Ethics 101
jstemwedel | September 11, 2007We're going to discuss this at a Socrates Café gathering next week, but I suspect there are current and former students and educators reading who have a view, so I'm opening it up:
Is extra credit fair?
You're free to consider the question from whatever angle you like -- fairness to the person creating and evaluating the extra credit assignment, or to the other students in the class (or in other sections of the class whose meanie instructors don't offer extra credit), or to the person electing to do the extra credit assignment.
You're also free to draw distinctions between situations in…
jstemwedel | August 28, 2007This is a follow-up, of a sort, to the previous post on why serious discussions (as opposed to shouting matches or PR campaigns) about the use of animals in research seem to be so difficult to have. One of the contentious issues that keeps coming up in the comments is how (if at all) such discussions ought to deal with prior bad acts that may not be representative of what's happened since, or even of the actions of most of the scientific community at the time of those prior bad acts.
My sense, however, is that the real issue is who we think we can engage in a serious reasoned dialogue with…
jstemwedel | August 27, 2007Lately it's struck me that when I post on the issue of research with animals, many of the comments I get on those posts see the issue as a black and white one. Mind you, these commenters don't always agree about whether it is the scientists or the animal rights activists who are on the side of the angels. However, many of them feel quite confident in asserting that all animal research is immoral, or that ideally all the judgments about what is necessary and appropriate in research with animals would be left to the scientists doing the research.
I can't help but think that there must be a…
jstemwedel | August 23, 2007Since you all were so helpful in response to my query about how engineers are different from scientists, I hope you won't mind if I pick your brains again.
Specifically, I'm after information about the sorts of engineering labs (or whatever the right engineering analog for "labs" would be -- projects?) freshman engineering students typically encounter.
What I'm interested in is the typical ways that the task for the students as envisioned by the instructor might go off the rails, presenting the students with temptations to do something to recover the hope of a good grade -- something of which…
jstemwedel | August 21, 2007Perhaps you've heard the news that Leona Helmsley died yesterday. Her obituaries have noted the the "Queen of Mean" came to be viewed as the embodiment of the greed of the 1980s (at least as it played out in the world of Manhattan real estate).
The public didn't like her much.
I have no real basis for making a judgment about whether she was a nice person deep down, whether she became a nicer person after doing jail time for tax evasion, or whether she was kind to animals. But I would like to have a look at something she was widely reported to have said (but denied saying):
"Only the little…
jstemwedel | July 25, 2007The news today from Inside Higher Ed is that the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to fire Ward Churchill. You may recall that in May 2006, a faculty panel at the university found that the tenured ethnic studies professor had committed repeated, intentional academic misconduct in his scholarly writings. You may also recall that the close scrutiny of his writings was sparked by an outcry at some of the political views he voiced (especially that the September 11th attacks were an instance of "chickens coming home to roost").
The mix of factors here -- a movement to remove a…
jstemwedel | July 3, 2007Planting incendiary devices, whether under vehicles or on doorsteps, even if you think the people you're targeting are doing something very, very bad.
Kant grounds ethical considerations in the imperative to respect the rational capacity in yourself and in others. Among other things, I take this to mean that when we see the ethical landscape differently than others -- including when we see others engaging in activities that we take to be unethical (because they violate Kant's categorical imperative) -- we have an obligation to engage them in a discussion where we ask them for their reasons…
jstemwedel | June 30, 2007A recycled post from the ancestor of this blog, before anyone read it.
In my "Ethics in Science" class, we regularly use case studies as a way to practice reasoning about ethics. There's a case I've used a few times involving research with animals where the protagonist airs some of her concerns (specifically, about her PI telling her to change the approved protocol several weeks into the study) to a (non-scientist) roommate. In our class discussions of this case, the question arose as to whether the roommate should even be counted as an interested party in the situation. After all, she wasn'…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2007Zuska sent me an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (behind a paywall, I'm afraid) that's more than a little connected to the thought experiment I posed earlier in the week.
The article was written (under a pseudonym) by an assistant professor whose nomination for a university award was torpedoed. By a member of his own department. Who was blocking the nomination of the author not out of any particular animus toward the author, but as a way to attack the department chair who had made the nomination.
What fun things must be in that department!
Anyhow, someone on the committee…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2007Because not every ethical matter involves serious misconduct, or even conscious efforts to grab someone else's credit, I thought I'd describe an utterly mundane scenario and canvass your reactions.
Let's say you've worked very hard on a project. You've been part of the organizing from the outset. You've done a lot of thinking and writing and rewriting. You've worked hard to build consensus. You've done loads of personal outreach to try to build a community around the project (including "cold-emailing" people you don't know personally). You've been the dependable facilitator. You've even…
jstemwedel | May 23, 2007Because I am engaged in a struggle with mass quantities of grading, I'm reviving a post from the vault to tide you over. I have added some new details in square brackets, and as always, I welcome your insight here.
I just got back [in Octiber of 2005] from talking with an outside evaluator about the federally funded training grant project at my university that tries to get more of our students to graduate school in science. The evaluator is here not at the behest of the funding agency, but rather at the request of the science professor here who oversees the program. Because, you know, he…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2007Today is our last day of classes before final exams, and it's looking like this semester is notably different from the nine semesters that came before it:
As well as I can ascertain, none of my students have committed plagiarism in any of their assignments for me!
Yes, that should be the normal state of affairs, but we are painfully aware of the gap between "is" and "ought", are we not? Some semesters, I've had to deal with multiple plagiarists. This term, no cheating-related paperwork for me.
Thank you, students, for restoring some of my faith in humanity. Be sure to eat healthy food, get…
jstemwedel | April 25, 2007Pencils ready? Here's a quick quiz; circle all that apply*:
1. You're a scientist and you've just published some research in a peer reviewed journal. You want:
a. Scientists in your field to read and discuss your work.
b. Interested non-scientists to get the important bits of what you found and why it matters, whether by powering through the article themselves or by getting a clear explanation of the article from a scientist.
c. No discussion of your article at all -- once it's on the page in the journal, there's nothing else to say about it.
d. All discussions of your findings to be based…
jstemwedel | April 2, 2007In case you somehow missed it: tech writer and blogger Kathy Sierra canceled public appearances after receiving death threats. In addition to the death threats, she called attention to some posts about her that were threatening in tone (though probably falling short of actual threats) and definitely mean on now-defunct sites set up by other A-list tech bloggers. Since blogging about this, SIerra has received more threats. A number of bloggers think Sierra has smeared the people who ran the now-defunct websites by not drawing a clear enough distinction between the death threats (which they…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2007On Abel's post on conscience clauses, Bob Koepp left this comment:
It's a pretty warped understanding of professionalism that would require professionals to violate their own sincere ethical beliefs. After all, someone lacking personal integrity probably isn't going to be much concerned with professional integrity. "You can trust me because I lack the strength of my convictions."
I think the connection between personal integrity and professional integrity is an important one, so here are some preliminary thoughts on it.
Joining a profession requires some buy-in to the shared values of that…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2007Abel at Terra Sigillata has a post about coscience clauses for pharmacists that's worth a read. In it, he takes issue with the stand of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), a professional pharmacy organization, recognizing "a pharmacist's right to decline to participate in therapies that he or she finds morally, religiously, or ethically troubling" while supporting "the establishment of systems that protect the patient's right to obtain legally prescribed and medically indicated treatments while reasonably accommodating in a nonpunitive manner the pharmacist's right of…
jstemwedel | January 30, 2007There's been some blogospheric blowout (see here, here, and here for just a taste) about a recent PETA ad that many viewers find gratuitously sexist. To me, the ad and the reaction to it are most interesting because they raise a larger issue about how we promote our values and how we choose our allies. From Michael Specter's article on PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk in the April 14, 2003 issue of The New Yorker:
Newkirk seems openly to court the anger even of people who share her views. "I know feminists hate the naked displays," she told me. "I lose members every time I do it. But my job isn…
jstemwedel | January 22, 2007In a post about curricular issues in genetics and biochemistry courses, Larry Moran raises some good questions:
It's almost a requirement these days that introductory genetics courses include a section on genetically modified crops. This invariably leads to tutorials, or labs, or essays, about whether GM-foods are a good thing or not. These discussions are usually lots of fun and the students enjoy this part of the course. Professors are convinced they are teaching ethics and that it's a good thing to show students that ethics is an important part of science.
In introductory biochemistry…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2007The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the University of California is getting serious about ethics -- by requiring all of its 230,000 to take an online ethics course.
Yeah, throwing coursework at the problem will solve it.*
Indeed, I'm not sure I'd even want to count this as "coursework" given the article's description of what the employees will be getting:
The course, which takes about 30 minutes, is designed to brief UC's 230,000 employees on the university's expectations about ethics, values and standards of conduct. ...
Although the course was developed to support an ethics policy…
jstemwedel | January 12, 2007Chad and Tara have spilled the beans on a highly classified backchannel discussion we ScienceBloggers have been having. Since the cat is already out of the bag (presumably a bag of beans), I suppose I'll chime in.
What basic concepts would you like me to explain here?
The idea, of course, would be for me to take a basic concept from my area of expertise and explain it in such a way that an intelligent non-expert would be able to grasp the important bits. As well, I'd want to explain why it matters to get clear on the concept, what it's good for, etc.
I'd be happy to entertain requests…