Ethicist Less Ethical

Over on Bloggingheads.tv, two philosophers navel gaze to consider whether thinking about morality make you a more moral person? Or just someone more effective at using morality to justify whatever they want to do. Eric Schwitzgebel finds the latter, for example documenting that ethics books in philosophy are more often overdue than books in other fields. Ethical philosophers are not more ethical than other people, merely especially talented at finding justification for doing what they want to do. Such convenient confabulation is no stranger to economics and finance, in than an economist can justify his preference for any reasonably popular economic policy via some published economics. It is is not as if the big questions in economics have become less disputed over the past century via theory, merely the failure of the Soviet Union, and other datapoints make certain arguments less compelling.