The Unethical Behavior of Ethics Professors

Are ethics professors more ethical than other philosophers? Eric Schwitzgebel, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Riverside, has written a series of posts over the course of several months trying to get at that question by determining whether ethics books are more likely to be missing from leading academic libraries than non-ethics books in the field of philosophy.

Schwitzgebel has now worked up his research into an essay. His conclusion: Ethics professors seem to behave no better than other philosophers. And when it comes to stealing books, maybe a little worse. Schwitzgebel found that modern ethics books (post-1959) are actually 25 percent more likely to be missing than non-ethics books, while classic ethics books (pre-1900) are more than twice as likely to be missing as other classic philosophy books. And when the list was reduced to the “relatively obscure books most likely to be borrowed exclusively by professional ethicists,” ethics books are almost 50 percent more likely to be missing.

So what ethics book is most commonly missing from academic libraries? John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.