[MCllorf]

>"Moral (or amoral) behavior, I would think, requires intent."

That itself is not something all ethicists would agree with. Finally, my bachelor's in philosophy comes in handy.

I don't understand the point in even writing an article like this because it's impossible to begin without staking out your moral positions, and at that point 99% of the work is just writing a philosophy paper. I don't think you can even say that most philosophers would agree that moral reflection promotes moral behavior, because you'd have to get them all to agree on what moral behavior is - or in other words, you'd have to solve the problem the field has been trying to solve for the entirety of its existence.

[toast0]

> I don't think you can even say that most philosophers would agree that moral reflection promotes moral behavior, because you'd have to get them all to agree on what moral behavior is - or in other words, you'd have to solve the problem the field has been trying to solve for the entirety of its existence.

I don't have the philosophy creds, but I don't think you really need to agree on what's moral behavior to think that thinking about it may promote behavior inline with the moral framework of the contemplator, whatever that happens to be. Or if the behavior didn't change, perhaps the contemplator wasn't really reflecting on morals after all.

[MCllorf]

It does make sense to use "whatever the contemplator thinks to be moral" as a stand-in for moral behavior. My only quip would be that whatever the contemplator thinks to be moral and what actually is moral are not necessarily the same thing though. I suppose in that case the study would just be asking if ethicists follow their own rules - I've been out of college for a bit but I don't think common courtesy is a hot topic in ethics at the moment.

[toast0]

That's certainly an aspect that would make it hard to interpret the behavior; if few ethicists feel it's immoral to let doors close loudly, then all of their reflection wouldn't change their behavior; and it would be hard to determine people's beliefs.

[pessimizer]

That's how Schwitzgebel would see it: http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/ActBel.htm

Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs, or The Gulf Between Occurrent Judgment and Dispositional Belief

[sportslife]

An old moral philosophy joke, I heard, is: utilitarianism is probably true, but it's probably best that nobody actually believes it.