly interested in these topics. Just at the level of philosophical gossip, it seems to be somewhat commonly believed among philosophers I’ve known that consequentialists and virtue theorists are generally OK, but you can’t trust deontologists. I’d be very curious to see some results that are better than vague impressions from gossip. But I have to suspect that the very small number of deontologists in your survey is a serious problem (not your fault, of course). It definitely makes your sample look strange to me (my general impression, partly from other surveys I’ve seen, is that deontologists are most common, followed by consequentialists and then virtue theorists). That raises the worry that if your sample is atypical in one respect it may be atypical in other respects.
Just at the level of philosophical gossip, it seems to be somewhat commonly believed among philosophers I’ve known that consequentialists and virtue theorists are generally OK, but you can’t trust deontologists. I’d be very curious to see some results that are better than vague impressions from gossip.
Results that show whether or not you can safely trust deontologists? What would you have in mind for testing that?
But I have to suspect that the very small number of deontologists in your survey is a serious problem (not your fault, of course). [...] That raises the worry that if your sample is atypical in one respect it may be atypical in other respects.
There’s no denying that it’s an atypical sample. Indeed, any sample of people with ethical theories would have to be… the typical person doesn’t even know what “consequentialism” means, let alone if they are one. Really, what we’re looking for is a good sample of philosophically informed people, and LessWrong isn’t such a bad place for that.
Ideally, we would want to sample philosophers at large, which (as lukeprog points out) Schwitzgebel does to the tune of similar findings (no statistically significant difference on whether ethicists vs. non-ethicists pay registration fees, academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one’s mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving,
and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires, and courteousness at talks).
There have been a variety of studies of various forms of trustworthiness; I don’t have a strong preference for any of those I’ve heard of (I tend to favor many different kinds of studies, generally). I’d previously seen one or two of Schwitzgebel’s papers, but those I’d seen before hadn’t made distinctions between different kinds of ethicists. Looking at his web page, I see that he does have at least one paper I hadn’t seen before which tries to do that, though the samples are not large. Still, as you say, it detects nothing, which does suggest at least that if there is an effect it probably isn’t large.
I’m certainly interested in these topics. Just at the level of philosophical gossip, it seems to be somewhat commonly believed among philosophers I’ve known that consequentialists and virtue theorists are generally OK, but you can’t trust deontologists. I’d be very curious to see some results that are better than vague impressions from gossip. But I have to suspect that the very small number of deontologists in your survey is a serious problem (not your fault, of course). It definitely makes your sample look strange to me (my general impression, partly from other surveys I’ve seen, is that deontologists are most common, followed by consequentialists and then virtue theorists). That raises the worry that if your sample is atypical in one respect it may be atypical in other respects.
Results that show whether or not you can safely trust deontologists? What would you have in mind for testing that?
There’s no denying that it’s an atypical sample. Indeed, any sample of people with ethical theories would have to be… the typical person doesn’t even know what “consequentialism” means, let alone if they are one. Really, what we’re looking for is a good sample of philosophically informed people, and LessWrong isn’t such a bad place for that.
Ideally, we would want to sample philosophers at large, which (as lukeprog points out) Schwitzgebel does to the tune of similar findings (no statistically significant difference on whether ethicists vs. non-ethicists pay registration fees, academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one’s mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires, and courteousness at talks).
There have been a variety of studies of various forms of trustworthiness; I don’t have a strong preference for any of those I’ve heard of (I tend to favor many different kinds of studies, generally). I’d previously seen one or two of Schwitzgebel’s papers, but those I’d seen before hadn’t made distinctions between different kinds of ethicists. Looking at his web page, I see that he does have at least one paper I hadn’t seen before which tries to do that, though the samples are not large. Still, as you say, it detects nothing, which does suggest at least that if there is an effect it probably isn’t large.