"One might suppose that ethicists would behave with particular moral scruple," begins the little monograph, looking you straight in the eye while snorting and grinning, textily. The two co-authors, philosophy professors who specialise in ethics, thus embark on what they call a "preliminary investigation" of their fellow ethics experts.

Eric Schwitzgebel of the University of California, Riverside, and Joshua Rust of Stetson University in Deland, Florida, surveyed almost 300 attendees of a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Tell us, they asked in a variety of ways, about the ethical behaviour of ethicists you have known. Schwitzgebel and Rust offered candy to anyone who agreed to complete the survey form. They report that "a number of people stole candy without completing a questionnaire or took more than their share without permission".

The ethics experts in aggregate indicated that in their experience, on the whole, ethicists behave no more ethically than do other persons. The paper, published in the journal Mind, pauses for just a moment to suggest a broader context. "Police officers commit crimes," it says, "Doctors smoke. Economists invest badly. Clergy flout the rules of their religion."

Schwitzgebel also wrote a study, on his own, called Do Ethicists Steal More Books?, which elbowed its way into the face of readers of the journal Philosophical Psychology.

Schwitzgebel drew up lists of philosophy books – some specifically about ethics, others not. Then, using information available through computer networks, he examined the status of every copy of those books in 19 British and 13 American academic library systems.

Schwitzgebel looked separately at what happened to newish books (Buchanon's Ethics, Efficiency and the Market; Baron's Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology, Hurd's Moral Combat; and suchlike best-sellers), and to older ones (Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; Kant's Critique of Judgment; Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil; and other beloved masterworks).

It was roughly the same story. The ethics books, whether youthful or aged, went missing more often than did the not-quite-so-relentlessly-about-ethics books.

The youthful, "relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books".

The aged, "classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing". (For those older books, Schwitzgebel looked only at the American libraries, muttering that "the British library catalog system proved impractically unwieldy".

Recently, Schwitzgebel has written in his blog about what he calls "the phenomenology of being a jerk". He identifies two important components of jerkhood. "First: an implicit or explicit sense that you are an 'important' person." "Second: an implicit or explicit sense that you are surrounded by idiots."

To determine whether you yourself might be a jerk, Schwitzgebel suggests, look at those two simple criteria. He adds the almost mandatory thought: "I can't say that I myself show up as well by this self-diagnostic as I would have hoped."

Marc Abrahams

Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize