Ethics 101
jstemwedel | January 6, 2009Or is it the kind of thing those other people do?
In the car yesterday, I caught a story on Marketplace that was looking for insight into why people on Wall Street cheat. In the piece, host Kai Ryssdal interviewed Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely about research conducted (with college students, of course) on cheating.
The set-up was that the students were asked to solve a set of math problems, and that they'd be paid (50 cents) for each one they got correct. While it sounds like some of the students were only paid after they completed the set of problems, other groups of…
jstemwedel | December 31, 2008
He defended the views he expressed in many of his radio programs and said that, because he consulted for so many drugmakers at once, he had no particular bias.
"These companies compete with each other and cancel each other out," he said.
The New York Times on psychiatrist and former radio host, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, whose NPR program "The Infinite Mind" was cancelled after it was discovered that Goodwin failed to disclose more than $1 million in income received for giving marketing lectures for drugmakers.
Dr. Goodwin seems a little unclear on the concept of conflict of interest.
It…
jstemwedel | December 30, 2008While we're speaking about revolutions and such, Hilzoy on the ongoing violence in Gaza:
I imagine what people on both sides are thinking is something more like: do you expect us to just sit here and take it? Do you expect us to do nothing? To which my answer is: no, I expect you to try to figure out what has some prospect of actually making things better. Killing people out of anger, frustration, and the sense that you have to do something is just wrong. For both sides.
I'm inclined to think there are generalizable lessons here.
And, that the same responses to bad stuff lead to more bad…
jstemwedel | December 11, 2008Back at the end of November, Martin wrote a post on the ethics of overpopulation, in which he offered these assertions:
It is unethical for anyone to produce more than two children. (Adoption of orphans, on the other hand, is highly commendable.)
It is unethical to limit the availability of contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption.
It is unethical to use public money to support infertility treatments. Let those unfortunate enough to need such treatment pay their own way or adopt. And let's put the money into subsidising contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and…
jstemwedel | October 24, 2008Jake has a great post up today about the frequency with which American internists and rheumatologists prescribe placebos and the ethical questions this raises. Jake writes:
For my part, I don't think I would be comfortable deceiving my patient under any circumstances. I see my role as a future physician partly as a healer but also as an educator. Patients -- particularly patients with intractable chronic illnesses -- want to understand what is happening to them. I almost feel like in deceiving them, I would be denying them that small measure of control -- that small measure of dignity --…
jstemwedel | September 24, 2008From time to time on this blog, we discuss the obligation scientists assume by virtue of accepting public money to fund their research. These obligations may include sharing knowledge with the public (since public money helped make that knowledge). And they also include playing by the public's rules as enshrined in various federal regulations concerning scientific research.
If a scientist takes public money, she expects there will be some public oversight. That's just how it goes.
Of course, working from this mindset makes it much harder for me to fathom how someone (say a Secretary of the…
jstemwedel | September 19, 2008Do not claim to have earned a degree (or degrees) that you did not in fact earn.
Degree-granting institutions maintain records of degree recipients. Eventually, chances are good that someone will check.
And even if your talents are worth more to your position than a degree could be, your dishonesty will be held against you.
Go with talent and integrity over talent and pretend credentials. Those who employ you will appreciate not being played for chumps.
jstemwedel | September 18, 2008The elder Free-Ride offspring, having entered fourth grade this year, will be participating in the school science fair in the spring. The elder Free-Ride offspring is very enthusiastic about the whole science fair thing.
Meanwhile, I'm having a very hard time.
I'm very committed to the idea that a science fair project is the kind of thing a kid should control, from start to finish -- conceiving the project, formulating some clear questions and some promising strategies for answering them, doing the experiments and making the observations, adjusting the strategies as necessary, setting up…
jstemwedel | August 5, 2008Once again, researchers who use animals in their research have been the targets of violence at the hands of animal rights activists.
As reported by the Santa Cruz Sentinel:
In one incident, a faculty member's home on Village Circle off High Street was intentionally firebombed at about 5:40 a.m. [on Saturday, August 2], according to police. The residence belongs to a well-known UCSC molecular biologist who works with mice. He was one of 13 researchers listed in threatening animal rights pamphlets found Tuesday in a downtown coffee shop.
In the second incident at about the same time, a Volvo…
jstemwedel | July 25, 2008The other day, Chad asked about the appropriate use of someone else's published data:
There's a classic paper on the Quantum Zeno Effect that I discuss in Chapter 5 of the book. The paper does two tests of the effect, and presents the results in two bar graphs. They also provide the data in tabular form. ...
If I copy the data from the table, and make my own version of the graph, am I obliged to contact them and ask permission to duplicate their results in my book?
Chad's commenters were of the view (substantiated with credible linked sources) that data itself cannot be copyrighted under U.…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2008Connected to my last post (and anticipated by my razor-sharp commenters), in this post I want to look at the pros and cons of routine screening mammography in women under age 50, drawing on the discussion of this subject in the multi-page "patient instructions" document I received from my primary care physician.
The aim of screening mammography is to get information about what's going on in the breast tissue, detecting changes that are not apparent to the eye or to the touch. If some of these changes are the starts of cancer, the thought is that finding them sooner can only be better,…
jstemwedel | July 17, 2008There's a question I've been thinking about intermittently (over the course of several years) that I thought I'd lay out here, on the theory that you all have a track record of sharing smart and insightful things (including related questions of your own) in the comments.
One of the things that potentially makes a human life good (at least, from the point of view of the person living it) is setting aims and directing one's efforts toward meeting those aims. For many people, these aims run along the lines of making the world a better place for others in some particular way - by reducing…
jstemwedel | July 10, 2008
Ronald A. Howard and Clinton D. Korver (with Bill Birchard), Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life. Harvard Business Press, 2008.
I fully embrace the idea that ethics should not just be a subject of esoteric inquiry in philosophy departments but rather a central feature of our lives as we live them.
Yet how exactly that's supposed to happen in a world where lots of people have been able to avoid ethics classes altogether presents a bit of a puzzle. Sure, we are presented with lessons about ethics outside the classroom, by family, friends…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2008The press covering the story of bioethicist Glenn McGee's departure from the post of director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College is hungry for an ironic twist. For example, Scientific American titles its article "An Unethical Ethicist?" What more fitting fall than some self-appointed morality cop going down on account of his own immoral dealings?
Believe me, I'm familiar with the suspicions people seem to harbor that ethicists are, in fact, twice as naughty as other folks. But from the evidence laboriously assembled in the SciAm article, I'm just not buying…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2008Because it strikes me as somehow related to my last post, and because Memorial Day is the Monday after next, I'm recycling a post I wrote last year for WAAGNFNP:
On Memorial Day, because I really needed to do something beside grade papers for awhile, I decided to go to the nursery to buy some plants. First, though, because the kids (who had the day off from school) were actually entertaining themselves pretty well, I poured myself another coffee and decided to actually read some of the articles in The Nation issue on climate change.
Confronted with the news that jets are evil and carbon…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2008After what has felt to me like a cooler than usual April and beginning of May, we seem finally to be changing seasons here. (OK, changing seasons with a vengeance -- apparently our temperatures yesterday were record highs.)
Of course, in this part of California, we have two seasons: the green season and the gold season (which some insist on calling the brown season). The winter, and the winter rains, are over. Now it's time for things to dry out.
This, as Michael O'Hare notes, means that water districts are trying to work out what to do about anticipated water shortages. He writes:
The…
jstemwedel | May 6, 2008More than a month ago William the Coroner tagged me. It is not just that I am slow; this meme is challenging!
Not mush, methodology.
A surprising number of people seem to think being ethical amounts to not being an inherently evil person.
I am passionate about teaching my students that making ethical decisions involves moving beyond gut feelings and instincts. It means understanding how your decisions impact others, and considering the ways your interests and theirs intersect. It means thinking through possible impacts of the various choices available to you. It means understanding the…
jstemwedel | May 1, 2008Once again, I'm teaching the relatively new ethics module in "Introduction to Engineering". Today was the discussion of what kinds of ethics might reasonably govern an engineering student's behavior, and how these might be important on the road to becoming a competent grown-up engineer.
So of course, we talked about cheating.
The students in the course all have i-Clickers, which means I can ask them questions and have them indicate one of up to five multiple-choice answers, then look at the results immediately and discuss them. In one of the sections I taught today, a majority of the…
jstemwedel | April 17, 2008Janet D. Stemwedel: Hey, can we talk about pseudonymous blogging?
Dr. Free-Ride: Haven't you already written a bunch of posts about that?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Yeah, but the blogosphere seems to be discussing it again.
Dr. Free-Ride: You know I only work on Fridays, right?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Get your pseudonymous butt in gear and help me have a proper dialogue!
Dr. Free-Ride: Dude, how are we supposed to have a dialogue about this? I'm you. You have yourself a monologue.
Janet D. Stemwedel: Hey, you were a pseudonymous blogger for a whole year! That's experience you can draw on.
Dr. Free-…
jstemwedel | April 10, 2008There is a rather vigorous exchange (although one that fails my test for a "dialogue" in a number of ways) going on in the comments on my post about Kay Weber's efforts to keep going forward with her lawsuit against Fermilab. Since this particular ethics blog is my ethics blog, I'm taking this opportunity to butt in with some comments of my own.
The point of the original post was to pass on information to those who have been following the progress of the case and might want to give Kay what assistance they can in mounting the next appeal. It was not intended to present the complete details…