ABSTRACT

Eric Schwitzgebel, Fiery Cushman, and Joshua Rust have conducted a series of studies of the thought and behavior of professional ethicists. They have found no evidence that ethical reflection yields distinctive improvements in behavior. This work has been done on English-speaking ethicists. Philipp Schönegger and Johannes Wagner (2019) replicated one study with German-speaking professors. Their results are almost the same, except for the finding that German-speaking ethicists were more likely to be vegetarian than non-ethicists. The present paper devises and evaluates eleven psychological hypotheses (along with one from Schönegger and Wagner) aimed at explaining why ethical reflection might have motivational influence for this topic but not for others. Three hypotheses are judged to be plausible at this initial stage: generic emotional support, perception of cost as a source of emotional obstacles, and social categorization.

摘要

Eric Sc​​hwitzgebel，Fiery Cushman和Joshua Rust对职业道德家的思想和行为进行了一系列研究。他们没有发现证据表明道德反思会在行为上产生明显的改善。这项工作是针对讲英语的伦理学家完成的。PhilippSchönegger和Johannes Wagner（2019）与说德语的教授重复了一项研究。他们的结果几乎相同，只是发现说德语的伦理学家比非伦理学家更可能是素食主义者。本文设计并评估了11种心理学假设（以及Schönegger和Wagner提出的一种心理学假设），旨在解释为什么伦理反思可能对该主题产生激励作用，而对其他话题却没有影响。在这个初始阶段，三个假设被认为是合理的：普遍的情感支持，