An empirical perspective on moral expertise: Evidence from a global study of philosophers

Abstract

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.

1. INTRODUCTION

The question regarding the benefits of philosophy for its practitioners and general society is as old as philosophy itself. Plato famously argued for the advantage of philosophers in adjudicating moral matters, advocating their public role as philosopher kings. This discussion of philosophers’ putative moral expertise has gained renewed attention with the increased research into bioethics. It emerged from the need to address the moral questions that stem from medical and technological developments of recent decades. Philosophers have been considered moral experts, who can assist in dealing with such questions, and there is growing evidence regarding their advisory activity on such matters.¹ However, it is still debated, even among philosophers themselves, whether and what sort of moral expertise philosophers possess.

Some scholars affirm the Platonic view and argue for philosophers’ privileged ability to analyze moral problems and to judge what ought to be done.² However, scholars in recent bioethical literature have questioned this view. Some reject altogether the notion that philosophers have an advantage in adjudicating moral matters,³ while others subscribe to a narrow view of philosophers’ moral expertise, which pertains to abilities to analyze and conceptualize moral problems, but not to judge what their solution is.⁴

Inspired by the experimental philosophy literature, we take a different approach to the theoretical dispute about philosophers’ moral expertise. We offer an empirical perspective on this debate by utilizing a novel and global study among 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries. This study is the most comprehensive study to date on philosophers’ views in terms of number of participants and international diversity. Our data offers a worldwide picture of what philosophers believe regarding their moral expertise and provides insights into the sources of existing disagreement. The analysis of the data is guided by a conceptual framework, which maps their views on moral expertise across two dimensions of philosophers’ putative moral capacities: their ability (a) to analyze and (b) to judge moral problems.

We analyze two dimensions of philosophers’ beliefs regarding moral expertise. First, we explore the distribution of their views on this subject. Our findings suggest that the vast majority of philosophers evaluate the ability of philosophers to analyze moral problems favorably, while the point of contention pertains to whether philosophers are also capable adjudicators of such problems. The findings indicate that the view that philosophers possess an extensive ability for moral judgment is significantly the most common among philosophers.

Second, we empirically evaluate a recent criticism of the view that philosophers are only expert moral analyzers, rather than judgers. According to this criticism, this view is inconsistent as it ignores the interconnection between the capacities to analyze and judge.⁵ We found that philosophers see the capacities to analyze and to judge moral problems as going hand with hand, revealing a strong and linear association between their beliefs in both of these capacities. The relationship suggests that an increase in one's belief in the moral analysis ability of philosophers is associated with an increase in moral judgment ability throughout the range of beliefs in moral analysis—from low levels to high. It also indicates that enhanced ability for moral analysis is not merely a necessary condition for judgment ability.

In the following section, we review the debate over philosophers’ moral expertise and present our conceptual framework. Next, we present the method of the study, which uses the conceptual framework to operationalize philosophers’ beliefs on this subject. In the Results section we present our findings, and, in the concluding section, we discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on moral expertise, and more generally for experimental philosophy.

2. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The literature commonly distinguishes between two types of moral expertise. Narrow moral expertise assumes an enhanced ability to analyze, understand, and conceptualize moral problems. Broad moral expertise encompasses the narrow version, and further assumes enhanced ability to know what is morally right.⁶

Scholars have debated whether and which of these two types of moral expertise philosophers possess. Some argue for philosophers’ moral expertise in its broader sense.⁷ Notably, Singer⁸ presents a representative argument in favor of this view. Due to their training and profession, philosophers possess more comprehensive knowledge of moral theories, better logical skills, and more time to think about moral matters. These possessions grant them an epistemic advantage in judging moral problems. Forming a sound moral judgment is not an easy task; it includes gathering information, selecting what information is relevant, and combining this information with the relevant moral knowledge. As he argues, “someone familiar with moral concepts and with moral arguments, who has ample time to gather information and think about it, may reasonably be expected to reach a soundly based conclusion more often.”⁹

Other scholars have rejected Singer's argument and contended that philosophers are moral experts only in the narrow sense. Philosophers are not moral problem solvers who can point to what ought to be done, but rather observers or inquirers who can enhance the thinking on the moral problem at hand. Their experience with different moral questions, arguments, and perspectives renders them more sensitive to a situation's laden values, to those who might be affected by it, and to the moral difficulties of possible solutions.¹⁰ These scholars ground their arguments on different meta‐ethical standpoints. Archard,¹¹ for example, argues that philosophers rely on common‐sense morality as they construct their judgments based on sets of moral principles of ordinary people. By doing so, philosophers assume that they do not command moral knowledge that is not commanded by others, and hence they do not assume an epistemologically privileged position regarding the judgment of moral matters. They are not moral experts in the broad sense.

Other scholars have expressed a deeper skepticism and have argued that philosophers are not moral experts at all. Cowley,¹² for example, claims that philosophers do not have any epistemologically privileged position regarding moral matters compared with nonphilosophers due to the special personal nature of moral decision‐making, which cannot be conducted by external putative moral experts.

While the above is not an exhaustive review of the debate, we suggest that the views of philosophers’ moral expertise can be classified using a two‐dimensional matrix (see Figure 1). The dimensions capture the stances regarding philosophers’ superior ability to analyze and judge moral problems. The view that philosophers are not moral experts¹³ holds that they are neither better moral judgers nor better moral analyzers. The narrow view of moral expertise¹⁴ maintains that while philosophers are better moral analyzers, they are not better moral judgers. The broad view of moral expertise¹⁵ posits that they are better moral analyzers as well as judgers. Lastly, the matrix points to the logical possibility that philosophers possess superior moral judgment but no superior moral analysis ability, which appears unfeasible, and indeed we do not identify any support for such an argument in the literature.

Figure 1.

Matrix of the views of philosophers’ moral expertise

The matrix reflects a connection between the two dimensions in this debate: philosophers’ improved ability to analyze moral problems is a necessary condition for their improved moral judgments. The debate between the narrow and broad views is a debate on whether expertise in philosophy confers mere narrow expertise or also broad expertise. A key assumption underlying the claim for broad expertise pertains to the assumed relevance of moral analysis for moral judgment, whereas the narrow view rejects this relationship between the two abilities.

Relatedly, a recent criticism of the narrow view relies on a similar conceptual understanding of the debate regarding philosophers’ moral expertise, and posits that the narrow view ignores the fundamental epistemological connection between the capacities to understand (or analyze) and judge.¹⁶ Regularly, this criticism argues, we believe that those who better understand X are more likely to accurately make a judgment in which X is a relevant consideration. A physician who is better able to diagnose a problem will be better able to judge how to treat it. According to this criticism, the supporters of the narrow view fail to justify why this understanding‐judgment connection does not apply to the moral domain. If philosophers have an improved ability to analyze moral problems, they better understand such problems and hence, we should acknowledge their accompanying advantage in judging such problems.

Consequently, the following alternative hypotheses represent these two competing views on the relationship between the capacities to analyze and judge moral problems:

H1: Philosophers’ beliefs about moral analysis and judgment capacities are unrelated.

H2: Philosophers’ beliefs about moral analysis and judgment capacities are positively associated.

Our main purpose in this paper is to offer empirical insights to the debate over philosophers’ moral expertise, using a novel international data set of philosophers’ beliefs. We explore two aspects. First, by mapping philosophers’ beliefs regarding the two dimensions of moral expertise, we wish to reflect the distribution of philosophers’ stances on this theoretical debate. Second, we explore the relationship between beliefs in moral analysis and moral judgment abilities, allowing us to test our hypotheses.

3. METHOD

3.1. Sample and distribution

The study included scholars who published philosophy or ethics articles as they are categorized by the Web of Science database between the years 2010–2020. In total 139,446 records were retrieved from the database. The records were written in 33 languages, with most of them (72%) in English. However, only 87,189 (62.5%) of these records contained one or more email addresses. To assess the validity of these records and exclude nonphilosophers, records were separated into two sub‐sets: single author's records (68,564/78.6%) and multiple author’' records (18,625/21.4%). We manually searched online for the professional identity of 100 randomly selected email addresses from each group. We found that the sample of multiple authors’ records consisted of fewer philosophers than the sample of single authors (28% vs. 79%, respectively. For 15% of the single‐author's list and 11% of the multiple authors list, no information was found.) These results are not surprising due to the publishing culture in the discipline. Based on this preliminary analysis, only single author's records were used for this study. After removing duplicate email addresses, the list included 41,675 unique email addresses to which invitations to participate were sent. See Table 1 for a summary of the selection procedures.

Table 1.

Summary of the selection procedure

Retrieved records (records of philosophy or ethics articles, indexed by the Web of Science database, published between the years 2010–2020)
Retrieved records	139,446
Records contained email address/es	87,189
Number of authors per record	Single author: 68,564 (78.6%) Multiple authors: 18,625 (21.4%)
Estimated percentage of philosophers	Single author records 79% philosophers 6% nonphilosophers 15% unknown Multiple author records 28% philosophers 61% nonphilosophers 11% unknown
Final distribution list (only single author records were used to compile the final distribution list)
Unique email addresses	41,675
Valid email addresses (excluding inactive email addresses)	35,659
Estimated number of individual scholars (excluding potential multiple email addresses per scholar)	30,782
Estimated number of philosophers invited	24,318 up to 28,935

In total, 35,659 email addresses received the invitation to participate in our study, after excluding inactive email addresses. Because some scholars have more than one email address, we used first and last name matches to estimate the number of scholars on our list, which resulted in 30,782 individual scholars. To further estimate the number of philosophers in this list, we used the results of our preliminary manual search of randomly sampled single author records, which suggested that 79% of the records belong to philosophers and for 15% no professional information was found. Thus, we estimate the total number of philosophers on our list is between 24,318 (79% of 30,782) and 28,935 (94% of 30,782, if we assume all the unknown email addresses belong to philosophers).

Invitations were sent during May and June 2020. Participants were asked to fill out an online questionnaire using the Qualtrics platform. The questionnaire was in English, and focused on the public role of philosophers and their views on this topic. The survey was closed on July 1, 2020. After excluding nonphilosopher participants, 4,087 full responses to the questionnaire were obtained. The completion rate, calculated based on the estimated number of philosophers in the invitation list, is between 14.12% and 16.81% (for a full description of the selection procedure and the completion rate calculations, see Supporting Information Appendix S1).

3.2. Participants

Table 2 summarizes the participants’ personal and professional backgrounds. As the table indicates, only 24.22% (n = 990) of the respondents are women, which reflects the current gender gap in the discipline.¹⁷ The average respondent is 50.2 years old (SD = 13.6), while the youngest is 20 years old and the oldest is 93. Respondents reside in 96 countries, but approximately 75% of them are from a smaller list of 16 countries. Not surprisingly, the largest number of respondents is from the United States (n = 1,012, 24.76%). Most respondents, 72.33% (n = 2,956) are academic professors at different ranks and others are adjunct professors, postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, independent scholars, or hold other positions. Most respondents (53.85%, n = 2,201) hold a position in a philosophy department. Others are associated with a wide range of departments and schools, for example, law schools, political science, sociology, psychology, literature, history, and economics departments.

Table 2.

Participants’ personal and professional backgrounds

	n	%		n	%
Gender			Country of residence (top 16)
Men	3,060	74.87	United States	1,012	24.76
Women	990	24.22	Italy	325	7.95
Other	37	0.91	United Kingdom	271	6.63
Age			Spain	197	4.82
20–29	101	2.47	Canada	182	4.45
30–39	931	22.78	Germany	174	4.26
40–49	1,133	27.72	Brazil	161	3.94
50–59	893	21.85	Russia	118	2.89
60–69	598	14.63	Australia	94	2.3
70–79	344	8.42	Israel	94	2.3
80+	87	2.13	France	81	1.98
Institution a			Argentina	75	1.84
University	3,393	83.02	Poland	70	1.71
Research institute	348	8.51	Mexico	64	1.57
College	268	6.56	Colombia	63	1.54
Private company/business	125	3.06	Netherlands	63	1.54
NGO	122	2.99	Field of expertise a
Government agency/ministry	78	1.91	Moral philosophy	1,412	34.55
Other	247	6.04	Political philosophy	1,208	29.56
Rank			Epistemology	932	22.8
Professor emeritus	260	6.36	Philosophy of science	883	21.61
Full professor	1,294	31.66	Metaphysics	860	21.04
Associate professor	864	21.14	Aesthetics	475	11.62
Assistant professor	538	13.16	Logic	388	9.49
Postdoctoral researcher	331	8.1	Other	1,827	44.7
PhD student	124	3.03	Philosophical tradition a
Adjunct professor	187	4.58	Analytic	1994	48.79
Independent researcher	285	6.97	Continental	1,696	41.5
Other	204	4.99	Intellectual history	1,157	28.31
Department a			Other	716	17.52
Philosophy	2,201	53.85	None	239	5.85
Political science	264	6.46
Bioethics	176	4.31
Bioethics/medicine	170	4.16
Other	1,135	27.77

^a Choosing multiple options is possible.

We have a limited ability to determine how representative this sample is. Since the actual characteristics of the population of philosophers worldwide are unknown, we lack comparable standards. Comparing with samples of previous studies of philosophers cannot solve this problem as such studies suffer from a similar problem or focus on a narrower population, for example, philosophers in English‐speaking countries. However, we were able to conduct several analyses to assess the potential for selection bias either due to attrition or self‐selection to respond. These analyses provide no evidence for self‐selection to respond to our questionnaire. However, among those who responded we do find relatively lower attrition among men and analytic philosophers, and higher attrition among publicly involved philosophers. The latter finding is not surprising given that more involved philosophers faced a longer version of the questionnaire. Therefore, our sample potentially over‐represents men and analytic philosophers, and under‐represents more involved philosophers. These analyses enable us to rule out some sources of selection bias, but not dismiss it completely (see further description of these analyses in Supporting Information Appendix S1).

3.3. Measurements

3.3.1. Moral analysis and moral judgment

Respondents’ beliefs regarding philosophers’ moral expertise were based on their responses to four statements about philosophers’ capacities ranging from 1 (not having such capacities) to 7 (extensively having them). Three statements, about philosophers’ ability to (a) identify decisions that have moral aspects or implications, (b) identify the moral values at stake or in conflict, and (c) map the moral implications of different courses of action, were jointly used to compute (by a simple mean) an index for respondents’ belief in philosophers’ moral analysis capacity. Responses to these three statements are highly correlated (Cronbach's α = .94). Respondents’ belief in philosophers’ moral judgments was based on their responses to the statement that philosophers can point out the morally correct decision/action (see Supporting Information Appendix S2 for the exact wording).

3.3.2. Personal and professional attributes

We control for two personal attributes: age and gender; and four professional attributes: respondents’ affiliation to a philosophy department (n = 2,201, 53.85%), working in the field of moral philosophy, including meta‐ethics (n = 1,412, 34.55%), and association with the analytic (n = 1,994, 48.79%) or continental (n = 1,696, 41.5%) traditions. All these factors were constructed as a dummy variable (yes/no answer). Additionally, participants were asked to report their involvement in public policy or other advisory activities. For this purpose, they were asked to write down up to 12 activities in which they were consulted by various institutions or organizations due to their professional expertise as philosophers (see Supporting Information Appendix S2 for the exact question wording). 66.09% of respondents (n = 2,701) reported not taking any part in such activities. The remaining are ordered in decreasing proportions from 12.89% (n = 527) who reported one such activity down to 0.05% (n = 2) who reported 12 activities (median = 0, mean = 0.85, SD = 1.59).

4. RESULTS

4.1. Views of moral expertise

Figure 2 presents a scatterplot of philosophers’ responses regarding their ability to analyze (x axis) and judge (y axis) moral problems. As Figure 2 shows, most respondents are concentrated in the higher scores of the moral analysis variable (right of center), providing preliminary, yet clear evidence for a strong collective belief in philosophers’ capacity to understand moral problems (median = 6, mean = 5.78, SD = 1.30). On the other hand, the spread of respondents across the values of the moral judgment variable (y axis) indicates that the belief in philosophers’ capacity to judge moral problems is more contested, reflected by a lower average ranking and greater variance (median = 5, mean = 4.45, SD = 1.77).

Figure 2.

Beliefs regarding philosophers’ moral analysis and judgment capacities. The views of philosophers’ moral expertise are colored by rough classification (ranks >4 are considered as positive, i.e., philosophers possess the attributed ability). Points are jittered.

As a preliminary analysis, we coded the observations based on the four categories of the conceptual framework. For this purpose, the moral analysis and judgment rankings were each divided into two values: scores larger than 4 were coded as “belief” in the ranked capacity, while scores equal to or less than 4 were coded as “rejection” of the ranked capacity.¹⁸ The colored points in Figure 2 present a visual representation of this coding. Based on this coding we can visually evaluate the proportion of support for each of the views regarding moral expertise. 49.45% of the respondents (n = 2,021, 95% confidence interval [CI] = ±1.54%) hold that philosophers possess broad moral expertise, which reflects belief in both their moral analyzing and judging capacities. Second, 38.88% of respondents (n = 1,589, 95% CI = ±1.5%) hold that philosophers possess narrow moral expertise, which reflects belief in their moral analyzing capacity but not in their moral judging capacity. Third, only 10.72% of respondents (n = 438, 95% CI = ±0.94%) hold that philosophers do not possess moral expertise—neither moral analyzing nor judging capacities. Only a tiny fraction (0.95%, n = 39) indicated that philosophers possess judging capacity but not analyzing capacity, which is manifested in high scores for their judging capacity and low scores for their analyzing capacity. The differences between these four proportions are statistically significant.

This picture stresses that the crux of the dispute is about the sufficiency of improved moral analysis for improved moral judgment. Almost 90% of respondents maintain that philosophers possess a high ability to analyze moral problems. However, they disagree on whether it is also accompanied by a high ability to judge moral problems: while the biggest group of respondents maintains that it is (supporters of the broad view), the group of respondents who rejects this idea (supporters of the narrow view) is not negligible.

4.2. Moral analysis and moral judgment

So far, we have only described the distribution of philosophers’ beliefs. Now, we take a closer look at the relationship between beliefs regarding moral analyzing and judging capacities. Note that this examination does not rely on direct answers of respondents regarding the relationship between the two capacities. Rather, we infer each respondent's view based on the responses to the two questions. This tests whether respondents’ beliefs regarding philosophers’ moral judgment ability are statistically associated with their beliefs regarding philosophers’ moral analysis ability.

Figure 3 visually presents the relationship between beliefs regarding moral analysis and judgment capacities. It offers a preliminary, yet very clear, impression of how these two capacities are related. While each respondent takes a different stand regarding philosophers’ moral expertise, an overall trend emerges: the blue line represents a linear estimation of the relationship between the two capacities ordinary least squares (OLS). It shows a positive and strong relationship between the two: as respondents rank philosophers’ ability to analyze moral problems more highly, they also tend to rank philosophers’ ability to judge moral problems as higher.

Figure 3.

Philosophers’ moral judgment capacity as a function of their moral analysis capacity. OLS regression line in blue and LOESS line in red. 95% confidence intervals are represented by gray areas around the fitted lines. Points are jittered.

The red line in Figure 3 represents an attempt to capture the relationship between the two dimensions, relaxing the linearity assumption locally estimated scatterplot smooting (LOESS). This analysis enables us to assess the functional form of this relationship, specifically, allowing it to vary over the range of values of both dimensions, without assuming that the relationship is constant (linear). As Figure 3 reveals, the two lines (the linear and nonlinear regression lines) almost fully overlap. This analysis supports the proposition that the relationship between moral analysis and judgment capacities is indeed positive and linear. The strong linear relationship found suggests that an increase in moral analysis ability is associated with moral judgment ability throughout the range of moral analysis—from low levels to high. It indicates that enhanced moral analysis is not merely a necessary condition for judgment ability. Had it been only a necessary condition, a nonlinear relationship would be expected, with a moderate or even null association in the higher scores of moral analysis.

To further examine this relationship, we conducted two regression analyses—presented in Table 3. Model 1 is a basic analysis, which examines this relationship without controlling for any other factor. It is the numerical representation of the linear line in Figure 3 and indicates a positive and significant relationship in which an increase of 1 point in the moral analysis ranking is associated with a 0.679 point increase in the moral judgment ranking. The moral analysis variable alone accounts for 24.8% of the variance in the views of philosophers regarding the ability to judge moral problems. Model 2 examines this relationship controlling for other individual‐level factors and country differences. This model suggests that the relationship between moral analysis and judgment is retained even when controlling for other demographic and professional factors such as gender, age, position in a philosophy department, expertise in moral philosophy, and association with the continental or analytic tradition.¹⁹ The relationship between moral analysis and judgment is more than five times stronger than the second strongest relationship included in this model—the analytic tradition (see the standardized model in Supporting Information Appendix S3, which enables such a comparison of the strength of the relationships of moral judgment with different independent variables).

Table 3.

Regression models for moral judgment as a function of moral analysis and personal and professional factors

	Moral judgment
	(1)	(2)
Moral analysis	.679***	.705***
	(.018)	(.018)
Men		−.053
		(.054)
Age		.010***
		(.002)
Philosophy department		.070
		(.049)
Moral philosophy		.098*
		(.050)
Analytic tradition		−.343***
		(.052)
Continental tradition		.081
		(.051)
Public involvement		.058***
		(.015)
Constant	.524***	−.232
	(.109)	(.214)
Country fixed‐effect	No	Yes
Observations	4,087	4,087
R 2	.248	.342
Adjusted R 2	.248	.325
Residual SE	1.537 (df = 4,085)	1.456 (df = 3,983)
F statistic	1,350.690*** (df = 1; 4,085)	20.113*** (df = 103; 3,983)

Note: Standard errors in parentheses.

*p < .05. ***p < .001.

The positive and linear relationship between moral analysis and judgment is also retained when testing for nonlinear relationships (see Supporting Information Appendix S3). To assess the robustness of the linear relationship between moral analysis and judgment, we conducted a series of regression analyses that estimate the interaction between moral analysis and a set of individual attributes in predicting moral judgment. We find no indication that this relationship varies across gender, age, membership of a philosophy department, work in the field of moral philosophy, association with the continental tradition, and public involvement level. However, we do find that this relationship is estimated as 10% weaker among analytic philosophers, yet even among this subgroup the relationship between moral analysis and judgment is positive and significant.

From Model 2 we can also learn that other personal and professional attributes are associated with philosophers’ beliefs about moral expertise. Focusing only on the attributes with a significant effect, the findings suggest that older respondents, respondents who work in the field of moral philosophy and more publicly involved ones, express stronger belief in philosophers’ ability to judge moral problems. In contrast, respondents who are associated with the analytic tradition tend to have weaker belief in philosophers’ moral judgment ability (see Supporting Information Appendix S3 for a more comprehensive analysis of the associations between personal and professional attributes and philosophers’ beliefs about moral expertise).

5. DISCUSSION

In this paper, we offer an empirical perspective on the debate over philosophers’ moral expertise. We relied on a novel international data set, involving 4,087 philosophers from 96 countries, to examine their beliefs on this subject. For this purpose, we developed a conceptual framework, which maps the views on this subject into a two‐dimensional matrix. These two dimensions—the capacity of philosophers to analyze and to judge moral problems—were used to operationalize the measurements of philosophers’ beliefs. Our analysis of these beliefs is twofold. First, we explore the two‐dimensional distribution of philosophers’ views on moral expertise. Second, we explore the relationship between philosophers’ beliefs regarding these two capacities. In this concluding section, we summarize our findings on each of these aspects, and discuss their potential implications.

First, the distribution of philosophers’ beliefs regarding moral expertise highlights that despite the recent skepticism regarding philosophers’ moral expertise, as expressed in the bioethical literature, the vast majority of philosophers do believe in moral expertise and in the contribution of philosophical training and experience to its acquisition. The view, which holds that philosophers are not moral experts, that is, lack an advantage in both moral analysis and judgment capacities, is held by a relatively small minority (estimated at 10.7%). Yet, the findings suggest that philosophers still differ regarding what their moral expertise consists of and highlight that the crux of the debate is not whether philosophers are better moral analyzers, as a near consensus of 88.33% exists that they are. Rather opinions diverge over whether philosophers are also better moral judgers. We estimated that 38.88% of respondents believe that philosophers are only narrow moral experts while 49.45% of them believe that they are broad moral experts.²⁰

These findings can primarily be of great sociological interest. They map the views of a global sample of philosophers regarding the ancient question of the merit of philosophy, reflect what philosophers think their profession enables them to do, and consequently, what they might contribute to society. As our findings indicate, for its practitioners, philosophy is not merely an abstract reflection, but also an endeavor that facilitates moral capabilities that can be of use to handle the moral problems we confront in our daily lives.

Furthermore, we may carefully consider the possibility that the distribution of philosophers’ beliefs can also play an evidential role in the dispute about moral expertise. On the one hand, philosophers, more than others, may be best suited to accurately evaluate the merits and limitations of their capabilities. They have gained extensive experience in reflecting on philosophical matters, thus they might better understand what philosophical inquiry requires and how well they have successfully handled such tasks in the past. Their beliefs might express collective wisdom that indicates what the right answers are. As an illustration, the fact that many physicians, with years of experience in medicine, similarly trust their ability to effectively diagnose and treat illness, gives us good reasons to believe that they are. We have good reasons to believe that physicians will better know their merits and limitations. Therefore, the finding that the majority of philosophers believe that their training and experience grant them better ability to both analyze and judge moral problems offers some evidence in favor of this view.

On the other hand, the fact that many believe that a proposition is true does not prove its truthfulness. Even if all philosophers accept a specific view, it does not bar the possibility that they might all be wrong. For example, they might overestimate their and their colleagues’ capabilities due to overconfidence and vanity. After all, they are motivated to believe that they possess such moral capabilities. Unfortunately, it is not easy to empirically assess whether philosophers are indeed better judgers of moral problems. In contrast to many other domains of expertise, in morality we do not have any clear empirical evidence for the success of moral judgments.²¹ Several studies have tried to overcome this problem using proxy criteria such as reliability²² and convergence.²³ However, they present mixed findings and some of these studies were also criticized for using unsuitable criteria that experts in other domains would also fail to satisfy.²⁴

Hence, better evaluation of the potential evidential role of our findings requires further research, including comparison with other experts. Studies of experts in domains where clearer empirical standards for evaluating expert performance exist might help clarify to what extent experts overestimate their professional abilities. Indeed, experts’ potential overconfidence has attracted much attention in the research on expertise. However, the conclusions are subtle as experts sometimes express overconfidence, but variations exist across domains and tasks.²⁵ It is also unclear which studies or experts can be used as a valid analogy to philosophers. For example, many studies of expert judgment focus on predictive tasks (i.e., judgments about future events), which are dissimilar to common philosophical tasks.²⁶ Therefore, comparison of philosophers with other experts requires detailed examination that is beyond the scope of this paper.

Following Niv's²⁷ recent analytic critique of the narrow view, which argues that its denial of the relationship between the capacities to morally analyze and judge is inconsistent and counter‐intuitive, the second aspect we explored in this study is the relationship between philosophers’ beliefs regarding these two capacities. We find that regardless of participants’ particular beliefs, a strong and positive relationship exists between the two evaluations. In other words, philosophers’ evaluations of their moral judgment capacity strongly depend on their beliefs regarding their moral analysis capacity. This relationship is consistent across all the examined subgroups of philosophers, including age, gender, and professional attributes. The narrow view, which holds that philosophers are moral analyzers but not moral judgers, is a clear deviation from this overall pattern as it rejects this relationship.

While Niv's argument is mostly theoretical, based on arguments from epistemology and psychology, our findings offer empirical evidence for the collective intuition regarding the relationship between these two capacities. Notably, the problem of philosophers’ potential vanity or overconfidence in assessing their capabilities is irrelevant in this case. These findings express a collective agreement on the existence of a relationship between moral analysis and judgment capacities, not on the degree to which philosophers possess them. Even respondents who believe that philosophers do not possess these capacities believe on average that the two are related.

Lastly, our findings point at personal and professional predictors of philosophers’ beliefs about moral expertise: philosophers in the field of moral philosophy, and those who are publicly involved in advisory activities, tend to evaluate philosophers’ moral judgment capacity as stronger, while analytic philosophers tend to reject this view. These findings contribute to recent attempts in experimental philosophy to examine what shapes philosophers’ beliefs.²⁸ They can be further examined from empirical as well as philosophical perspectives. From an empirical perspective, they point to the potential of exploring the extent and nature of the causal relationships that underlie the specific predicators of philosophers’ beliefs we identify, since the observational nature of our data does not permit causal inference. For example, we cannot tell whether working in the field of moral philosophy boosts philosophers’ confidence in their moral abilities, or that people with such higher confidence choose to work in this field in the first place. From a philosophical perspective, the findings on the predicators of philosophers’ beliefs may foster future discussions on their relevant influence on philosophical reasoning as studies in experimental philosophy have used similar findings to challenge the allegedly universal nature of such reasoning.²⁹

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Supporting information

Supporting information.

Biographies

Yarden Niv is from the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University. He studies moral expertise, combining methods and perspectives from both philosophy and psychology.

Raanan Sulitzeanu‐Kenan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the Hebrew University, and former Head of the Federmann School of Public Policy. His research interests include political behavior, behavioral public administration and policy, and empirical legal studies.

Niv, Y. , & Sulitzeanu‐Kenan, R. (2022). An empirical perspective on moral expertise: Evidence from a global study of philosophers. Bioethics, 36, 926–935. 10.1111/bioe.13079