RUNNING HEAD: Do Ethicists Steal More Books?
Do Ethicists Steal More Books?
Eric Schwitzgebel
Department of Philosophy
Do Ethicists Steal More Books?
Abstract
If explicit reasoning about morality is morally useful, as Kohlberg and many ethicists have suggested, then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional ethicists’ behavior has never been systematically studied. The present research examines the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books. Study 1 found that contemporary (post-1959) ethics books were actually 25% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. When the list was reduced to the relatively obscure books most likely to be borrowed exclusively by professional ethicists, ethics books were almost 50% more likely to be missing. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were more than twice as likely to be missing as other classic philosophy books.
Keywords: Morality, ethics, philosophy, reason, moral reasoning, Kohlberg
Do Ethicists Steal More Books?
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that the aim of studying ethics, “is not, as in other inquiries, the attainment of theoretical knowledge: we are not conducting this inquiry in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good” (4th c. BCE/1962, 1103b). In Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785/1998), Kant asserts that a philosophical understanding of morality is essential to a firm and unswerving hold upon morality, allowing one to avoid corruption by self-regarding desires and misdirection by irrelevant considerations. In On Liberty (1859/2003), Mill says that ethical doctrines become largely powerless to guide behavior unless their fundamental principles are grasped and the arguments both for and against them are rigorously considered. If Aristotle, Kant, and Mill are right, a lifetime’s commitment to the study of moral philosophy should have salutary effects on one’s moral behavior. Ethicists, by virtue of their long training and deep grasp of the principles of morality, will behave better than non-ethicists.
Indeed they might. But the question has never been systematically studied.
Among contemporary philosophers, Nussbaum (1997) and Moody-Adams (1997) have argued that philosophical moral reflection is a crucial part of our moral education, will tend to make us better citizens, and can give us the courage to stand up for justice – but they offer no empirical evidence in support of these claims. Posner (1999), a judge and philosopher of law, argues in contrast that academic moralism “has no prospect of improving human behavior” (p. 7) since (among other things) its motivational force is feeble and it tends to traffic in rationalizations either of self-interest or of culturally-derived, arational intuitions. Posner’s empirical evidence is also very thin: mostly impressionistic reflections about the effects of studying moral philosophy on law students and professional philosophers and citation of a couple of interview studies of (non-philosopher) rescuers of Jews during World War II and other altruists, who mostly do not seem to have been driven by any especially sophisticated philosophical vision (Monroe, 1996; Gross, 1997). Peer opinion of the moral behavior of ethicists may indeed be very telling, but nothing systematic has been published on the issue. In accord with Posner, I have found in both formal and informal polling that the majority of professional philosophers believe that ethicists do not behave better than non-ethicists (for a summary, see Schwitzgebel 2007). In fact, it is not uncommon to hear the opinion that ethicists behave worse, overall, than non-ethicists. Anticipating the current research, several philosophers have shared with me their impression that ethics books are missing from libraries more often than non-ethics books.
Accounts of moral development that give a central role to moral reasoning and that see moral behavior as largely flowing from moral reasoning, such as Piaget’s (1932/1965) and especially Kohlberg’s (1984), should, it seems, predict that ethicists will show excellent moral behavior, since there is no doubt that professional ethicists are champions of moral reasoning – at least in the sense of “moral reasoning” that researchers like Piaget and Kohlberg have in mind. (Accordingly, Rest [1993] finds that graduate students in moral philosophy show very sophisticated moral reasoning about Kohlbergian dilemmas.) However, the nature and strength of the relationship between Kohlbergian measures of moral reasoning and real-world moral behavior remains unclear (Blasi, 1980; Kohlberg, 1984; Colby & Damon, 1992; Krebs & Denton, 2005; Stams, Brugman, Deković, van Rosmalen, van der Laan, & Gibbs, 2006). In contrast, accounts of moral development and behavior that emphasize emotion and downplay the importance of moral reasoning (Haidt 2001; Greene & Haidt, 2002), might predict that skill in philosophical reasoning about ethics would have little bearing on actual moral behavior.
Although the relationship between moral behavior and a professional career in ethics remains unstudied, a number of researchers have examined the relationship between professed religiosity or religious behavior (such as church-going) and self-reported or objectively measured social deviance or criminality. A seminal study in 1969 (Hirschi & Stark, 1969) found no relationship between high school students’ self-reported church attendance or belief in an afterlife and either police records or self-reported criminal behavior. Subsequent studies have tended to find weakly negative (often non-significant) relationships between religiosity and criminality or moral deviance. A recent meta-analysis (Baier & Wright, 2001) puts the median effect size at r = -.11, but even this small correlation is likely to be inflated by the file-drawer effect (the fact that negative results, especially of small studies, are less likely to be published) and bias on the part of religiously-committed subjects (who may suspect the hypothesis and unwittingly adjust their answers) and investigators. Also many of the studies included in Baier & Wright’s meta-analysis are only correlational and control for only a few potential common causes, and thus give insufficient basis for inferring a causal relationship between religiosity and immorality or crime. Heaton (2006) and Eshuys & Smallbone (2006) have recently attempted to get at the issue of the direction of causation through temporal analyses. Heaton, looking county by county across the U.S., finds evidence suggesting that rather than religiosity causing lower crime rates, lower crime rates (in a county, historically) may cause higher religiosity; he also finds no decrease in crime after the Easter holiday. Eshuys & Smallbone, looking at the self-reported religious histories of sex offenders, actually find the opposite of the predicted effect: Sex offenders who reported being religious as youths had more and younger victims than those who were comparatively less religious.
Another related issue on which there are considerable empirical data is the effectiveness of courses in business ethics. Such research generally examines the relationship between business ethics courses and either self-reported attitudes about business ethics or maturity of response to Kohlberg-like dilemmas. The results are mixed, with some studies finding that students exposed to business ethics courses show more ethical or more mature responses (Boyd, 1981; Glenn, 1992; Hiltebeitel & Jones, 1992; Murphy & Boatright, 1994; Loe & Weeks, 2000; Luthar & Karri, 2005) and others finding a very limited relationship (Duizend & McCann, 1998; Conroy & Emerson, 2004) or none at all (Wynd & Mager, 1989; Borkowski & Ugras, 1992; Smith & Oakley, 1996; Martin, 2007). Many of these studies are flawed in not having control groups or control questions. Without control questions, students can be rated as “more ethical” by means of simple strategies. For example, a number of studies simply measure the degree of students’ self-reported condemnatory attitudes about hypothetical violations of ethical standards. Students may then appear more ethical simply by showing a bias toward regarding any presented scenario or behavior as ethically problematic – a response strategy that ethical training courses may tend to encourage, but which need not show any real improvement in moral understanding.
I have been unable to find any empirical studies attempting to relate business ethics instruction and real-world moral behavior.
The Present Research
The present research aims to provide the first small bit of non-anecdotal, empirical data directly on the question of whether professional ethicists behave any better than non-ethicists. In particular, the present research examines the theft and negligent treatment of library books. Are ethics books more, or less, likely to be missing from academic libraries than other philosophy books? I choose other philosophy books as the comparison class, rather than books in literature, chemistry, or some other discipline, and rather than the whole universe of non-ethics books, because it seems likely that by looking only within philosophy, the patterns of book use and the population using the books will be more closely matched, reducing the potential role of a variety of confounds.
I assume that the theft and negligent treatment of library books is, as a general rule, morally bad. Whether a book is missing for innocent reasons or instead due to negligence or deliberate theft cannot be determined from library records, but no such assessment is necessary if we assume that the rates of completely innocent loss are the same between the two groups. Furthermore, most loss is not entirely innocent, I suspect: One can handle library property with more or less respect and care, conscientiously keep library books separate from one’s personal property or mix them in. Many professors and graduate students, when they change universities, negligently or intentionally bring some library books with them. Even if a book is missing simply because it was misshelved by a patron without having ever been removed from the library, that reveals negligence on the part of the patron and a disregard of most libraries’ requests that patrons not reshelve books. Books specifically described in library records as having been paid for by the patron were excluded from analysis. Not all libraries display such data in their online records, but among those that do, books recorded as lost and paid constituted a small proportion of the missing books.
We should not assume, of course, that people who tend to mistreat library books are, on the whole, bad people – but it’s doubtful that there is any single measure that will serve as an index of overall moral character, especially in light of situationist findings in social psychology (Ross & Nisbett, 1991; Doris, 2002). The research reported in this essay is intended as no more than the first of a number of research projects that will explore the moral behavior of ethicists in a variety of very different ways. Two studies will be presented. The first examines the rates at which contemporary, technical philosophy books are missing from academic libraries. The second examines the rates at which classic pre-20th-century texts are missing.
Study 1: Rates at Which Recent Technical Philosophy
Books Are Missing
Method
Compiling the list of books. To generate the list of books to be examined, I used a list of book reviews from Philosophical Review (a leading philosophy journal) from 1990-2001. Based on book title and author, an independent coder – an ethics professor – coded the reviewed books as either (1) ethics, (2) non-ethics, or (3) marginal / don’t know. The coder was instructed to treat philosophy of law and political philosophy as ethics and philosophy of religion and philosophy of action as marginal. All books rated by the coder as ethics books (147 books) were added to the list, and one-third of the non-ethics books (155 books) were added to the comparison list. These lists were then supplemented with lists generated from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (October 2006) in the following manner. I coded Stanford Encyclopedia entries as either (1) ethics or (2) philosophy of mind and/or language (the only subfield of philosophy comparable in size and scope to ethics). Books were added to the ethics list or the comparison list if they were published after 1959 and appeared in the bibliographies of at least five encyclopedia entries in category (1) or (2). Seventy-six ethics books and 63 non-ethics books met the criteria, for a final list of 206 ethics books and 213 non-ethics books, with a skew toward philosophy of mind and language among the non-ethics books. Seventeen ethics books appeared on both the Phil Review and SEP lists, as did five non-ethics books. The low overlap among the non-ethics books was not due to any disproportion in the sample but rather due to the fact that only one-third of the non-ethics Phil Review books were listed. Twenty-four of the SEP non-ethics books were reviewed in Phil Review between 1990 and 2001.
Most of the books on both lists are virtually unknown outside of philosophy. Alphabetically by title, the first five ethics books are: After Virtue (MacIntyre), Against the Ethicists (Sextus Empiricus, trans. Bett), Alexander of Aphrodisias: Ethical Problems (trans. Dooley), Altruism (ed. Paul), and Am I My Parents’ Keeper? (Daniels). The first five non-ethics books are Abstract Objects (Hale), Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect (Davidson), Appearance and Reality (Hacker), Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity (Blumenthal), and Aristotle on Perception (Everson). Among the most widely known ethics books included are A Theory of Justice (Rawls), Concept of Law (Hart), and In a Different Voice (Gilligan). Among the most widely known non-ethics books are Naming and Necessity (Kripke), Consciousness Explained (Dennett), and Word and Object (Quine).
The lending libraries. I examined the online catalog information
about the status of each copy of these books at 13
Collecting the data. A research assistant and I collected the ethics and non-ethics data in tandem between October 17 and December 13, 2006, when all schools were in fall session. We coded each copy of each book as either on shelf (neither checked out nor missing), within period (checked out but not overdue), overdue (overdue by no more than one year), or missing (including books more than one year overdue). In some cases, I called libraries to clarify the significance of their status messages. A copy of a book was considered delinquent if it was either overdue or missing; off shelf if it was within period, overdue, or missing; and held if it appeared in the catalog in any way. I excluded from analysis books in repair, books listed as lost and paid, and books whose status was unclear.
Results
Raw numbers and key percentages are listed in Table 1. Preliminary analysis suggests that the ethics books are more likely to be delinquent or missing than the non-ethics books, both when considered as a percentage of holdings (two proportion test, 3.4% delinquent vs. 1.9% delinquent, 95% CI for difference 1.1%-1.9%, p < .001; 2.2% missing vs. 1.3% missing, 95% CI for difference 0.6%-1.3%, p < .001) and when considered as a percentage of books off shelf (two proportion test, 13.4% delinquent vs. 10.5% delinquent, 95% CI for difference 1.1%-4.7%, p = .002; 8.7% missing vs. 6.9% missing, 95% CI for difference 0.3%-3.2%, p = .02). The most important measure, missing as a percentage of off-shelf – 8.7% for ethics and 6.9% for non-ethics – yields an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1. In this sample, an ethics book is 25% more likely than a non-ethics book to be missing, if it is off shelf.
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Unfortunately, there are several problems with this analysis. First, it turns out that the ethics books are older than the non-ethics books. The ethics books have a mean copyright year, weighted by number of books within period (off shelf but not overdue or missing), of 1987.5 for the ethics books and 1989.7 for the non-ethics books. And older books, as one might expect, are more likely to be missing, since they’ve had longer to disappear from the shelves. The median copyright year of an off-shelf book in this data set is 1990. 10.0% of off-shelf books with a copyright year before 1990 were missing, while only 6.4% of those copyrighted 1990 or later were missing (95% CI for difference 2.1%-5.0%, p < .001).
A linear regression model to correct for age proved to be unstable, with too much of the effect driven by a few very popular books from the 1960s and early 1970s (such as Word and Object, Concept of Law, and Theory of Justice) so instead the data were reduced, excluding from the analysis all books copyrighted before 1985. This resulted in a weighted mean copyright year of 1992.9 for the ethics books and 1992.7 for the non-ethics books. On this reduced data set, the percentage of books off shelf that are missing is 7.7% for ethics and 5.7% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.35 to 1. The result remains statistically significant (95% CI for difference 0.4%-3.4%, p = .01).
A similar concern can be raised about the popularity of the books. It is evident from Table 1 that the ethics books are held and checked out in greater numbers than the non-ethics comparison books. And the more popular books, as measured by number of within-period (non-delinquent) checkouts, are more likely to be missing than the less popular books: They are not only more likely to be off shelf but also a higher percentage of those off shelf are missing. 49.2% of the within-period checkouts were of books with no more than 23 total within-period checkouts across all libraries. Missing as a percentage of off-shelf was 6.8% for these less popular books. For the more popular books, missing as a percentage of off-shelf was 9.4% (95% CI for difference 1.1%-4.0%, p < .001).
I took recourse, again, to reducing the data. By excluding all books listed in the Stanford Encyclopedia (regardless of whether they also appeared in Phil Review), the better-known and most checked-out books were all eliminated, leaving only the most obscure books – which in any case are the books most likely to be checked out exclusively by professors and advanced students in philosophy and thus might be the best measure of professional ethicists’ behavior. After the exclusion, the book list contained 128 ethics titles and 149 non-ethics titles. Holdings and checkout rates become more balanced, as is evident from Table 2. Within-period checkout as a percentage of non-delinquent holdings is now 13.9% for ethics and 14.9% for non-ethics. Since the total number of missing books is cut from 446 to 118, the power of the test is substantially reduced. However, the estimated effect size increases – 8.5% missing for ethics vs. 5.7% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.48 to 1 – and the difference thus remains statistically significant (95% CI for difference 0.3%-5.2%, p = .03).
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In conversation, several
philosophers have suggested that the effect might be driven largely by law
students, who presumably borrow ethics books more often than non-ethics books
in philosophy and who, in some quarters, have a reputation for being
self-serving. The data do not bear out
this hypothesis. Four law libraries are
included in the
The two proportion tests I have been using assume the trials to be statistically independent. The present data might fail to be independent in two different and cross-cutting ways: Some books might be more likely than others to go missing. (Consider Abbie Hoffman’s [1971] counterculture classic Steal This Book [not included in this survey].) Also, some libraries might be more likely to have missing books – if, for example, their security is lax or if a single patron is stealing many books. (By the way, although only 13 copies of Steal This Book are held in the selected libraries, three are missing. Only one is checked out within period.) Unfortunately, standard statistical tests for independence cannot be applied here due to the small number of relevant events for each book and for the smaller libraries.
However, we can look at the data by book and by library, to see if just a few books or just a few libraries are driving the effect. If not, it may be reasonable to conclude that the independence assumption is approximately satisfied. I calculated missing as a percentage of off-shelf for all titles with at least five books off shelf across the sampled libraries, excluding the pre-1985 and the SEP titles (but including law titles). Though the power of this test is poor, the difference is high enough that ethics titles remain statistically more likely to be missing, with a median 8.3% missing for ethics, 0.0% for non-ethics (Mann-Whitney, adj. for ties, p = .046). The difference is also statistically significant on the full set of titles, excluding those with four or fewer off shelf (median 7.8% vs. 0.0%, p = .03).
Given a sample of only 32 libraries, many of which have only one or a few books missing, library-by-library comparisons cannot have much statistical power – especially since the data turn out to be nonparametric (since too many small libraries are only missing ethics books). Looking library by library, on the reduced list (excluding SEP and pre-1985 books but including law books), 12 libraries had more ethics books missing than non-ethics books and 6 had more non-ethics missing (the remaining libraries either had one of each missing or none) – a non-significant trend (binomial test, p = .14). Looking at the full list of titles, 25 libraries had more ethics books missing than non-ethics books and 2 had more non-ethics books missing. However, since there were twice as many ethics books checked out, overall, as non-ethics books on the full list, we should expect, on average, twice as many missing ethics books as non-ethics books in each library. A Wilcoxon ranked sign test of the proportion, per library, of (ethics books missing) / (ethics books missing + 2.0 * non-ethics books missing) vs. .5 is marginally significant (p = .07). Sixteen libraries were missing a greater proportion of ethics books than expected, while 9 were missing a greater proportion of non-ethics books.
No particular topical subgroup of books stands out post-hoc as particularly more or less likely to be missing than any other – not applied ethics, nor feminism, nor meta-ethics, nor philosophy of law, nor books with a demanding as opposed to a lenient ethical view. However, there are too few titles in most of these categories, too little power, and too many confounds (including age and popularity) to test this systematically.
Discussion
The results so far suggest that ethics books are actually more likely to be missing than non-ethics books in philosophy. Furthermore, the estimated effect size increases when relatively better-known books are excluded from the analysis, leaving only books likely to be checked out by professors and advanced students in ethics. It does not appear that the results are driven by just a few books or just a few libraries. However, given the non-independence of the trials and the statistical marginality of the library-by-library analysis, the conclusion can only be tentative. Therefore, I decided to do a second study examining prominent pre-20th-century philosophy texts. Are classic texts in ethics more likely to be missing than other classic texts in philosophy?
Study 2: Rates at Which Classic Philosophy Texts Are Missing
Method
Compiling the list of books. I turned again to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The preliminary lists were composed of texts from the 19th century or earlier that appeared in at least five ethics bibliographies or five mind-and/or-language bibliographies. I removed books prominent both in and outside of ethics (such as Hume’s Treatise) and that normally appear anthologized with books of the other type (such as Hume’s Enquiries and most of Plato’s dialogues). Based on a perusal of the historical entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia, I chose to add Bacon’s New Organon and Kant’s Critique of Judgment to flesh out the very short the non-ethics list. All English and original-language editions were included; so also were anthologies in which the book in question appeared as the first-listed or most prominent work, unless the anthology included both ethics and non-ethics texts. I also made a second comparison list of Nietzsche’s most prominent works. Although Nietzsche is in some sense an ethicist (as well as an epistemologist and metaphysician), he condemns conventional morality. I thought it might be interesting to compare the rate at which his books are missing with the rate at which more traditional ethical works are missing. The final list of books appears in Table 4.
The lending libraries. I used the same
Collecting the data. A research assistant and I collected the data in late December, 2006, and early January, 2007, when most schools were between sessions, and then again in late February and early March, 2007, when all schools were in session. The Nietzsche data were collected only in March. Since undergraduates borrow these books at high rates, I thought it might be informative to compare between-session and mid-session data. Books were again coded as on shelf, within period, overdue, or missing. Multi-volume works were coded separately if the library had a separate status line for each volume, unless the work was split into more than three volumes. (Some editions of Aquinas, for example, are divided into many small volumes.) When volume data were combined, the highest coding number of all the individual volumes was used, with on shelf being 1, within period 2, overdue 3, and missing 4.
Results
As expected, a greater proportion of books was checked out in February-March than in December-January, though the effect was not large: 13.5% of the ethics holdings and 15.9% of the non-ethics holdings were off shelf during break, while mid-session the percentages were 16.7% (two proportion test, p < .001) and 18.4% (p = .02), respectively. As is evident from these percentages, non-ethics books were slightly more likely to be off shelf than ethics books, in contrast to Study 1. This difference was statistically significant over winter break (p = .01) and marginally significant mid-session (p = .08). Similarly to Study 1 (before the data reductions) ethics holdings (5541 mid-session) were about twice that of non-ethics holdings (2324 mid-session), so twice as many ethics books (735) were off shelf and non-delinquent than non-ethics books (374). The mid-break and mid-session data overall look very similar, apart from the slightly higher off-shelf rates mid-session and more copies of the Plato’s Republic found mid-session (1119 vs. 884, probably due to different search strategies). The remaining analysis will treat the mid-session data only, since the Nietzsche data were only collected mid-session, and since the missing rates for the Republic are substantially lower mid-session, bringing them closer to the median, and thus erring on the side of statistical caution.
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As is evident from Table 3, ethics books are about twice as likely to be missing in this sample as non-ethics books, whether measured as a percentage of holdings (2.8% vs. 1.5%, 95% CI for difference 0.6%-1.9%, p < .001) or as a percentage of books off-shelf (16.7% vs. 8.4%, 95% CI for difference 4.7%-11.9%, p < .001). The Nietzsche books are also more likely to be missing than the non-ethics books (5.6% vs 1.5% as a percentage of holdings, 95% CI for difference 2.6%-5.5%, p < .001; and 19.5% vs. 8.4% as a percentage of off-shelf, 95% CI for difference 5.8%-16.2%, p < .001). Measured as a percentage of holdings, they are more likely to be missing than the ethics books (95% CI for difference 1.3%-4.3%, p < .001), but by the more important measure of percentage missing among those off shelf, the difference is not statistically detectable (95% CI for difference -2.4%-7.8%, p = .30).
All libraries have at least twice as many ethics as non-ethics books missing. But there are also twice as many ethics books off-shelf within period. As in Study 1, this was corrected by comparing the proportion, by library, (ethics books missing) / (ethics books missing + 2.0 * non-ethics books missing) vs. .5. The difference is statistically significant (t test, M = .71 vs. .5, 95% CI for mean .63-.78, p < .001). Twelve of the 13 libraries are missing a greater proportion of ethics books than expected.
By title, the differences are also striking. Table 4 ranks the titles by missing as a percentage of off-shelf, with books with fewer than 25 total off shelf in brackets. With the exception of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic, which might be expected to be unstable with only 19 off shelf (5 missing), every single one of the 12 most-missing titles is either an ethics or Nietzsche book. Likewise, of the 8 titles least missing, only 1 is an ethics title – and that one is really more in philosophy of religion than in mainstream philosophical ethics. The mean percentage missing is 16.7% for ethics books (not including Nietzsche) vs. 7.9% for non-ethics (odds ratio 2.1 to 1). Even with the tiny sample size (12 ethics books, 9 non-ethics books), this difference in means is statistically significant (t test, 95% CI for difference 2.1%-15.7%, p = .01). Also, Nietzsche’s three books are right in the middle of the pack among ethics titles.
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The lists can be made more comparable by cutting the outliers: books with fewer than 25 off shelf (see Table 4) and those with more than 100 (Aristotle, Hobbes, and Plato). The eight remaining ethics books have an average of 402 held, 62.5 off shelf, and 11.4 missing. The six remaining non-ethics books have an average of 329 held, 61.5 off shelf, and 4.8 missing. Missing as a percentage of off-shelf is thus 18.2% for ethics and 7.9% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 2.3 to 1. The difference in mean percentage off shelf that are missing remains significant (t test, 95% CI for difference 3.4%-18.7%, p = .01). Although the ethics titles still have higher holdings per book, the relationship between holdings and missing as a percentage of off-shelf is relatively small and statistically undetectable. (For the full list of ethics books r = .18, p = .53; for non-ethics books, r = .09, p = .80.) The difference in means remains if missing is calculated as a percentage of holdings (mean 2.6% vs. 1.3%, odds ratio 2.0, 95% CI for difference 0.2%-2.3%, p = .02).
Discussion
The results of Study 2 support the conclusion of Study 1. Looking at this very different selection of books, ethics books are again more likely to be missing. The effect is so large and consistent that it shows up even in low power title-by-title and library-by-library analyses.
General Discussion
These data suggest that ethics books are more likely to be missing from academic libraries than other types of philosophy books. This effect appears to hold both for obscure books likely to be checked out mostly by professional philosophers and for widely read classics like Mill’s On Liberty and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. If these data are representative, a philosophy book not on the shelf is anywhere from 25% to 130% more likely to be missing if it is an ethics book than if it is not.
The effect does not appear to be attributable to law students, since law books and ethics books in law libraries are not missing at any greater rate than other ethics books. Nor does it seem that ethicists are simply more absent-minded than non-ethicists, since ethics books are not especially more likely than non-ethics books to be a year or less overdue (see Tables 1-3). Nor does the effect appear to be due entirely to undergraduate (and other) non-specialists, since the effect size in Study 1 does not decrease, and may actually go up, when relatively better-known titles are removed from the sample. The effect holds whether the data are analyzed by individual book copy, by title, or by library. Furthermore, it does not appear that books endorsing conventional morality are any less likely to be missing than books challenging conventional morality: Kant and Mill are missing as much as Nietzsche, Rawls as much as Williams.
With respect to their treatment of library books, then, it does not appear that the people reading philosophical ethics behave any better than those reading other sorts of philosophy; indeed, the opposite seems to be the case. It surely does not follow that ethicists and students of ethics generally behave the same as, or worse than, people interested in other areas of philosophy. To draw this general conclusion would require evidence from a diverse range of activities – evidence that has not yet been collected. However, in one domain in which ethicists could have displayed their superior conscientiousness, honesty, and concern for others’ property, they failed to do so.
There are potential confounds I made no effort to control. Readers might more dearly love ethics books than other philosophy books. Readers of ethics books might be poorer than readers of other philosophy books and so more tempted to theft; or they might be wealthier and so more willing to risk fines. Ethics books may take longer to read and so be more likely to leave the campus; or they may be more pleasant to read and so more exposed to the hazards of the cafe, the beach, and the bedstand. They may be assigned for different sorts of courses. They may have been more popular ten years ago than they are now. They may be more likely reported missing if a patron can’t find them on the shelf. They may be more likely to be borrowed by the patron’s friends and spouses. Thus the present data are at best only suggestive. Yet the fact that the data run consistently in the opposite direction of the predicted effect implies that such confounding factors must be large if these data are to be consistent with ethicists’ being actually in general more conscientious with their library books than non-ethicists.
Some philosophers
I’ve discussed these results with profess to be unsurprised and untroubled by
the idea that ethicists’ moral behavior is no better than non-ethicists’, for
ethics, they say, is an abstract discipline with little connection to everyday
life. But that’s not how Aristotle,
Kant, and Mill see it – or Nussbaum, or Moody-Adams, or many of the other
ethicists whose books are included in these studies. To think that daily professional reflection
on the virtues, on the Kantian maxims, on both general principles and specific
instances of moral right and wrong, should have overall no positive effect on one’s moral behavior, and maybe even a
negative effect – to think that students reading Kant for the first time and
reflecting on the importance of honesty and of acting on universalizable maxims,
many of whom have specifically chosen to study ethics, should be just as likely
as students reading Nietzsche, and considerably more likely than students
reading Bacon or Descartes, to mishandle or even deliberately steal library
property, is highly cynical. Is there no
point in moral reflection, no moral benefit to be gained from sustained consideration
of ethical problems and principles? Is
people’s behavior completely unaltered by studying Aristotle, Kant, and Mill,
despite those philosophers’ hopes?
Unfortunately, to interpret the bearing of the current data on this
larger question requires a body of research that does not yet exist.
References
Aristotle
(4th c. BCE/1962). Nicomachean ethics. Trans. M. Ostwald.
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Table 1
Study 1: all surveyed ethics and non-ethics books
|
|
Ethics |
Non-Ethics |
|
Holdings |
14,517 |
9,608 |
|
Off shelf |
3,721 |
1,775 |
|
Delinquent |
498 |
186 |
|
Missing |
323 |
123 |
|
Within period as % of non-delinquent holdings |
23.0% |
16.9% |
|
Delinquent as % of holdings |
3.4% |
1.9% |
|
Missing as % of holdings |
2.2% |
1.3% |
|
Delinquent as % of off-shelf |
13.4% |
10.5% |
|
Overdue as % of off-shelf |
4.7% |
3.5% |
|
Missing as % of off-shelf |
8.7% |
6.9% |
Table 2
Study 1: older and more popular books
excluded
|
|
Ethics |
Non-Ethics |
|
Holdings |
5,040 |
5,601 |
|
Off shelf |
781 |
911 |
|
Delinquent |
94 |
91 |
|
Missing |
66 |
52 |
|
Within period as % of non-delinquent holdings |
13.9% |
14.9% |
|
Delinquent as % of holdings |
1.9% |
1.6% |
|
Missing as % of holdings |
1.3% |
0.9% |
|
Delinquent as % of off-shelf |
12.0% |
10.0% |
|
Overdue as % of off-shelf |
3.6% |
4.3% |
|
Missing as % of off-shelf |
8.5% |
5.7% |
Table 3:
Classic texts
|
|
Ethics |
Non-Ethics |
Nietzsche |
|
Holdings |
5,541 |
2,324 |
1,035 |
|
Off shelf |
926 |
427 |
298 |
|
Delinquent |
191 |
53 |
63 |
|
Missing |
155 |
36 |
58 |
|
Within period as % of non-delinquent holdings |
13.7% |
16.5% |
24.2% |
|
Missing as % of holdings |
2.8% |
1.5% |
5.6% |
|
Overdue as % of off-shelf |
3.9% |
4.0% |
1.7% |
|
Missing as % of off-shelf |
16.7% |
8.4% |
19.5% |
Table 4
Classics texts, by title
|
Author, Title |
Missing as % of off-shelf |
Ethics / Non / Nietzsche |
|
[Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint] |
0.0% |
Non |
|
[Frege, Translations from the Philosophical Writings] |
0.0% |
Non |
|
Bacon, New Organon |
3.4% |
Non |
|
Kant, Critique of Judgment |
3.8% |
Non |
|
Descartes, Meditations |
5.6% |
Non |
|
Aquinas, Summa Theologica |
5.9% |
Ethics |
|
James, Principles of Psychology |
7.1% |
Non |
|
[ |
9.5% |
Non |
|
[Kant, Metaphysics of Morals] |
10.0% |
Ethics |
|
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason |
10.3% |
Ethics |
|
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason |
10.6% |
Non |
|
Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation |
11.1% |
Ethics |
|
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding |
12.1% |
Non |
|
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics |
14.8% |
Ethics |
|
Hobbes, Leviathan |
15.0% |
Ethics |
|
Plato, Republic |
15.8% |
Ethics |
|
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra |
15.9% |
Nietzsche |
|
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals |
16.2% |
Ethics |
|
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil |
18.9% |
Nietzsche |
|
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals |
21.8% |
Nietzsche |
|
Mill, On |
23.2% |
Ethics |
|
Rousseau, Social Contract |
23.5% |
Ethics |
|
Locke, Two Treatises of Government / Second Treatise |
23.8% |
Ethics |
|
[Frege: Foundations of Arithmetic] |
26.3% |
Non |
|
Mill, Utilitarianism |
31.3% |
Ethics |
Author Note
Eric
Schwitzgebel, Department of Philosophy,
Correspondence
concerning this article should be addressed to Eric Schwitzgebel, Department of
Philosophy,
*** Acknowledgements ***