[ExI] Medical power of attorney for cryonicsts

[Anders Sandberg]

John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> , 6/12/2014 7:00 PM:



Are smart people more ethical than dumb people?


The evidence so far seems to be that they do commit fewer crimes (there might be a bias here that they don't get caught or that most smart crimes are nonviolent), students with poorer cognitive ability cheat more on tests (mean effect size 0.26), smarter people are more faithful to their partners (Kanazawa), smarter people cooperate more in prisoners dilemma type games, and they tend to be more long-term oriented (impulsiveness tends to correlate with doing bad stuff). So, yeah, smart people are more ethical than dumb people on average. 


On the other hand, Eric Schwitzgebel has fairly convincingly shown that *ethicists* don't seem to keep promises, follow social norms, avoid moral framing effects, or behave like one would expect a very ethical person would do (it all started with his observation that ethics books are stolen more often from university libraries). Being deft with arguing what is good might not mean you behave well. But this is mainly a problem for people who think that teaching ethics makes people nicer; ethicists would point out that the validity of arguments are independent of who makes them. 


Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20141206/9eebae52/attachment.html>