Jake Young is a 
Janet has been discussing why scientists are reluctant to discuss ethics in science. One of her arguments is that scientists feel that the majority of ethical standards are being imposed from the outside rather than being adopted internally.
So here is an idea. Being a MD-PhD, I am a culture strattler. One of the things that I have noticed about medical culture is that in medical culture there is what I would call an occupational ethics -- a set of standards that have been debated and generally accepted -- for doctors. We take lots of classes about how to deal ethically with a variety of challenging situations -- like for instance when the patient is unpleasant as a person or when their is a debate about whether the patient is competent to make his own decisions. These sessions prepare us for a world that is often ethically gray.
I would propose that we as scientists need a set of internally generated occupational ethics.
What would be good principles to include in our set of ethics? Let's start a debate on some ideas.
1) Scientists should discuss facts in good faith. They should represent what is known in a field accurately to the best of their ability, and they should not exclude when a subject is not known or poorly understood.
2) Science being viewed as credible and impartial is a public good. Scientists should behave in a manner that over the long-term enhances the credibility of science overall. (This would prohibit plagarism, falsification, fraud, and patently biased or political behavior.)
3) Scientists should be rewarded in proportion to their contribution.
Any other ideas...
Comments
One problem is that the notion of "science ethics" is ambiguous: it means (1) ethically proper means of conducting research, and (2) living up to moral requirements of being an expert in empirical matters in a social context. You can think of it as internal and external ethics. If we move to the sort of occupational guild picture you suggest, my fear is that all we will get is an enumeration of good housekeeping rules of thumb for inside the lab etiquette. The hard questions seem mostly to be in the intersection of the science and the broader society. These are the tricky, messy issues and we need scientists deeply committed to participating in them. Unfortunately, it seems that the reward structure actively discourages particpation in these wider cultural discussions, instead preferring insular communication between specialists only -- in other words, want tenure, promotions, prestige?...don't worry about the big questions, focus all your energy on the big journals. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive, but the public aspect of the job is seen as unnecessary or even unsavory. How to change that seems to me to be a crucial element of this discussion.
Posted by: SteveG | June 27, 2006 9:46 AM