Category Archives: Ethics 101

A hole inside where my optimism used to be.

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I have discovered that whatever patience I may have once had for students who think it’s a reasonable strategy to try to deceive their way through “meeting” requirements in an ethics course has completely eroded. There’s not a bit of it left, just a gaping hole where it used to be.

What’s more, I think I came to the mistaken impression that I still had some patience in reserve largely due to my lack of inner shout-y-ness* about these students.

It turns out the inner shout-y-ness is gone because the part of me that regulates it has concluded that it’s wasted energy. I cannot save adults who have decided to cheat at ethics for a grade. This is not to say I believe they cannot change — just that I cannot change them. At least, not with the tools at my disposal.**

This realization leaves me feeling kind of sad.

Also, I think it has changed my strategy with regards to setting explicit expectations (for example, specifying that students are only allowed to use class readings and notes, discussions with classmates, and their own wits on certain assignments, and that using any other materials for these assignments is forbidden), and then enforcing them with no wiggle-room. At this point, if a student specifies (in writing) that he or she understands the rules and agrees to follow them else fail the course and face administrative sanctions, I am going to treat that as an enforceable contract.

Because honestly, with a critical mass of students who do seem willing to conduct themselves ethically in an ethics class, it’s probably better for everyone if I can remove the few who are not.

I only wish removing the bad actors didn’t leave me feeling dead inside.

_____
*Shout-y-ness is so a word.

**This is not an oblique request for a torture chamber. That’s not really my scene.

Pursuing your goals in a world with other people.

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Apropos of the discussion here, I offer some general thoughts on pursuing partner, career, family, or other aims one deems important:

  1. Knowing what you want can be handy. Among other things, it can help you identify when you’ve found it. If you have no idea what you want, recognizing it when you have it can be harder.
  2. On the other hand, being able to specify exactly what you want is not a guarantee that you can or will attain it. It could be, for example, that your desired simultaneous combination of partner-career-family-other aims does not exist.
  3. Hypothetical people that meet all our desiderata may be easier to get along with in our imagination than are actual flesh-and-blood people who embody those desiderata. Happily, it often turns out that actual flesh-and-blood people who significantly depart from some of the desiderata we set a priori are wonderful to be with.
  4. It’s possible that there’s something creepy about choosing a life partner on the basis of an a priori list of criteria (as opposed to, say, getting to know hir and deciding zie is a person whose companionship you value), especially if those criteria tend to specify services that imagined life partner will provide in advancing your aims. It kind of sets you up to be a self-serving creep who doesn’t care about your partner’s needs or aspirations.
  5. If your aims matter to you — if they’re really worth pursuing — sometimes this requires that you sacrifice other aims.
  6. If you, personally, are unwilling to sacrifice aim X to pursue aim Y, that probably means that, push come to shove, you value aim X more. That’s fine — but it might be a good idea to make your peace with the possibility that you can’t have both X and Y.
  7. If you really, really want to pursue aim Y without abandoning your pursuit of aim X, you might have to adjust your expectations about the level of attainment that will be possible. (Depending on values of X and Y here, this might involve ratcheting down career aspirations to something slightly less competitive, lucrative, prestigious, and/or time-consuming, scaling back on the projected number of your progeny, ratcheting down your expectations for a spotless home, what have you.)
  8. On the other hand, if you really, really want to pursue aim Y without abandoning your pursuit of aim X and you therefore make it someone else’s job to pick up the slack on one of these two goals, it strikes me that you ought to make damn sure that this someone else (a) values the goal you are asking hir to pursue on your behalf and (b) that zie is not being forced thereby to abandon the pursuit of some other goal that zie values more.
  9. This is a good moment to remember Kant’s insight that treating others as mere means to advance your goals rather than recognizing them an setters of their own goals is thoroughly assy behavior.
  10. In some circumstances, the least exploitative way to achieve the goal that matters to you but not so much that you’ll sacrifice pursuit of your other goals to attain it is to pay someone else to do it. After all, money can be exchanged for goods and services, which might make it useful to the person whose assistance you are getting in pursuing some of hir goals.
  11. Institutions that stack the deck in favor of some classes of people being expected to sacrifice their own aims in order to accommodate (or actively support) other classes of people in the pursuit of their goals suck big bags of crap.
  12. When you recognize that institutional structures support your pursuit of your goals by limiting the options of others to pursue their goals, it would be a real show of humanity (and of not being an entitled ass) to do what you can to increase the potential for those other people to pursue their goals. It would also be cool to examine the institutional structures that stack the deck and figure out how to start dismantling them. (If you need a self-interested reason to do this, consider that fate may conspire to make you care greatly for the happiness and well-being of someone on the short end of this institutional structural stick.)
  13. In an environment where some people’s goals are presumed to matter more than others (because of what class they are in rather than anything to do with the particulars of their goals), or where certain goals are judged in advance to be more appropriate (or “natural”) to members of some classes of people, it is hard as hell to identify “freely chosen goals” that are actually free of the influence of various institutional structures. But, people who don’t live in vacuums can’t set goals that don’t assume the persistence of certain features of our background environment.
  14. Sometimes taking your own goals seriously may require imagining — even working for — the non-persistence of certain features of our background environment. This may also be required to take seriously the goals and aspirations of other people who matter to you. It doesn’t mean changing those features will be easy, but few goals worth pursuing are.

I hope I can be forgiven the Xs and Ys in the discussion here, as I think what’s at stake ranges far beyond the traditional work/life balance issues about how to divvy up housework and parenting, whose career advancement to prioritize, et cetera. I think it cuts to the core of treating other people as fully human.

And, for some reason, it seems an awful lot like politicians, policy makers, and pundits are having a harder time with that lately than they should be. It feels like the rest of us have to pick up some of that slack.

Straightforward answers to questions we shouldn’t even have to ask: New York Times edition.

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The Public Editor of the New York Times grapples with the question of whether the Times‘ news reporting ought to get the facts right.

The question is posed nicely in a letter quoted in the piece:

“My question is what role the paper’s hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements – by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper’s overarching goal is truth, oughtn’t the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn’t the Times’s coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?”

Arthur S. Brisbane, the Public Editor, responds by asking:

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

Here’s a suggestion: Budget some money for fact-checking, whether by dedicated fact-checkers or the reporters themselves. And then, make sure every piece of the story that makes a factual claim — whether it is in the reporter’s background or analysis, or in a direct quotation from someone else — is checked against the available facts. Tell us whether the claims are supported by the available evidence. Present the readers with the facts as best they can be established right there in the story.

Because people reach for newspapers to get factual details of things happening in the actual world we’re trying to share. If the paper of record views getting the facts right as a style choice, where the hell is the public supposed to get the facts?

A question for the hivemind: delivering something good for you in a way that might be bad for you.

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Despite the dawning of the End Times (at least as far as our semester is concerned), I was able to find time for a chat with a colleague yesterday about a currently amorphous project that is staring to take shape. It’s a project that’s being spearheaded by other interests, but my colleague has been approached to take on what may be a significant role in it, and he’s thinking it over. So, much of our chat had to do with the potential of the project along various trajectories it might take — lots of “what if” since, as mentioned above, it’s pretty amorphous right now.

Anyhow, one of the tentative aims is to improve kids’ skills in and engagement with a particular broad subject area where the general perception is that kids need better skills and engagement. The tool to achieve this would be games that the kids would play on their own time (so it wouldn’t gobble up valuable class time; I guess you need that to get kids ready for the high-stakes standardized tests and stuff). And, the research driving this strategy has, apparently, focused a lot on the neurophysiology of how kids interact with games to identify the features a game ought to have to get kids addicted to it.

For both of us, this seems like a red flag.

So, the question: Do you think it’s a good idea (where “good” equals ethical or some other relevant value; feel free to specify it in your answer) to build kids’ skills and/or competencies by means of a delivery device that is explicitly designed to be addictive? (In case it matters, we’re talking about children younger than 13 years old.)

Does it matter what the actual skills and/or competencies are?

Does it matter whether the designed-to-be-addictive delivery method might itself be more attractive to the kids (and the adults they eventually become) than the various real-world venues in which the application of these skills and/or competencies are taken to be important?

Lay it on me.

Some ethical decisions are not that hard: thoughts on Joe Paterno.

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Ethical decision-making involves more than having the right gut-feeling and acting on it. Rather, when done right, it involves moving past your gut-feeling to see who else has a stake in what you do (or don’t do); what consequences, good or bad, might flow from the various courses of action available to you; to whom you have obligations that will be satisfied or ignored by your action; and how the relevant obligations and interests pull you in different directions as you try to make the best decision. Sometimes it’s helpful to think of the competing obligations and interests as vectors, since they come with both directions and magnitudes — which is to say, in some cases where they may be pulling you in opposite directions, it’s still obvious which way you should go because the magnitude of one of the obligations is so much bigger than of the others.

The ethical decision-making strategy I teach my students (drawn from Muriel J. Bebeau, “Developing a Well-Reasoned Response to a Moral Problem in Scientific Research”) is one I find useful in all sorts of real situations (which is pretty much the point of an ethical decision-making strategy). Occasionally, this means applying it to evaluate whether a decision which someone else describes as “really tough” actually is.

For example, on the downfall of Joe Paterno, I encountered comments on the ethical decision he had to make (and on how well or badly he did with that) like this:

If this guy met his “legal obligations” by reporting the report, not something he saw himself even, then why isn’t that enough? He likely would have preferred to do even less. And he’s not the police, he isn’t charged with investigating and finding out the facts.

and this:

We all have to balance competing ethical obligations all the time, let’s at least do each other the courtesy of admitting that it’s difficult.

Is it difficult?

If you would rather not think about a situation where a responsible adult had to figure out what to do when child rape was reported to him, you probably don’t want to read the rest of this post. I don’t blame you. However, if you should find yourself in a relevantly similar position as the responsible adult, whether you want to think of it or not, you’ll be on the hook to do good ethical decision-making of your own.

Let’s have a look at the bare-bones of the JoePa case: A graduate assistant tells the head coach that he has witnessed an emeritus member of the coaching staff in the team’s shower facilities performing a sex act on a 10-year-old. The head coach need to figure out what to do.

Who are the interested parties here?

  • The head coach, who needs to make the decision about what to do.
  • The child who was abused, who has an interest in being protected from future abuse.
  • The graduate assistant, who has an interest in being an effective member of the football program, as well as in not being punished for being a whistleblower.
  • The emeritus member of the coaching staff. He has an interest in maintaining his reputation and relationship with the football program, and in being treated fairly. If he didn’t actually abuse the child, being treated fairly may amount to something different than if he did commit the abuse.
  • Law enforcement agencies have an interest in getting information about criminal acts so they can investigate them, establish the evidence for a prosecution, and stop criminal acts that are ongoing.
  • The football program, the university, the university community, and the larger society. These communities have a bunch of interests, including continuing a successful football program that lots of people enjoy, keep kids in the community safe from abuse, and upholding the values off the institutions and communities.

The head coach is (I hope) thinking through possible courses of action that include taking the matter to the police or taking the matter to the university’s athletic director. He might also be considering what would happen in the case that he does nothing. What are the possible consequences of these various courses of action?

If he takes the matter to the police:

  • The police may act to stop the emeritus matter of the coaching staff from committing further abuse.
  • The police will likely launch an investigation of the allegations to determine whether they are grounded. The police investigation will also collect evidence that may be used in a prosecution.
  • The head coach’s relationship with the emeritus matter of the coaching staff may be damaged.
  • The reputation of the emeritus matter of the coaching staff will likely be damaged.
  • The administration of the athletic department and the university might be upset at the unfavorable light cast on them by the incident, if the allegations become public.
  • The reputation of the football program with the university community and the broader community may be tarnished by news of the incident.
  • It may take a bunch of time to cooperate with the police investigation.

If he takes the matter to the university’s athletic director:

  • The head coach’s relationship with the emeritus matter of the coaching staff may be damaged.
  • The reputation of the emeritus matter of the coaching staff will likely be damaged.
  • The administration of the athletic department and the university might be upset at the unfavorable light cast on them by the incident, if the allegations become public.
  • The reputation of the football program with the university community and the broader community may be tarnished by news of the incident.
  • It may take a bunch of time to cooperate with the police investigation — if the university’s athletic director passes the matter onto the police.
  • The abuse may stop — if the athletic director passes the matter onto the police.
  • If the athletic director doesn’t pass the matter onto the police, the head coach may have to involve the police himself, which may anger the athletic director.
  • Or, if the athletic director doesn’t pass the matter onto the police, the head coach may have to spend a lot of time trying to convince him to involve the police. This may anger the athletic director and be emotionally draining to the head coach.
  • If the athletic director doesn’t pass the matter onto the police, the head coach may feel guilty that he didn’t do more to stop the abuse.

If the head coach decides to do nothing:

  • The abuse may continue, and more kids may be abused.
  • The reputation of the football program and the university may remain intact.
  • In the event that the situation becomes public later, the reputation of the football program and the university may be badly damaged — as might the reputation of the head coach.
  • The head coach’s relationship with the emeritus member of the coaching staff may remain intact. Or, it might not.
  • The head coach’s relationship with the graduate assistant may suffer.
  • The reputation of the emeritus member of the coaching staff may remain intact.
  • The head coach’s conscience may be troubled.

What are the head coach’s obligations here?

  • To protect those who cannot protect themselves.
  • To protect his team.
  • To uphold the values of the athletics program, the university, and the larger community.
  • To protect the reputation of the athletics program, the university, and the larger community.
  • To protect colleagues from unfair treatment (but not from just consequences)
  • To provide the information he has about the child abuse to law enforcement so they can investigate the allegations to determine whether there is evidence to support them.
  • To maintain his own integrity and good conscience

I take it there is no ethical obligation to avoid headaches or awkward moments with one’s colleagues.

Looking at these obligations, nearly all seem to pull in the direction of the head coach doing something, rather than doing nothing. Indeed, they strike me as all pulling in the direction of doing something effective, rather than passing the buck to a higher-up and being done with it.

Some might argue that there’s a conflict between the obligation to protect those who cannot protect themselves and the obligation to protect colleagues from unfair treatment. However, it seems like the head coach should be able to uphold his obligation to protect colleagues from unfair treatment without having to cover up what was reported to him (and without that allegation being buried by an administrator higher up in the hierarchy). Indeed, as a grown-up, the emeritus member of the coaching staff has far more resources to secure fair treatment than does the 10-year-old child.

How people make decisions tells us something about what obligations and interests they take most seriously. Do they care more about the values of their organization or its reputation? Do they care more about vulnerable people or about people they know personally who might be hurting those vulnerable people? Do they choose blissful ignorance over the involvement that might be required to obtain accurate information, or to pass on the information they have (no matter how uncertain it might seem to them) to the people whose job it is to conduct investigations in these sorts of cases?

(I’m not claiming here that police investigations of allegations of child rape are perfect. However, they seem likely to do better by the potential victims and other vulnerable members of the community than not investigating such allegations at all.)

Some ethical decision-making is hard. There are cases where we are bound by strong obligations that pull us in different directions.

But this particular case really isn’t that hard. It may require effort to do the right thing, but figuring out what the right thing to do is here is not rocket science.

On fairness.

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Because, it seems, the younger Free-Ride offspring and I have different ideas of what counts as fair.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: (noticing a song on the radio) Hey, it’s “Poker Face”. That song is really old.

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: It must be like 15 years old.

Dr. Free-Ride: No, it’s not.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: Yes, it is!

Dr. Free-Ride: Do you want to bet?

Younger Free-Ride offspring: OK, I’ll bet you a dollar.

Dr. Free-Ride: You sure now? I’m going to fire up Wikipedia to verify the date. And I’m quite sure that the song is no more than five years old.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: Go ahead and check. And if I’m right, lets make it two bucks?

Dr. Free-Ride: What?

Younger Free-Ride offspring: Just look it up. If it’s older than five years, I win, if it’s less, you win.

Dr. Free-Ride: OK. See, it came out in 2008, which means it’s only three years old. Will you be paying me my dollar now or later?

Younger Free-Ride offspring: That’s no fair! You knew it was less than five years old.

Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, I did. That’s why I was willing to bet on it.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: But I didn’t know that you knew.

Dr. Free-Ride: But I told you I was certain.

Younger Free-Ride offspring: I thought you were wrong that you knew it. And it wasn’t fair for you to bet me if you knew the answer for sure.

So, apparently, taking a gamble with too little uncertainty attached to it is unfair. Or maybe my crime is having absorbed some facts about young-person music.

* * * * *
Speaking of fairness, I don’t think it’s fair for public school kids to bear so much of the brunt of failing state and local budgets. If you agree, it would be awesome if you could donate even a few bucks to one of the projects in my giving page for the DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students 2011 drive.

And, for the next week, through the very last moment (Eastern Time) of Thursday, October 13th, bloggers in the challenge will be competing to get the most new donors to their giving pages. The five bloggers in the challenge who pick up the most new donors during this window will each receive a $50 gift certificate for ThinkGeek stuff.

I love ThinkGeek stuff, but I love reader participation even more — which means, if you all can help me get to the top five so I can win that gift certificate, I’m going to turn around and give each of my donors a chance to win one, too! I’m prepared to give away a $50 gift certificate, a $25 gift certificate, and a $10 gift certificate to randomly drawn donors to my giving page (because that would be fair). Just forward me a copy of the email DonorsChoose sends you to confirm your donation to my giving page and you’re in the drawing.

There may be some other incentives for your participation, too … stay tuned!

Pseudonymity and ethics (with a few more thoughts on Google+).

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In a comment on my last post, Larry Moran takes issue with my defense of pseudonymity:

Janet says,

But Larry, other than my say-so (and that of those with whom I’ve cultivated online ties), how do you know “Janet D. Stemwedel” is really my “real” (by which I assume you mean “legal”) name? You didn’t peek at my driver’s license, so maybe the government here knows me my some other name.

That’s not a very good argument from someone who specializes in ethics! :-)

The issue is whether I prefer dealing with people who identify themselves or with people who use fake names to disguise their real identity. What you’re saying is that there will always be unethical people who will get around any rules designed to avoid false identities, therefore we shouldn’t even try to enforce a policy requiring real names.

I doubt very much that you use an argument like that when you discuss other issues like plagiarism, or preparing a CV. Let’s drop that argument, okay? We all know that there will be unethical people who will lie and cheat to get around any rules. That’s not an argument against having rules.

The issue before us is whether we want to live in an internet society where people identify themselves and stand behind what they say and do, just as they do in the real face-to-face world, or whether we want an internet society with different rules. I try to teach my students that it is important to take a stand on certain issues but they have to be prepared to suffer the consequences (both good and bad).

Larry is right that the part of my comment he’s quoted isn’t a very good argument. Indeed, I meant it mostly as a suggestion that Larry’s comfort dealing with me as a person-attached-to-her-real-name is based on a certain amount of trust that I really am properly attached to that legal name (since Larry has yet to demand to see my papers).

Neither, of course, would I want to say that the existence of people who get around a rule is a good reason to abandon the rule or attempts to enforce it. Instead, my support for the rule would turn on what the rule was meant to accomplish, what it actually accomplished, and whether the intended and/or actual effects were worth pursuing.*

However, Larry seems also to be suggesting that something stronger than his own personal preference against the use of pseudonyms.

As I read what he’s written, it seems like he’s suggesting that there’s something inherently unethical about using a pseudonym — that being pseudonymous online is somewhere on a spectrum of deeds that includes plagiarism and C.V.-padding. Let the record reflect that I’m not convinced this is actually what Larry is saying. But given that it might be read that way, I want to examine the suggestion.

Is pseudonymity always deceptive?

At the heart of the matter, I think we need to look at the question of how pseudonyms are used.

The suggestion in Larry’s comment is that a pseudonym is a fake name intended to disguise one’s identity. However, it strikes me that “disguise” might be a loaded term, one that has an additional connotation of “mislead” here.

Misleading is a variety of lying, and I’m happy to grant that lying is generally unethical (although, unlike Kant, I’m prepared to accept the possibility of a case where lying is less unethical than the existing alternatives).

But, my sense from the pseudonymous people I have encountered online (and from my own brief experience as a pseudonymous blogger) is that not all people using pseudonyms are aiming to deceive. Instead, I think it’s more accurate to say that they are choosing how much of their personal information to disclose.

And, I’m inclined to think that non-disclosure of personal information is only unethical in specific instances. I don’t think we have a positive right to total information about everyone with whom we engage.

Indeed, I don’t think we actually want total information about all of our contacts, whether online or in real life. My students have no interest in the current state of my digestive health, nor in what’s in my record collection (let alone what a “record” is). My children have no need to know whether the user interface for grade entry at my university is well-designed or clunky. Readers of my blog probably care less about my opinion of baseball teams than about my opinions on recent news stories about scientific misconduct.

Even being on the receiving end of an accidental overshare can feel like a violation of a relationship, as I had occasion to note a few years ago:

There was an academic blog I used to read that I enjoyed quite a lot. I had to stop, though, when it became apparent that the (anonymous) blogger was married to someone that I knew. (What clinched it was a post about a social occasion that I attended.) To keep reading the blog would have felt, to me, like a violation of the blogger’s trust — from real life, I knew certain details about the blogger that had not been revealed to the blog’s readers, and from the blog, I knew certain details about the blogger’s life that had not been revealed to the blogger’s real-life friends and acquaintances. Caring about the blogger (and the real-life person) meant I had to respect the walls of separation the blogger had erected.

We are always making judgments about what pieces of our experiences and ourselves it’s relevant to share. And we make those judgments differently depending on with whom we’re interacting, in what kind of context, how that will affect our comfort level (and theirs), and what kinds of consequences (deserved or undeserved) sharing what we share may bring.

I’m happy to be accountable for my views on research with animals, for example, but voicing them publicly can make me (and my family members) targets of people who think it’s OK to use threats of violence to silence me. I can fully understand why people actually conducting research with animals might not want to attach their real names (which are attached to addresses and phone numbers and license plate numbers of cars under which someone might put incendiary devices) to their candid views online — and, I think that our public conversation about research with animals would be greatly impoverished without their participation in it.

Courage, as Aristotle would remind us, is the right balance of confidence and fear for the circumstances at hand. Too little confidence makes us cowardly, but too little fear makes us foolhardy.

I should also note that many of the notable users of pseudonyms in the blogosphere choose pseudonyms that are extremely unlikely to be mistaken for legal names — which is to say, in withholding certain personal details they are not also trying to deceive others into believing that their “real” names in the three-dimensional world are “SciCurious” or “GrrlScientist” or “DrugMonkey” or “Prof-like Substance”. That’s not to say that such a clear ‘nym can’t be intentionally deceptive — for example, if GrrlScientist were male, or if PhysioProf were a certified public accountant, or if SciCurious had not a whit of curiosity about matters scientific. But either way, you’d have no expectations that a Social Security search on the surname Curious would help you locate Sci.

Perhaps ironically, it is the people with obviously assumed names like these, not people with “real-looking”** assumed names that might actually fool others into thinking they’re real, who have had their access to Google+ accounts revoked.

I won’t claim that no one uses an assumed name to mislead — obviously, there are people who do so. But this doesn’t make it the case that everyone using a ‘nym is using it to deceive. Indeed, pseudonymity can create conditions in which people disclose more honest information about themselves, where people share opinions or experiences that they could not comfortably (or safely) share using their real names.

I understand that not everyone is comfortable dealing with online persons who could, in an instant, dismantle their pseudonymous online identities and vanish. Especially if you’ve dealt with troll-y exemplars of pseudonymity, your patience for this may be limited. That’s fine. I’m happy to live in a world where people get to choose with whom they engage in their own online spaces, as well as which online spaces maintained by others they will frequent.

Indeed, I even noted that Google is free to make its own rules for Google+. That Google establishes a real-name rule for Google+ doesn’t raise it to the level of a moral precept (“Thou shalt use only thy full legal name”). If the rule is clearly explain in the Terms of Service, it probably imposes an obligation on the person who agrees to the ToS to follow the rule … but it probably also imposes an obligation on Google to enforce the rule consistently (which so far it has not).

And, Google setting its own rules does not preclude our discussing whether these are reasonable rules, ones with well thought out aims that have a reasonable chance of achieving those aims or some close approximation of them.

I think Larry is right that the names policy (and/or who will want to sign up for Google+) is going to come down to people’s comfort levels. Opting for one set of rules may make some groups of potential users very comfortable and others so uncomfortable that it effectively bars their participation. Google needs to think about it in those terms — who do they want in, and who are they happy to cede to their competition.

Right now, to me, Google+ feels a little like a country club to which I was admitted before I knew what kind of people the membership rules were going to exclude (because they’re “not our kind, dear”). Personally, this particular sort of “exclusivity” makes me less comfortable, not more. Depending on Google’s next move, I may be removing myself from the spiffy new clubhouse and spending a lot more time on the internet’s public beaches.

______
*Of course, I don’t need to tell you that rules are not always completely congruent with what’s ethical. There are plenty of rules that are unjust, loads of rules that we use to encode our ethical commitments, and a plethora of rules that seem to have no ethical content to speak of. (How would a utilitarian, a Kantian, and a virtue ethicist come down on “No white shoes after Labor Day”?)

**Naturally, which names look “real” and which look “made-up” is tied up in lots of cultural assumptions.

Helpful hint for ethics students.

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Let’s say you have been given a case study and asked to suggest an ethical course of action for the protagonist in the case.

If, in the course of explaining the course of action you are recommending, you find yourself writing, “Even though it would be unethical, the protagonist should …,” you may be doing it wrong.

Can nothing be done about the exam-talkers?

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That isn’t a typo — the issue is students who talk to each other while taking exams.

I received the following via email from a reader (lightly edited to remove identifying details):

I’m wondering if you and your readers can help me analyze this situation.

I caught two students talking during an exam.

This is not the first time for this pair. The first time this happened, I explicitly communicated my expectations about conduct during an exam to all of my students, specifically stating that talking during an exam will be taken as cheating. The academic integrity section of the undergraduate bulletin also states that conversation during an exam is not allowed.

After the second incident, I wanted to penalize both students with a zero for said exam and forfeiture of the dropped-lowest-exam-score policy. The students immediately said they will appeal to the dean and their parents have been hounding the chair as well as the administration.

The message I’m getting now is that I cannot prove the talking during the exam actually took place (although I saw it). Not only that, I’m basically being bullied to drop it for fear that the parents will file a law suit, maybe because the administration has decided the university cannot deal with another scandal after a recent one fueled by alcohol.

My question is, when did talking during exams become acceptable? (That it’s acceptable is the message I’m getting regardless of what’s written in the academic bulletin). I have not been teaching long but have read about faculty being fearful of repercussions when reporting cheating students. I don’t want to end up like that, compromising my principles for fear of repercussions such as loss of job (I’m not protected by tenure). Unfortunately, this is where I am headed. This whole incident is very demoralizing. Is it too much to expect students to abide by a shared code of conduct during exams? Is this response by chair and administration common?

I’m going to give my advice on this situation, but since my correspondent specifically requested help from you, the commentariat, please post your advice in the comments, making sure to point out ways you think my advice goes wrong.

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