A Question for the Readers

Its definitely possible to ask the questions about the outcomes of activity x without condoning activity x. I mean, no one thinks that car companies studying how to make their cars safer during an accident means the companies are in favor of car crashes.

It's almost a certainty that some fraction of responses will deal with the question you're not asking but the underlying issue. Check with drugmonkey on how some of his drug addiction topics turn into "legalize eet". Of course, when he makes a post about THC addiction its fairly comical when the stereotypical stoners show up and make whatever arguments they normally make. In certain topics, like the one you stumbled into, the results are not comical.

As you've also noticed, it can depend on who asks the question. I wouldn't even bother commenting on this, it will make things worse :p

Well, in a logical sense, yes, is completely possible. The sentence "Offshore drilling has consequences X, Y, Z" and the sentence "X is bad" are logically independent.
Now, psychologically is a different issue altogether and is an empirical question, not a philosophical one. Do people that investigates the effects of offshore drilling tend to condone it? I think the answer might be affirmative but I'm not sure how to investigate the direction of causation. Maybe people that condone some aspects of reality would want to investigate their negative effects or maybe investigating about them convinces them that they are harmful.

Depends on how it's done. The collection of data regarding any phenomenon can be recorded, but its social connotations have to be fit into the framework of the social climate of the time. For example, one can say there are X number of pet dogs in the United States, but the way they affect society cannot be quantified in the same way as the data. The effects of offshore drilling can be quantified in the number of gallons spilled, the number of animals killed, and so on, but how society reacts is based on the value placed on those animals, the value of keeping the water clean. Do we value the life of a pelican more than the savings on a barrel of oil? That is what's hard to quantify. I don't think seeing and recording a phenomenon is condoning it - it is the opposite, or rather separate. It's neither approving or disapproving. Though humans WILL have their opinions....

It is both possible and important to investigate the effects of a given thing without passing or implying moral judgment, but it is not easy to do so in an open forum without having one's intentions grossly misinterpreted. In my experience, most people have great difficulty separating the two types of questions to which you have referred here.

I think it does matter what is being asked and who is doing the asking. Some subjects and contexts will require the writer to be especially sensitive and well-informed. That said, I also think careful framing, clear ground rules for discussion, and strict moderation can markedly increase the chances of receiving constructive responses.

For example, if the topic at hand is whether or not X is associated with Y, you might ward off potential misunderstandings by making clear what, precisely, you are and are not examining in that post. Reassure the readers that you are aware that topic X is controversial and complex. Remind them that the possible relationship between Y and X is just one X-related concern out of many. Certainly you want to be extra careful not to imply that you would make a broad moral or ethical conclusion on the basis of a few papers.

When a writer is playing the role of neutral, unbiased researcher (as if there were such a thing), I, for one, will expect to see him or her pick apart the evidence with a critical eye and address its limitations as well as its strengths. If he fails to do so, it is reasonable to suspect he may have some sort of personal stake in the issue and has been out scavenging for evidence of his own OK-ness. Even if this is not actually the case at all, appearances will influence the type and quality of reader feedback (as well as the quieter thoughts readers keep to themselves).

The answer is: a categorical "yes." Viva la science.

I consider myself a new regular reader of your blog. In what strikes me as an underwhelming coincedence, some of the bloggers who have been most critical of your ideas lately are the same who I've lost interest in quite a long time ago.

Don't be afraid to ruffle some people's feathers now and then.

In a perfect world, yes, we could ask questions like those while opposing the things we are asking about, but if we discover that the answers don't "fit the party line", then the question and the answers will be attacked.

In cases like climate change and oil spills, the answers are fully in line with environmental groups and so the attacks are lessened. With drugs, most of the answers match up with the "it's really bad for you" idea, so most of the answers are allowed. One study showing THC isn't as bad as Meth is allowable, because THC and Meth are still both bad for you.

However, in some cases, the answers don't fit the theory, but because the theory is part of a complex social argument, the answers, the question, and the asker will be attacked. This is what happens for questions like pornography. Most of current academic research on pornography stems from the results and thinking of radical feminism. One major component of radical feminism is anti-pornography feminism. Since the research didn't show that viewing pornography instantly makes one an evil misogynist, it had to be attacked. I would suggest "Negotiating Sex and Gender in the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography" by Carole S. Vance for an overview of some of the rhetoric that has come beforehand. Ultimately, the anti-pornography movement is dependent on the research saying, unequivocally, that porn is absolutely evil, so even if the researcher doesn't support pornography, if the results don't say "porn is evil", then the researcher and the research are open to attack.

Of course now, it isn't just pornography where this can happen. Any research into race, sex, gender, sexuality, or such topics will inherently be part of the extremely polarized political discourse on these very same topics. So while yes, we should be able to ask questions like that, we simply cannot pretend that the people that are involved are not going to attack the research if it doesn't match the discourses they are using.

It's possible. The problem is it sometimes still feels wrong to investigate the effects of a product that you feel was created via unethical means. I think two things that exacerbate this feeling are: if the product is still being created in the present, and if people are involved.

Regarding the first one, you can see how it would be different to study the effects of having an alcoholic parent, using a child who is currently being beaten by his alcoholic dad. The idea of stopping the harm takes precedent over the idea of studying how the harm operates. People have to feel like they're doing more about the former than the latter in order to feel okay about doing the latter at all. And that's probably why researchers who study a harmful phenomenon will often support their work by saying "think of all the people we can help deal with this if we understand it better." Saying that line - and I'm not knocking it at all - seems to go a long way in making people feel better about the endeavor.

Now about the second factor - whether or not people are (directly) involved. I actually think this is the key factor, and since reading Hauser's Moral Minds I'm in a better position to say why. According to Hauser, and he demonstrates this pretty well, humans instinctively feel it's wrong to use people as a tool to accomplish other ends. Studying the effects of porn consumption can be seen as using the humans who originally made the porn as tools to accomplish, in this case, the gain of information. Now if you feel that producing porn is okay and the people who do so do so willingly, this probably won't bother you. But if you feel that porn takes advantage of people and the people involved in its production are to varying extents being harmed, then using that to gain something - even if the porn was produced in the past, completely without your bidding - can feel wrong.

It's a start at an explanation, anyway.

I think it is not only possible, it is critically important in a whole lot of contexts.

Take my given focus, addiction and addictive behaviors. The entire point of my decision to put my focus in that direction, is a desire to reduce the harm of addiction on society. To further this goal, there are a lot of questions that must be explored - including the benefits/perceived benefits of substance abuse.

In a lot of cases there are benefits to getting high. In my own case the benefit was that it slowed my brain down. That doesn't mean that I am going to then claim that substance abuse is a good thing. The benefit I received from my drug use was relative to my baseline and doesn't take into account the trade-off with the negative consequences. In balance, my substance abuse was actually a terrible thing.

But if we fail to explore the benefits of a given negative behavior, we are ignoring a critical aspect of the problem. Without understanding the "why" we simply can't expect to figure out how to prevent that behavior in the future. If all we focus on is the damage that behavior causes we cannot change anything.

James Davis hits the mark - it is all about politics. I will take it further and make an explicit statement about it; Politics makes for bad science.

It depends a lot on the circumstances. There are some questions about effects it is extraordinarily difficult to ask ethically, without causing problems beyond what you're trying to study.
Let's take the example of studying the effects of heroin. There are plenty of perfectly ethical studies on the effects of heroin, some of which may find minimal harm, which still do not condone the usage of the drug. I'd argue we need these studies.

On the other hand, is it ethical to do any imaginable study on the effects of heroin? What if we are giving previously naive individuals, who would never have tried the drug otherwise, a known drug with harm and addiction risks? What if the heroin in our study is from Afghanistan, and that in doing our studies we are effectively increasing the demand for the product and the resulting conflict in the area?

What if we found that asking people to rate their own responses to heroin causes them to see it as 'not harmful to me personally'- precipitating a cognitive rationalization loop that results in them exposing themselves to more heroin than a control group who we *didn't* ask how it affected them?

(related to these: I wonder if people in human sexuality research have their IRBs require them to source their porn to the most ethical possible suppliers. And I wonder if IRBs consider long-term followup to see if psychological type questions ever cause problems)

Ultimately, we'd have to look at what the benefits of our study would be, and ask how significant would they have to be to compensate for these associated costs of doing the research.

Another example- I don't think anyone would argue it's ethically permissible to *cause* an oil spill just to research ways to try to clean it up. Even though it is, of late, pretty dang obvious we need to research this area.

Or how about knowing that intellectually, the question: "what is the effect of *withholding* treatment for syphilis?" is a perfectly valid question. It's just that, under most circumstances, it's not *ethically* as valid a research direction.

Some pure hypotheticals- what would we do if we found that researching certain traumatic events, say childhood sexual abuse, involved processes (asking people to recall the experience) that actually resulted in drastically worse life outcomes and mental health? I think psychologists have a general sense that talking about trauma is better, but what if the data showed it was totally wrong? What if we found that *talking* about the trauma was fine, but any attempts at justice (e.g. prosecuting the abuser) actually resulted in terrible outcomes? Could we as a society handle that knowledge?

One that's only far too possible- if we are interested in the efficacy of torture on the ability of torturers to gain information, it's generally not considered ethical to take two groups and subject one to torture and one to other interrogation techniques. Yet, if we do a 'natural history' type experiment, and simply record information from torture that happened without us, but our data shows that it is effective, and torture rates subsequently skyrocket, are we remotely responsible?
Were the Manhattan project scientists at all responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

More slippery still (and probably more related to the area that gave you trouble) are questions of what knowledge it is ethical to use. Is it ethical to use the data obtained by Nazi scientists, using protocols we would never tolerate today? Is it ethical to use HeLa cells to cure cancer? Where is the line?

I raise all these as questions because I certainly don't have all the answers. I don't have a particular agenda, other than the to tell the 'all knowledge is good and Science is the Highest Good' folks to go jump off a bridge...

Pretty much what Ides of Ulven and becca said, which is a heck of a lot more thoughtful than the "oh, it's fine, piss off the pc crowd" responses. Yes, it is possible, but you need to tread carefully. And some issues carry very specific problems -- see, for example, this paper Contentious issues in research on trafficked women working in the sex industry: Study design, ethics, and methodology.

This seems pretty cut-and-dry. It is the role of science to ask what and why. It is the role of ethics to ask ought or ought not. We use science in order to understand our world; we concoct ethics to translate our empirical understanding into rules. Science has no place making ethical judgments.

It sounds odd to me to suggest that you wouldn't study the effects of something that you thought was wrong... if you think something is wrong, you likely already think it has some negative effects... so wouldn't you want to try to find some evidence of this so that you could use the science to help back up your ethical point? I guess it's if you don't find the evidence you were expecting to find that things get a little trickier... but I think you can still be ethically opposed to something even if you don't find evidence of harmful effects - but as a scientist, you can't be going around claiming harmful effects without testing those claims either. I think another good example of this is the spanking debate and related psychological research.

Science has no place making ethical judgments.

Bullshit, Dave. By that reasoning it is perfectly acceptable to place human infants into isolation units, to see how badly that screws up normal development, or deliberately addicting prisoners to heroin, to chart effects on life competency and recidivism. Ethics isn't an optional add-on to science after it is done.

@13: I actually agree with Dave on this one. Of course we have to conduct our research ethically, nobody is saying otherwise. Nobody would suggest that we, for example, go and make a bunch of people dependent on heroin. But there are already people who are dependent on heroin, some of whom will consent to participating in a research study. Nobody would ever suggest that we rape a bunch of people. But there, unfortunately, are people who have already been raped, some of whom will consent to participating in a research study. Similarly: nobody would suggest that we go and surgically remove anybody's frontal lobes. But there are people with various developmental and acquired lesions, some of whom will consent to participating in our research studies.

The argument here is that the empirical findings of scientific research do not necessarily bear on the ethics of a behavior. What if we found that, actually, people who get raped turn out okay? (And, of course, I'm not suggesting that this is the case). Even if this were the case, rape would still be ethically inexcusable. Because science describes subjective truth, but ethics describes objective ought. At least that's how I see it.

The comment that set me off was "Science has no place making ethical judgments." In light of this, the preceding paragraph seems to imply that science both can and should do any experiment necessary to understand the world, and only then should conclusions be applied to ethical decisions of behaviour.

I would absolutely agree that no subject should be completely off-limits to investigation, but how needs to be ethical from the get-go, and it also needs to be understood in the context of history and culture -- for example, that some some investigations would inevitably be misused. As an example of what I mean, do you think that it would be right for scientists to investigate how to tailor a disease to strike only people of a certain haplotype? Would it be ethical for scientists to investigate whether a smokeless version of white phosphorus could be made that NOTHING could extinguish? That would certainly add to our understandings of disease or chemistry, but what exactly do you think it would be used for?

Science isn't all some abstract thing, entirely disconnected from the rest of the human world.

I would say that ethics bears on the way we do science, but scientific findings do not necessarily bear on ethics.

Luna--you are mistakenly equating "conducting research ethically" with "making ethical judgments." The ethical standards for conducting research are outside of the scientist's control; you have no choice but to follow them. So there is no judgment, per se, to be made in designing your experiment. That is a wholly separate matter from making statements of rightness or wrongness, which, I'm sure scientists would overwhelmingly agree, is not the place of science.

"Science, in itself, is not the source of the ethical standards, the moral insight, the wisdom that is needed to make value-judgments; though it is an important ingredient in the making of value-judgments. Social, political and military decisions are made on grounds other than those in which science is authoritative."

-Dr. Polykarp Kusch, 1955 Nobel Laureate

"Because science describes subjective truth, but ethics describes objective ought."
This seems backwards to me. Technically, science aims at approximating objective truth rather than describes it, but more importantly I don't know that there is anything objective about ethics. Ethics is about forming a coherent set of guidelines/rules based on some set first principle(s). First principles are also subjective truths.

It gets complicated when you have two first principles that conflict. My point was, for some people "discovering knowledge is good" is taken as a first principle. Which is fine, but science doesn't *tell* us that discovering knowledge must be good. We turn to science because we *believe* (subjectively, ultimately) that discovering knowledge is good. Personally, I reason from "suffering is bad" more than "discovering knowledge is good". One is not derived from ethics and the other from science, they are *both* ethical first principles that you can reason from.

Ethics is the 'why', science is the 'how'.

"I would say that ethics bears on the way we do science, but scientific findings do not necessarily bear on ethics."
This I can agree with.

The ethical standards for conducting research are outside of the scientist's control; you have no choice but to follow them. So there is no judgment, per se, to be made in designing your experiment.

Again, completely disagree. There is a great DEAL of judgement to be made in designing experiments. You are portraying scientists as if they were amoral robots who have no say in the ethics of their work, but must be dictated to and controlled by outside rule (undoubtedly true for some, but definitely not for all), and/or science as if it were intrinsically disconnected from any morality or set of ethics. The opinion of one or any number of old Nobel laureates does not make this picture any more accurate. To the contrary, there is an entire set of ethics inherently intrinsic to science more than any other field, such as how data should be acquired and handled, how anomalous data should be treated, how credit should be allocated, etc. You also dodge the point I posed about research which would inevitably be misused.

I suggest you need to spend a bit more time -- or maybe a lot more time -- over on the sister SB blog "Adventures in Ethics and Science." Science does not happen in a vacuum, and it should never be treated as if it does. Ethics are part of the picture whether you like it or not, right from the start; "pure knowledge" which only flows to ethics and takes nothing from ethics is largely an idealistic illusion.

As much as anything, I am commenting to support the bonobos, not because the point has been lost...

I have to fervently disagree with the idea that ethics are somehow outside the scientists control. While there may be ethical issues that like it or not, a scientist has no control over, that doesn't mean there aren't any. As a scientist in training, who has some pretty strong ideas about research I want to do, I absolutely think about the ethics of studies I want to design.

A very good example, is using human drug addicts in researching various aspects of addiction and treatment. There are studies being done at any given point, wherein the researchers actually supply addicts with their substance of abuse. At some point I may well engage in this type of research, which most definitely creates very serious ethical concerns - from safety, offers of treatment and respect for personal autonomy.

These are not easy questions and given what is allowed in this type of research, the study designer is largely responsible for making many of these ethical calls. At some point it is very likely that I will have to make those calls. And in all honesty, I want to be the one who ultimately makes that call - I am the one who has to deal with the consequences. That doesn't mean I think I should decide the absolute boundaries, that is what IRBs are for. It just means that I have to make the decisions within those parameters.

There are all sorts of ethical decisions that have to go on in this process. I am honestly not sure how I feel about the idea of just depending on an independent body to determine the ethics of research one might want to engage. Although it may just be that I have especial issues with this, because there have been a lot of really screwed up psych experiments - some of them providing fundamental knowledge to be sure, but seriously unethical just the same.

there is an entire set of ethics inherently intrinsic to science more than any other field, such as how data should be acquired and handled, how anomalous data should be treated, how credit should be allocated, etc.

We are in agreement here. Yes, there is a set of guiding principles for how research is conducted. Yes, they are subject to interpretation. Yes, some of the accepted conventions may have unintended consequences. But the bottom line is that designing an ethical experiement does not involve a pronouncement of rightness or wrongness.

The original post is not asking about ethical experiment design. It's asking about what role science plays is declaring a thing to be right or wrong, and the unequivocal and resounding answer to that question is "none whatsoever."

As so as not to be accused of "dodging," I will maintain that it is not possible to commit an ethical violation simply by gathering a certain type of knowledge (as long as the experiment itself is conducted ethically). For practical purposes, implementing some sort of standard limiting research on the basis of how it is likely to be used introduces exponentially more subjectivity into the research process and opens the door to major agency problems.

"For practical purposes, implementing some sort of standard limiting research on the basis of how it is likely to be used introduces exponentially more subjectivity into the research process and opens the door to major agency problems."
I disagree. I'm a microbiologist. If I create a virulent strain of weaponized smallpox, which has no conceivable use outside of bioterror, it would be an ethical violation.
It's a good thing for you- and for the world- that most microbiologists disagree with you.

Is this a vastly more complicated world than one in which scientists ONLY seek knowledge? Yes. But every day, in every way, from the grants that we write to the experiments that we design, we *do* make judgment calls about which knowledge is the most important. To IGNORE the fact that some knowledge is going to be used to benefit the human condition, whereas other knowledge is going to used to destroy people, is unethical.
So even above and beyond the non-trivial issues of designing ethical experiments (i.e. an ethical *production* of knowledge), ethics does (and must) enter into the selection of which questions to ask.

For the record, I don't think that means we can't ask if "X that we all think is bad actually has Y detrimental effect"- even if we end up with the answer that X has no relation to Y. It just means that the question of whether to do so might be complicated, and dependent on the circumstances.

Becca--I will defer to your expertise here, but it seems antiscientific to say that such a virus would have "no conceivable use outside bioterror." If it has use in bioterror, then wouldn't it have a particularly urgent use in counter-bioterror? The WHO is against destroying the existing secure stocks of smallpox specifically because of their research value. Why should your weaponized strain get different consideration?

ethics does (and must) enter into the selection of which questions to ask

I absolutely agree. An ethicist would have a clear preference for studying, say, the relationship between demographics and the spread of malaria over studying the causes of missing teaspoons. But the difference between that claim and the claim that "we are ethically prohibited from asking certain questions" is more than semantic.

That said, I always allow my beliefs to be challenged, so if you think there's a hypothetical case that's more unequivocal than the smallpox one, I would be interested to hear it.