The research of philosopher Eric Shwitzgebel appears to show that ethicists are less ethical. Katja Grace argues that that’s exactly what you ought to expect. Since ethicists are supposed to change our understanding of ethics, we should expect ethicists to behave unethically according to our common-sense understanding of ethics. If not, why are we employing them?
However, I think her argument is flawed.
There are two minor flaws. First, ethicists tend to behave less ethically across a wide variety of different measures. While it might be true that it is morally obligatory to talk during American Philosophical Association presentations, in spite of the general consensus that people who talk during presentations are dickbags, it would be very strange if it were also equally obligatory to steal ethics books, slam doors, and leave your trash behind in conference rooms. Surely common sense morality has to be right about something. In addition, these issues are rarely addressed in ethical debate; as far as I am aware, ethicists do not generally work on the subject of whether it is morally obligatory to talk during presentations, and thus it would be very strange if they’d collectively decided that it was.
Second, Shwitzgebel also included peer ratings of the ethics of ethicists. Presumably, if ethicists were consistently behaving according to a morality that makes more sense than common-sense morality, they would be rated by their peers as more ethical, not about the same. (Unfortunately, Shwitzgebel does not include a breakdown of whether ethicists believe other ethicists are more ethical than non-ethicists do, so it is possible that non-ethicist philosophers simply haven’t gotten the memo.)
More importantly, Katja Grace’s argument depends on eliding the difference between unethical acts and ethically neutral acts. Most formulations of ethics– “everything not permitted is forbidden” utilitarianism aside– have a category for acts that ethics doesn’t care about much at all. Ethics does not have a strong opinion on whether I drink coffee, tea, milk, or nothing in the morning. Ethics research might very well say that an act believed to be unethical is actually ethical, but it might also very well say that an act believed to be ethically neutral is ethical. Indeed, several famous points of disagreement between ethicists and non-ethicists fall in the latter category– most notably charity donations and vegetarianism.
Most people see eating meat as a morally neutral action and donating large amounts of money to charity as, if not neutral, certainly not obligatory. Ethicists are more likely than the general public to believe that eating meat and not donating to charity are both wrong. Nevertheless, the evidence appears to suggest that ethicists are statistically indistinguishable from non-ethicists in their meat consumption and charity donation habits. This is frankly kind of embarrassing, because you’d think at least the Peter Singer fans would drive up the average.
In conclusion, I think it is still probably true that thinking about ethics doesn’t make you a better person.
Thing of Things 
I suspect there’s a selection bias at play, in terms of the sort of person who is extremely interested in ethics in the first place. It’s entirely possible ethicists are more ethical than they otherwise would have been.
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An interesting argument, though I’m curious why you suspect that naturally less ethical people are more likely to be interested in ethics?
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Because in order for ethics to be interesting, there has to be something to explore, some knowledge to be gained. For most people, ethics is throwing bean-counting on top of common sense, ivory-tower nonsense with no real-world applications.
More saliently, ethics are only interesting if you think the answer might not come out the way you expect. If you already know the answers, the process for arriving at them isn’t very interesting.
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For children and teenagers, “ethics” is the category of books you decide to read in order to have fancy arguments available for why you should be allowed, nay, encouraged!, to do exactly whatever you already wanted to be doing. Sociopaths get pulled into Kant; solipsists get pulled into Descartes; etc. Once you’re there, you might find you have a knack for arguing about ethics and want to do it for a living. But you’re much more likely to be exposed to ethics in the first place because you wanted to “pick a faith where you weren’t living in sin.”
To test this hypothesis: find a culture that still does the trivium/quadrivium thing, where children are exposed to the thoughts of at least some (generally-known, non-propagandist) ethicists. See whether the ethicists of this culture are any more ethical than the ones in our culture.
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Good point. Like how therapists often specialize in their own disorders, etc.
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Perhaps the problem isn’t thinking in general about ethics. Perhaps there’s something wrong with the current culture of how ethicists are encouraged to think about ethics.
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My comments this last time this came up: http://lesswrong.com/lw/koe/rationality_quotes_august_2014/b76e
(Short version: I suspect any causal effect is dwarfed by selection effects.)
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Has there ever been a bioethicist who wasn’t a near-complete luddite?
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I wonder if familiarity with the field helps people become more comfortable with being less ethical. A lot of people have this sort of anxiety about doing something wrong: it worries them; they’re scared it means they’re terrible; they often need consoling after; etc. An ethicist is familiar with ethics, what it means if one behaves unethically, what the consequences are, etc.
Where one might feel strong guilt in petty theft, an ethicist knows that it’s probably not a big deal, the world will go on as it always has.
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The adherents to the descendants of Utilitiarianism might be particularly egregious here: thinking they can consciously “spend” goodness, and then can “earn it back” somewhere else, because utility is fungible. I mean, maybe they’re even managing that—but I have a feeling the study just looked at “how many unethical acts these people commit” rather than the total calculus of their net negative *and* positive effects on the world compared to regular people. (Likewise, when their peers are asked, they likely just come up with salient examples of their unethical behavior. Even if their peers generally have the impression of them being quite ethical, “potential tribal blackmail material” sticks in the mind as nothing else.)
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I have no idea why ethicists are less ethical, but I imagine that it’s similar to how mathematicians are (reputedly) bad at arithmetic.
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I would wager that, on the whole, mathematicians are better at arithmetic then the rest of the population. Mathematics (specifically the math that mathematicians do) isn’t about arithmetic so mathematicians would be better at this math then they would be at arithmetic and since arithmetic is elementary math, a mathematician is likely to consider themself bad at arithmetic. I also suspect that mathematicians overestimate the skill at arithmetic the general population has.
There are examples of people who are really good at mental arithmetic and this is a different skill then the skills mathematicians use in their work. Mathematicians aren’t good at arithmetic in this sense but I still suspect that they tend to be above average in ability. I also doubt there is a good analogy between this and with ethicists and ethical behavior.
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I’d guess that physicists are probably better in mental arithmetic than mathematicians are as it’s often useful to do a quick estimate of the result of a physical calculation.
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To be fair, though, physicists usually just count the number of zeros. If you want the exact number, you take a calculator.
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