Previously Published Works

Schwitzgebel, Eric; & Rust, Joshua. (2010). Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors?. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(2), pp 189-199. doi: 10.1007/s13164-009-0011-6. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/887203mm

If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behavior, one might expect ethics professors to behave morally better than socially similar non-ethicists. Under the assumption that forms of political engagement such as voting have moral worth, we looked at the rate at which a sample of professional ethicists—and political philosophers as a subgroup of ethicists—voted in eight years’ worth of elections. We compared ethicists’ and political philosophers’ voting rates with the voting rates of three other groups: philosophers not specializing in ethics, political scientists, and a comparison group of professors specializing in neither philosophy nor political science. All groups voted at about the same rate, except for the political scientists, who voted about 10–15% more often. On the face of it, this finding conflicts with the expectation that ethicists will behave more responsibly than non-ethicists.