Longtime readers of the previous incarnation of this blog knew me as “Dr. Free-Ride”. Most of them, however, never asked where that pseudonym came from. As it happens, the source of the pseudonym was a class discussion (in my “Ethics in Science” course) that, by its very liveliness, inspired me to start the blog in the first place.
The class discussion was about whether those with scientific training are morally obligated to practice science. Some (like Kristin Shrader-Frechette, in her book Ethics of Scientific Research) have argued that trained scientists have a positive duty to do scientific research because:

• society has paid for the training the scientists have received (through federal funding of research projects, training programs, etc.)
• society has pressing needs that can best (only?) be addressed if scientific research is conducted
• those few members of society who have specialized skills that are needed to address particular societal needs have a duty to use those skills to address those needs (i.e., if you can do research and most other people can’t, then to the extent that society as a whole needs the research that you can do, you ought to do it)

It’s an interesting claim to examine with a classroom of science majors. How do you suppose it went over?
Since it was early in the term and I was still working to break the ice — to get the class past polite discussion and into the ring to wrestle with the claims they were reading — I decided that it was only fair to put myself up as a test-case. Am I a bum — a free-rider — by virtue of having scientific training but living the life of a philosopher? That self-examination was the very first post of the original “Adventures in Ethics and Science”, which I reproduce in its entirety below the fold.

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Because some of you may be new to “Adventures in Ethics and Science” (having found it by way of the high-powered company I’m keeping here at ScienceBlogs), and because a lot of the cool kids here are doin’ it, I thought I’d give you a quick run-down of some of my archived posts. A few of these are big-traffic posts via search engine results, while others are posts that are dear to my heart (the “unsung heroes” of the archives). It’s my hope that these will give you a taste of some of the issues in ethics and science that seize my hands and make me blog.
Of course, I’m always happy to entertain requests, so if there’s an ethics-and-science issue you don’t see here but would like to, just give a holler!

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