Are philosophers moral experts?

Aristotle, the most significant moral philosophers in the history of Western philosophy

In the abstract of his article “Are moral philosophers moral experts?”, Bernward Gesang writes: “I call people moral experts if their moral judgments are correct with high probability and for the right reasons.” It’s a theoretical article about the question whether there are moral experts. I don’t want to discuss the article here, but I think that it is reasonable to say that moral philosophers and in fact philosophers in general are moral experts in this sense. And if such philosophers are moral experts, they shouldn’t be influenced in their judgments by irrelevant factors. For instance, an experiment showed that holding a warm cup of coffee makes you have more positive attitudes towards a stranger than when you hold a cup of ice coffee. (see this blog). Other possible influences on judgments found are the presence of an odour, the presence or absence of direct physical contact or the order in which hypothetical moral scenarios are presented. (see Schwitzgebel and Cushman 2012, p. 135) Philosophers should not be influenced by factors of this kind, when judging a moral problem, for if so they don’t pass judgment for the right reasons. However, are philosophers really free from the influence by irrelevant factors? It’s what the authors just mentioned, Schwitzgebel and Cushman, wanted to know. “Because of their extensive training, professional philosophers are a ‘best case’ population for the skilful use of principled reasoning to influence moral judgment, and they have occasionally been explicitly described as such by psychologists”, and judging studies in this field, “[t]here is some empirical cause for optimism about philosophical expertise in moral reasoning”, so Schwitzgebel and Cushman (p. 136). However, because they had some doubts about the value of such studies, they decided to test the expertise of philosophers on moral questions for so-called order effects: Philosophers and non-philosophers were presented three series of two moral problems. Half of them got them in the order AB and the other half in the reverse order BA. Would the order presented have an impact on their judgments of these moral problems? If the philosophers would be experts, they should not be influenced by such an irrelevant factor like order of presentation, or at least less than non-philosophers.
One of the questions the test persons had to pass a judgment on concerned the so-called “doctrine of the double effect”: It is worse to harm a person as a means of saving others than to harm a person as a side-effect of saving others. An example of this doctrine is the trolley problem, which I have discussed several times before in my blogs (see here). In short it’s this: Switch: A driverless, runaway trolley on a railway is heading for a tunnel, in which it will kill five people, if nothing stops it. A bystander can save their lives by turning a switch and redirecting the trolley on to another track. However, then a man walking on that track will be killed instead of the five. Push: Alternatively, a bystander can stop the trolley by pushing a fat man from a footbridge on the track. The test persons had to read these cases either in the order Switch-Push or in the order Push-Switch and then rate the hypothetical action on a seven-point scale from (1) ‘extremely morally good’ to (7) ‘extremely morally bad’ with the midpoint (4) labelled ‘neither good nor bad’. (In fact the test was more complicated, but we can ignore it in this blog; see Source below). The result was, so Schwitzgebel and Cushman, that “Push was rated better when presented after Switch than when presented first, and Switch was rated worse when presented after Push than when presented first. Thus, respondents tended to assimilate their responses to the second scenario to their responses to the first scenario.” (pp. 141-2). This was the average result of all test persons, and we should expect, if philosophers are moral experts, that they would be less influenced by the order of presentation of the hypothetical cases than non-philosophers. However, what was the case? The philosopher maybe did slightly better than non-philosophers, but not significantly. Tests for the two other moral problems in the investigation showed about the same results. Even more, when the results on the three tests were aggregated philosophers appeared to be more influenced by the order of presentation of the cases than non-philosophers (p. 356).
Philosophers are supposed to do better than non-philosophers in passing moral judgments. We can ask what “better” involves, but anyway they should not be influenced by irrelevant factors. However, the investigation by Schwitzgebel and Cushman doesn’t support this view: Judgments by philosophers seem to be as much influenced by irrelevant factors as judgments by non-philosophers. At least, philosophers are as much vulnerable to order effects as lay persons, while they should be resistant to them. As the authors say: “Our analysis found no support for the view that philosophical expertise enhances the stability of moral judgment against order effects.” (p. 147) Since in the investigation the judgments by philosophers also appeared to be not fundamentally different from those passed by non-philosophers, it calls into question whether philosophers are really moral experts. Of course, there is much more to say about the moral expertise of philosophers and about the expertise of philosophers in general. For example, we may expect that they are better in logic and that they are better deductive reasoners. However, we should not overestimate their expertise, for philosophers are as human as humans are. 

Source
Eric Schwitzgebel and Fiery Cushman, “Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers”, Mind & Language, Vol. 27, No. 2 April 2012, pp. 135–153. Or here.