Lately 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 lot of people who recognize gray areas between these two extreme positions. Does the fact that relatively fewer of them comment on the posts reflect their discomfort with the gray areas themselves, or with how those gray areas are treated in the debate between the extreme positions?
Category Archives: Ethics 101
Temptations for engineering students.
Since 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.
Thoughts on the passing of Leona Helmsley.
Perhaps 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 people pay taxes.”
Lessons from the Ward Churchill case.
The 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 tenured professor at a public university because his views are judged politically objectionable, plus a finding of real problems with the integrity of his scholarship, not to mention a whole set of issues around shared governance and the appropriate process within university hearings (which I will leave to the people with a much better feel for org charts) — have made the Churchill case a Rorschach test. How people interpret what the case was about, and how they will judge the outcome, probably tells us more about their priorities and anxieties around higher education than it necessarily tells us about Ward Churchill himself.
A singularly bad way to respond to an ethical problem.
Planting incendiary devices, whether under vehicles or on doorsteps, even if you think the people you’re targeting are doing something very, very bad.
Discretion, deception, and communication between scientists and non-scientists.
A 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’t involved in the research. And, since she wasn’t a scientist, she was in no position to assess whether the protocol was reasonable, whether the scientific question was an important one to answer, etc. So, you know … butt out.
Reliance on professional integrity and personal ethics shouldn’t mean letting the rascals get away with it.
Zuska 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!
Credit where credit is due (a thought experiment).
Because 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 shelled out your own money to laminate a sign.
Where do you want scientists to learn ethics?
Because 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.
An odd (but pleasant) milestone.
Today 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 adequate sleep, and kick ass on your finals.