Considerable attention in bioethics has been devoted to moral expertise and its implications for handling applied moral problems. The existence and nature of moral expertise has been a contested topic, and particularly, whether philosophers are moral experts. In this study, we put the question of philosophers’ moral expertise in a wider context, utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. We find that despite the skepticism in recent literature, the vast majority of philosophers do believe in (...) moral expertise and in the contribution of philosophical training and experience to its acquisition. Yet, they still differ on what philosophers’ moral expertise consists of. While they widely accept that philosophers possess superior analytic abilities regarding moral matters, they diverge on whether they also possess improved ability to judge moral problems. Nonetheless, most philosophers in our sample believe that philosophers possess an improved ability to both analyze and judge moral problems and that they commonly see these two capacities as going hand in hand. We also point at significant associations between personal and professional attributes and philosophers’ beliefs, such as age, working in the field of moral philosophy, public involvement, and association with the analytic tradition. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about moral expertise. -/- . (shrink)

A recent empirical study has argued that experts in the ethics or the law of war cannot reach reasonable convergence on dilemmas regarding the number of civilian casualties who may be killed as a side effect of attacks on legitimate military targets. This article explores the philosophical implications of that study. We argue that the wide disagreement between experts on what in bello proportionality means in practice casts serious doubt on their ability to provide practical real-life guidance. We then suggest (...) viewing in bello proportionality through the prism of virtue ethics. (shrink)

In recent decades, the discipline of bioethics has grown rapidly, as has the practice of ethical consultation. Interestingly, this new recognition of the relevance of moral philosophy to our daily life has been accompanied by skepticism among philosophers regarding the existence of moral expertise or the benefits of philosophical training. In his recent article in Bioethics, William R. Smith suggested that this skepticism is rooted in philosophers' belief that moral expertise is inconsistent with liberal–democratic values, when in fact they are (...) compatible. In this paper, we provide a unique opportunity to empirically examine Smith's observation by utilizing and extending global data on philosophers' beliefs about moral expertise, involving 4087 philosophers from 96 countries. Our findings support Smith's theoretical observation and show that societal levels of support for liberal–democratic values are associated with greater skepticism about moral expertise. We suggest that these findings might be explained by the cognitive process of motivated reasoning and an invalid inference of “is” from “ought.” Consequently, the potential tension between moral expertise and liberal–democratic values is invalidly used for rejecting the existence of moral expertise, while its main and valid implication is for how moral expertise should be applied in liberal–democratic settings. (shrink)

This research provides evidence regarding the causal effect of group conformity on task performance in stable and variable environments. Drawing on studies in cultural evolution, social learning, and social psychology, we experimentally tested the hypotheses that conformity improves group performance in a stable environment (H1) and decreases performance (by hindering adaptability) in a temporally variable environment (H2). We compare the performance of individuals, low conformity groups, and high conformity groups in a four-arm randomized lab experiment (N = 240). High conformity (...) was manipulated by rewarding agreement with the group’s majority and imposing a cost on disagreement. The monetary implications of conformity impaired performance in a variable environment but did not have a significant effect on performance in the stable environment. Intragroup individual-level analyses provide insights into the mechanisms that account for the group-level results by showing that lower conformity in groups facilitates efficient adaptability in the use of social information. (shrink)