Book review: The Ethical Chemist.

People sometimes worry that throwing ethics coursework at scientists-in-training is not such a great strategy for training them to be ethical scientists. (I've explored worries of this sort myself.)

For one thing, at many schools the existing coursework may be a fairly broad "moral issues" course aimed at understanding what it means to be a good person rather than a good scientist.* Or the ethics course on the books may have more to do with meta-ethics (the examination of various theoretical frameworks grounding claims about what is good and what is bad) rather than practical ethics. And if the instructor for the course comes from a non-science discipline (like philosophy or religious studies) and is teaching from texts from that discipline, there's a good chance that the student will ask herself, "What does any of this have to do with being an ethical scientist?"

Chemist Jeffrey Kovac's book The Ethical Chemist: Professionalism and Ethics in Science is a text that, for those charged with teaching ethics to chemistry students, aims to sidestep these worries.

Kovac's focus is not on the intricacies of various flavors of utilitarianism, nor on a laborious reading of Kant to construct the arguments that are supposed to support the categorical imperative -- the chapter devoted to ethical theories is just over seven pages long. Kovac presents the main gist of the theories to give students a framework for understanding how different ethical arguments are constructed, and why they sometimes clash in ways that seem difficult to resolve.

Another chapter discusses chemistry (and science more generally) as a profession. Here, Kovac develops the idea that the professional (and specifically, the chemist) is engaged in relationships that bring certain internal bargains with other members of the profession and external bargains with the larger society in which the profession is practiced. Describing these as "bargains" rather than "obligations" reminds the chemist-in-training that she is benefiting in specific ways by being a member of her profession. Her participation in the profession of chemistry (and the ethical duties that participation brings) make her part of a "gift economy" where open interaction (rather than quid pro quo) is what keeps the production of chemical knowledge moving.

After this spare but persuasive motivation of the idea that ethics have an important role to play in the practice of chemistry, Kovac gets to the centerpiece of the book: a strategy for ethical problem solving and fifty cases with direct relevance for chemistry students and practicing chemists. His systematic approach for approaching ethical decisions is:

1. Define the problem.
2. Collect data.
3. Analyze the data.
4. Make judgments.

There's no mistaking the clear parallel with the plan of attack scientists use for tackling scientific problems. One of the things I like about this approach is that it reminds us that objectivity is a goal in ethical decision making, too. Rather than just going with your gut feelings, pulling yourself out of the situation to attend to the precise circumstances (including who the other interested parties are and what their interests might be, not to mention which duties we have and what directions they are pulling us) can create conditions where it's easier to consider potential consequences of doing X versus doing Y. More than that, the backward step involved in such an analysis lets you formulate the situation in such a way that you can ask: "What would my respected colleague do here? What would my trusted advisor do here? What would a good chemist do here?" To my mind, these are much better questions to be asking than, "What do I suspect all the super-productive people in my field would do here?" or "What do I think I might get away with here?"

The case studies are concise but rich with possibilities, and range from situations one might encounter as a student taking chemistry classes (or dealing with professors) to issues that might face the academic scientist trying to make a discovery or the industrial chemist trying to shore up the bottom line. Each case is followed by a brief commentary that examines the central ethical questions of the case in a bit more detail and raises further issues that might be relevant in formulating a good response to the case. These commentaries don't identify a particular response as the best response to the case (which would kind of defeat the purpose -- why think through a response on your own if the commentary is going to tell you how to respond?), but instead use the additional issues and questions to add a level or two of complexity to the case. In other words, the commentaries encourage the reader to revisit their initial response to a case and refine her model of what a good chemist would do here by building additional considerations into this model. Ethical reasoning is not presented as an all-or-nothing activity, but an iterative process of getting closer and closer to behaviors best suited for the activities of the chemical profession (and the good of the society to which those professionals go home at night).

One really nice feature of the cases is that a number of them come in multiple versions, either representing the viewpoint of different participants in the situation or representing the viewpoint of the same participant given slightly different circumstances or information. For example, the first case involves a set of ten measurements, two of which are suspected to be deviant, and asks about ethical ways to respond to these measurements. The first version poses the question from the point of view of the graduate advisor (i.e., do you ask the grad student who made the measurements to do more experiments, do you publish all of what you got, do you publish everything except the two measurements you suspect are deviant?); the second version poses the same questions from the point of view of the graduate advisor whose student initially just showed her the eight "good" runs and then admitted that two of the measurements didn't fit the expectations; and the third version approaches the situation from the point of view of the graduate student who has made the ten measurements and must decide what to present to the boss (and whether initial measurements are warranted before anything is included in the progress report). Not only do the multiple versions of particular case illuminate that students and PI's may have different interests at stake (and interestingly different duties), but they also get the reader imaginatively into the heads of different stakeholders in a situation -- again, pushing them to strive for move objectivity in their responses to ethical challenges.

Since my laboratory life was in the world of chemistry, I found these cases realistic and engaging. I'm not certain that a student in biology or physics or another scientific field would find them all as compelling, but a good number of them concern issues that are ubiquitous in the sciences (e.g., how to ensure that your data collection and analysis is really objective, how to properly apportion credit in collaborative projects, whether it's possible to referee the papers of others in your subfield without crossing any ethical lines). And certainly, the reader who wants to cut to the chase and find out what ethics have to do with being a chemist will be very happy with the balance Kovac strikes between efficiently setting out preliminaries and strategies and then exploring a panoply of ways the chemist's professional life presents her with ethical decisions.
_______
* This is not to say that good scientists shouldn't also be good people. However, the specific details of each of the two projects may differ in interesting ways, and the motivations for being a good scientist may be quite different from the motivations for being a good person.