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dspeyer comments on Rationality Quotes August 2014 - Less Wrong
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There's probably a selection effect at work. Would a highly moral person with a capable and flexible mind become a full-time moral philosopher? Take their sustenance from society's philanthropy budget?
Or would they take the talmudists' advice and learn a trade so they can support themselves, and study moral philosophy in their free time? Or perhaps Givewell's advice and learn the most lucrative art they can and give most of it to charity? Or study whichever field allows them to make the biggest difference in peoples' lives? (Probably medicine, engineering or diplomacy.)
Granted, such a person might think they could make such a large contribution to the field of moral philosophy that it would be comparable in impact to other research fields. This seems unlikely.
The same reasoning would keep highly moral people out of other sorts of philosophy, but people who don't have an interest in moral philosophy per se might not notice the point. It's hard to avoid if you specifically study it.
If someone's studying moral philosophy in their free time, then wouldn't they be taking academic books on ethics out of the library?
Unlikely that they would make such contribution? Yes. Unlikely that they think they would make such contribution? Maybe no.
But I guess they probably don't even think this way, i.e. don't try to maximize their impact. More likely it is something like: "My contribution to society exceeds my salary, so I am a net benefit to the society". Which is actually possible. Yeah, some people, especially the effective altruists, would consider such thinking an evidence against their competence as a moral philosopher.
This could happen, but I think it's mostly dwarfed by the far larger selection effect that people who are not financially privileged mostly don't attempt to become humanities academics these days -- and for good reason.
Are you saying that financially privileged people tend to be less moral?
While that case has been made in a few isolated studies, I was more generally referring to the fact that people who don't come from money will usually choose careers that make them money, and humanities academia doesn't.
Wasn't sure about that, so I tracked down some research (Goyette & Mullen 2006). Turns out you're right: conditioned on getting into college in the first place, higher socioeconomic status (as proxied by parents' educational achievement) is correlated with going into arts and sciences over vocational fields (engineering, education, business). The paper also finds a nonsignificant trend toward choosing arts and humanities over math and science, within the arts and science category.
(Within the vocational majors, though, engineering is the highest-SES category. Business and education are both significantly lower. I don't know which of those would be most lucrative on average but I suspect it'd be engineering.)
I think there are several trade-offs there: engineering looks like the highest expected value to us, because we (on LessWrong, mostly) had pre-university educations focused on math, science, and technology. People from lower SES... did not, so fewer of them will survive the weed-out courses taught in "we damn well hope you learned this in AP class" style. And then there's the acclimation to discipline and acclimation to obsessive work-habits (necessary for engineering school) that come from professional parentage... and so on. And then of course, many low-SES people probably want to go into teaching as a helping profession, but that's not a very quantitative explanation and I'm probably just making it up.
On the other hand, engineering colleges tend to have abnormally large quantities of international students and immigrants blatantly focused on careerism. So yeah.
How does that fact impact the morality of moral philosophers as measured?