[Unrelated news: I joined twitter. Follow me @jasonfbrennan ]

While I am saintly in word and deed, it looks like moral philosophers are not especially moral, as compared to other philosophers. Indeed, they may just hold higher standards than others, but then fail to meet them. (For instance, moral philosophers are more likely than other philosophers to say that meat eating is wrong, but they are just as likely to have eaten meat at dinner the night before.)

What does this tell us about moral philosophy itself?

When I was 18, before I’d taken any philosophy courses other than symbolic logic, I had a cartoony view of what moral theory was supposed to be. In my mind, moral theory was first supposed to prove that morality is rational, such that it would turn out that anyone who did anything wrong would always be making a kind of cognitive error. Second, it was supposed to provide an infallible algorithm for determining what to do in any particular situation. The idea here is what that if a sociopath read The Correct Moral Theory he’d be transformed into a saint.

After studying philosophy, I realized that’s not what it’s meant to do. Sure, there are good arguments for holding that it’s rational to adopt moral ends, though it doesn’t follow that morality and rationality are never at odds. And moral theory can sometimes provide us guidance on the ground about what to do, though, in the end, asking what Kantianism tells us about the day to day minutiae of morality is a bit like asking what Einstein’s field equations tell us about the path of a falling feather.

In the end, whether knowing or studying moral theory helps us become more moral depends a great deal on moral psychology. Why do normal people, i.e., people who are not sociopaths and who have moral concerns, sometimes fail to do the right thing? When I taught business ethics, I used to spend a 3-4 weeks looking at empirical work on this question. Here’s a class slide that summarizes a range of possible explanations:

My sense of the empirical work is that overall motivational failings and external factors tend to cause bad behavior more frequently than epistemic failings. Further, the kinds of epistemic failing that are most prevalent/important are moral blind spots. That is, people often act badly because they simply aren’t aware that something moral is at stake. We go through life largely on auto-pilot and simply don’t notice something that we’re in a morally charged situation.

If that’s right, then we shouldn’t really expect moral theory to make us better people. Moral theory is not well equipped to deal with the bottom two sets of causes. Rather, you’d want the tools of psychology, organizational theory, economics, and management theory to help with that. Moral theory is better equipped to deal wit the top row of problems, though it’s really directed at the top two bullet points, which aren’t as important.