Ethicists steal more books

Eric Schwitzgebel has just completed an exhaustive study of the behavior of ethicists. He had noticed that a large number of ethics books seemed to be missing from research libraries across the nation. Rather than leave that observation in anecdotal form, he began a systematic analysis of the data. His initial analysis showed that 1.25 ethics books were missing for every 1 book in non-ethics fields of philosophy. But that still didn't satisfy him. Perhaps ethics books are simply more popular, or perhaps the sample is biased because of the relative age of the ethics versus non-ethics books. So Schwitzgebel conducted a more extensive analysis, eliminating factors for three separate concerns:

(1) Older books are more likely to be missing, and the ethics books were on average a couple years older than the non-ethics books.

I addressed this concern by eliminating from the sample all books published prior to 1985. This brought the average age of the books to the same year (1992.9 for ethics, 1992.7 for non-ethics). On these reduced data, the ethics books were still more likely to be missing: 7.7% to 5.7%, for an odds ratio of 1.35 to 1 (p = .015).

(2) Ethics books are more likely to be checked out than non-ethics books in philosophy, and there is a tendency for books that are more checked out to have a higher percentage of the off-shelf books missing -- not just a higher percentage of the holdings missing, but a higher ratio of missing to off-shelf-but-not-missing.

I addressed this concern by further reducing the sample, eliminating all the "popular" ethics and non-ethics books -- those cited at least 5 times in the relevant entries of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (This left only fairly obscure books, presumably known to and borrowed by only professors and advanced students in the field.) This actually seems to have increased the effect: 8.5% to 5.7%, for an odds ratio of 1.48 to 1 (p = .026).

In an attempt to behave ethically, I didn't steal Schwitzgebel's entire post. You'll have to visit his blog for the rest.

In other news:

• More ethics: Was Milgram's experiment ethical the first time it was done? What about when it was done a second time?
• iRobot builds a platform anyone can use to customize their personal robot
• A pathway is identified that may pave the way for memory-enhancing drugs
• But since memory is not an exact record of the past, what exactly would we be enhancing?