Pencils 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 on press releases rather than the details in your journal article.
Category Archives: Ethics 101
Cyberspeech and cybersilence: thoughts on the Kathy Sierra matter.
In case you somehow missed it: tech writer and blogger Kathy Sierra cancelled 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 did not make) and whatever their involvement might have been with the posts (not comments) on the now-defunct sites. There are about a gazillion posts you could read on this whole firestorm (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, to give just a sampling).
I had never heard of Kathy Sierra before this firestorm struck, but for the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about issues around online interaction and communication. These thoughts are running in lots of different directions, so rather than try to hammer them into a coherent “manifesto”, I’ll just lay them out and let you tell me how they fit together.
Personal integrity and professsional integrity.
On 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.
Personal conscience versus professional duties.
Abel 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 conscience.”
I’m going to have a go at the connection between a pharmacist’s personal integrity and his or her professional integrity — in my next post. First, I’m dipping into the vault to offer the way I was thinking about this issue on the ancestor of this blog back in April 2005. Here’s what I wrote then:
Naked chicks in PETA ads: the ethics of getting your point across.
There’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’t to hold on to members, as much as I’d like to–it’s to get people who just don’t give a damn about this issue to look twice.” The truth is that extremism and outrage provide the fundamental fuel for many special-interest groups. Nobody ever stopped hunting because the National Rifle Association supports assault weapons; many of those who oppose abortion are appalled that people in their movement commit acts of violence, yet they are not appalled enough to support abortion. The same is true with peta, and Newkirk knows it; a vegan isn’t going to start eating meat or wearing fur simply because she disapproves of a naked calendar.
(Bold emphasis added.)
Teaching about ethics and other sources of controversy in science class.
In 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 courses we often have a section on fuel metabolism. That’s the part of biochemistry that deals specifically with how your food is converted to energy. It’s human biochemistry. In that section of the course the Professor often raises the question of proper diet. Is it okay to eat meat? Are trans fatty acids bad for you? Should you be eating carbohydrates? Our experience is that Professors who teach this section often have very strong opinions and their personal ethical stance is portrayed as scientific fact.
These are two different cases. In the first one, the question is whether the value of debating controversial “ethical” issues outweighs the disadvantages. The biggest downside, in my opinion, is the emphasis on technology as opposed to pure basic science. By giving prominence to “ethical” issues we are emphasizing the consequences of genetic knowledge as it relates to the human condition. …
Part of the problem arises from a desire to please the students. How often do we hear the complaint that students aren’t interested in biochemistry and genetics? The students are bored by science so we have to add sections on genetically modified foods and genetic screening to our introductory genetics courses. Isn’t this strange? Rather than concentrate on making the basic science as interesting and exciting as possible, we cater to the students by giving them the topics they think are interesting. That’s no way to educate.
There’s another problem; what is ethics? Sometimes it’s hard to see the difference between simple controversy and ethics. Sometimes it’s hard to define exactly what “ethics” is all about in spite of the fact that “bioethics” is one of the biggest growth industries in science. Here’s where a philosopher or two could weigh in.
Hey, I’m a philosopher! Here’s my take:
Probably not the approach to instilling ethics most likely to succeed.
The 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.*
Getting down to basics.
Chad 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?
What are our duties toward crackpots?
At the AAS meeting in Seattle, Rob Knop risked his own well-being to get the details on a poster that was, shall we say, waaaay out of the mainstream. Quoth Rob:
Now, don’t get me wrong. There will be a lot of posters with data or theory that turns out to be wrong, and there are a lot of posters that disagree with each other and debate and dispute the best interpretation of the data. That’s the normal process of science. The nuts here… they think they’re participating in the normal process of science, but they do not understand it well enough to realize that they are just cranks, nothing more. “Closed minded” the will call those like me who write them off, or “stuck in the modern paradigm just like those who dismissed Copernicus, Galileo, and Einstein.” Well, no. These folks are off their rocker, and we know it.
Nor is this sort of thing an isolated incident; one of Rob’s commenters points us to this intriguing abstract from an upcoming APS meeting.
I’ve been there. Indeed, I’ve even blogged about it, back in August 2005. Here’s what I wrote:
When activists are also human: issues of consistency.
I’d like to take a moment to consider a recent comment on a fairly old post about a class meeting wherein my students and I considered some of the inconsistent views about animals with which people seem to walk around. Here’s what the commenter said: