Since ethicists are trained to reason explicitly about morality, we might expect them to behave particularly well. For example, we might hope they’d return library books on time. In 2009, University of California philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel examined the philosophy collections at 32 academic libraries. He found that contemporary ethics books were 25 percent more likely to be missing than non-ethics books in philosophy. Relatively obscure ethics books, which presumably are more likely to be borrowed by specialists, were almost 50 percent more likely to be missing.

“If these data are representative,” he concluded, “a philosophy book not on the shelf is anywhere from 25% to 150% more likely to be missing if it is an ethics book than if it is not.”

(Eric Schwitzgebel, “Do Ethicists Steal More Books?”, Philosophical Psychology 22:6 [December 2009], 711-725.)