One of the things that came out of the discussion of the ethics of blogging about science at the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference was a clear sense that we don’t yet have general agreement about what kinds of ethics should guide science blogging — in part, because we haven’t come to an agreement about just what kind of activity science blogging is.
Category Archives: Ethics 101
Ethical considerations in the development of a male birth control pill.
“Why don’t they make a birth control pill for men?”
There are important considerations from medical ethics that might explain why a birth control pill for men has not happened yet.
Why ethics matter to science.
Regular readers of this blog know that I teach an ethics class aimed at science majors, in which I have a whole semester to set out ethical considerations that matter when you’re doing science. There’s a lot to cover, so the pace is usually more breakneck than leisurely.
Still, it’s rather more time for detail and reflection than I get in the four 50 minute lectures of the ethics module in the introduction to engineering class. In that context, my main goal is to persuade the students that ethical considerations aren’t completely disconnected from the professional community of engineers they hope someday to join (nor from the learning community of which they’re already a part).
But even these four meetings seem like a lot of time compared to the research ethics session I have facilitated the past couple summers (and will facilitate again this summer) for undergraduates doing summer research internships at one of the local private-sector centers of science and engineering. There, I get a whopping 90 minutes with the students.
With that kind of time pressure, you start stripping off the bells and whistles to locate the core message you want to get across. The core message, as I see it, is after the jump.
From the annals of academic dishonesty: a bad way to fish for extra points.
As the new calendar year approaches, I can’t help but anticipate the coming spring semester — and to hold out the hope that this one will be the semester in which none of my students commits plagiarism. Otherwise, I’m facing a perfect 12-semester streak.
Near the end of last semester, one of my colleagues related a tale of dishonesty so brazen that it struck us as one for the books. (Or the blogs, anyway.) The crowning offense was that it was committed in the course of an extra credit assignment.
The ethics of performance enhancing drugs in academe.
In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there’s a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled “Professor’s little helper,” this commentary explores, among other things, how “cognitive-enhancing drugs” are starting to find their way into the lifestyles of professors and students on university campuses, a development which raises some interesting ethical questions.
The questions are sufficiently rich here that this post will just serve as my first attempt to get some of the important issues on the table and to open it up for discussion. (There will also be an ongoing discussion of this commentary on the Nature Network website, in case you’re interested.)
Obeying the sign(s).
Signs are not the boss of me (or of you), but they often convey useful information. For example, this sign reminds of us of responsibilities that come with being a dog owner (or dog guardian, depending on your jurisdiction):
You’ll notice that the sign advising you to clean up after your pet actually dispenses biodegradable gloves with which you can scoop the poop. This is a sign doing everything it can to help you follow its directions.
Other signs are more focused on our safety than on getting us to behave responsibly towards others in our shared public spaces. For instance, this sign:
Follow-up: why did the cheating poll for frosh engineering students have those answers?
In an earlier post, I shared the responses freshman engineering students had made (via electronic clickers) to a few questions I asked them during an ethics lecture I was giving them.
My commenters are pretty sure I left out options in the multiple choice that should have been included.
In this post, I consider some of those other options, and I try to explain my thinking in formulating the questions and the possible responses the way I did.
(Also, I’ll include the questions themselves, since the Quimble polls I used to present them in the original post seem not to be working at the moment.)
What freshman engineering students think about cheating.
In the freshman introduction to engineering class, where I am teaching the ethics module, the students have electronic clickers with which to respond in real time to (multiple choice) questions posed to them in lecture. I took advantage of this handy technology to get their responses to a few questions on cheating. I’m presenting the questions here in poll form so you can play along at home:
var all_polls = document.getElementsByClassName(‘quimble_poll_div’);
for (var i = 0; i < all_polls.length; i++) {
all_polls[i].style.width = '500px';
}
var all_polls = document.getElementsByClassName(‘quimble_poll_div’);
for (var i = 0; i < all_polls.length; i++) {
all_polls[i].style.width = '500px';
}
var all_polls = document.getElementsByClassName(‘quimble_poll_div’);
for (var i = 0; i < all_polls.length; i++) {
all_polls[i].style.width = '500px';
}
(In the event that Quimble is down and the poll is thus inaccessible, you can view the questions in this follow-up post.)
What do you suppose the students said?
Not letting your high morals turn you into a cheater-pants.
As promised, I want to take a look at this article (discussed also at Corpus Callosum). I’m not a psychologist, so I won’t have much to say about what causes might underlie the phenomenon of do-gooders doing bad. However, I will have some words (from the point of view of someone concerned with practical ethics) about how this pitfall might be avoided.
Look out, children! There’s an ethicist!
This is not breaking news (unless your news cycle is more geological), but it strikes me as relevant on the day that I deliver my penultimate lecture in the newly-created ethics module in the Introduction to Engineering class at my university:
Can you trust an ethicist to behave ethically?