Conflict of interest in biomedical research: a view from Europe

In this paper I address the conflict of interest (CoI) issue from a legal point of view at a European level. We will see that the regulatory framework that exists in Europe does state the need for the independence of ethics committee involved in authorisation of research and clinical trials. We will see that CoI is an element that has to be closely monitored at National and International level. Therefore, Member States and Newly Associated States do have to address CoI in the authorisation process of research and clinical protocols of biomedicine. The opinions here expressed are personal and do not commit the European Commission. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at a Conference on Conflict of Interest and Its Significance in Science and Medicine, 5–6 April, 2002, Warsaw, Poland. The author is a Scientific Officer in the Programme Science and Society dealing with ethics and science (Unit C.3).     

On teaching computer ethics within a computer science department

The author has surveyed a quarter of the accredited undergraduate computer science programs in the United States. More than half of these programs offer a “social and ethical implications of computing” course taught by a computer science faculty member, and there appears to be a trend toward teaching ethics classes within computer science departments. Although the decision to create an “in house” computer ethics course may sometimes be a pragmatic response to pressure from the accreditation agency, this paper argues that teaching ethics within a computer science department can provide students and faculty members with numerous benefits. The paper lists topics that can be covered in a computer ethics course and offers some practical suggestions for making the course successful. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2005 conference, Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology, Linking Workplace Ethics and Education, co-hosted by Gonzaga University and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California, 9–10 June 2005.     

The virtues of belief: toward a non-evidentialist ethics of belief-formation

William Kingdon Clifford famously argued that “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” His ethics of belief can be construed as involving two distinct theses—a moral claim (that it is wrong to hold beliefs to which one is not entitled) and an epistemological claim (that entitlement is always a function of evidential support). Although I reject the (universality of the) epistemological claim, I argue that something deserving of the name ethics of belief can nevertheless be preserved. However, in the second half of the paper I argue that Clifford’s response to the problem of unethical belief is insufficiently attentive to the role played by self-deception in the formation of unethical beliefs. By contrasting the first-person perspective of a doxastic agent with the third-person perspective of an outside observer, I argue that unethical belief is a symptom of deficiencies of character: fix these, and belief will fix itself. I suggest that the moral intuitions implicit in our response to examples of unethical belief (like Clifford’s famous example of the ship owner) can better be accounted for in terms of a non-evidentialist virtue ethics of belief-formation, and that such an account can survive the rejection of strong versions of doxastic voluntarism.

Joseph Butler, “Upon Self-Deceit” (1726)

     

The computer revolution and the problem of global ethics

The author agrees with James Moor that computer technology, because it is ‘logically malleable’, is bringing about a genuine social revolution. Moor compares the computer revolution to the ‘industrial revolution’ of the late 18th and the 19th centuries; but it is argued here that a better comparison is with the ‘printing press revolution’ that occurred two centuries before that. Just as the major ethical theories of Bentham and Kant were developed in response to the printing press revolution, so a new ethical theory is likely to emerge from computer ethics in response to the computer revolution. The newly emerging field of information ethics, therefore, is much more important than even its founders and advocates believe.     

Future directions in engineering ethics research: microethics, macroethics and the role of professional societies

Three frames of reference for engineering ethics are discussed—individual, professional and social—which can be further broken down into “microethics” concerned with individuals and the internal relations of the engineering profession and “macroethics” referring to the collective social responsibility of the engineering profession and to societal decisions about technology. Few attempts have been made at integrating microethical and macroethical approaches to engineering ethics. The approach suggested here is to focus on the role of professional engineering societies in linking individual and professional ethics and in linking professional and social ethics. A research program is outlined using ethics support as an example of the former, and the issuance of position statements on product liability as an example of the latter. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Symposium on Technology and Society 2000 (ISTAS 2000), Rome, Italy, 7 September 2000. Joseph R. Herkert directs a dual-degree program in engineering and humanities/social sciences and is editor of Social, Ethical, and Policy Implications of Engineering (Wiley/IEEE Press).     

Teaching ethics to scientists and engineers: Moral agents and moral problems

In this paper I outline an “agent-centered” approach to learning ethics. The approach is “agent-centered” in that its central aim is to prepare students toact wisely and responsibly when faced with moral problems. The methods characteristic of this approach are suitable for integrating material on professional and research ethics into technical courses, as well as for free-standing ethics courses. The analogy I draw between ethical problems and design problems clarifies the character of ethical problems as they are experienced by those who must respond to them. It exposes the mistake, common in ethics teaching, of misrepresenting moral problems as multiple-choice problems, especially in the form of ‘dilemmas’, that is, a forced choice between two unacceptable alternatives. Furthermore, I clarify the importance for responsible practice of recognizing any ambiguity in the problem situation. To foster in students the skills they need, teaching examples should preserve the open-ended, multiply-constrained, and ambiguous character of problem situations as experienced by the agent. I give guidelines for constructing open-ended scenarios that present moral problems much as an agent would experience them — guidelines which strongly influenced the construction of ‘cases’ in the latest edition of “On Being a Scientist” — and I discuss how to present historical cases and cases from the instructor’s own experience to best foster agent-centered learning. This paper is a modification of material originally included in the handbook which accompanied the AAAS Seminar “Teaching Ethics in Science and Engineering”, 10–11 February 1993.     

Mapping our Progress: Identifying, Categorizing and Comparing Universities’ Ethics Infrastructures

Ethics researchers have scrutinized ethical business problems, which have been demonstrated through the actions of managers at Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen, among others. In response to these business transgressions, the US government has implemented the Sarbanes–Oxley Act to shore up businesses’ ethics infrastructures. However, universities, too, struggle with ethics problems. These include NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) violations, discrimination issues, sexual harassment, endowment admits, plagiarism, and research funding manipulation. Despite these problems, we have little knowledge regarding universities’ ethics infrastructures and codes of conduct, and insignificant empirical research on academic ethics issues (Kelley & Chang, Journal of Higher Education, under review, 2006; Morgan & Korschgen, College Student Journal, Sept., 2001). This lack of knowledge exists despite the critical role universities play in shaping the moral behavior of future generations (Langlais, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 13:B11, 2006; Woo, BizEd, May/June:22–27, 2003). In this paper, we conduct exploratory research to identify the elements of universities ethics’ infrastructures. From our research, we develop an understanding of the ethics policies and infrastructure elements in place at a representative group of universities. We compare these infrastructures to those in business as well as across Carnegie Classifications. We then conclude with recommendations for developing university ethics infrastructures and suggestions for future research.     

Truth and trustworthiness in research

We have recently reached a watershed in the research community’s consideration of the ethics of research. The way is now open for a more nuanced discussion than the one of the last decade in which attention to legal and quasi-legal procedures for handling misconduct dominated. The new discussion of ethical issues focused on trustworthiness takes us beyond consideration of conduct that is straightforwardly permitted, forbidden or required, to consideration of criteria for responsible behavior. This paper develops an overview of the subject of trustworthiness among researchers. It illustrates and discusses various types of betrayal and defections in research conduct, and locates these in relation to many of the situations discussed elsewhere in this issue. Beginning with the breaches of trust that constitute major wrongdoing in research (“research misconduct”), I argue that these are more often examples of negligence or recklessness than they are of “fraud.” Acts of negligence and recklessness figure not only in misconduct, narrowly defined, but in many lesser betrayals and defections that undermine trust. The presence or absence of an intentional deception is not a reliable indicator of the seriousness of some moral lapse. Such a lapse, where it does occur, may be simply a particularly poor response to perennially difficult research responsibility. Finally, I consider trust and trustworthiness among collaborating researchers and a range of intentional and unintentional behaviors that influence the character of these trust relationships. The supervisor-supervisee relationship is of particular significance because it is both a difficult area of responsibility for the supervisor and because this relationship is formative for a new researcher’s subsequent expectations and behavior. I review the history of the research community’s discussion of research ethics in the editorial for this issue ofScience and Engineering Ethics 1: 322–328.     

儒家伦理与情感

The Confucian understanding of emotions and their ethical importance confirms and exemplifies the contemporary Western renewed understanding of the nature of emotions. By virtue of a systematic conceptual analysis of Confucian ethics, one can see that, according to Confucians, the ethical significance of emotions, lies in that an ethical life is also emotional and virtues are inclinational. And a further exploration shows that the reason for the ethical significance is both that emotions are heavenly-endowed and that there exists a union of emotions and reason in Confucian ethics. This will constitute a challenge to the so-called mainstream ethical theories which have been popularly engaged in seeking justifications for abstract moral rules. __________ Translated from Zhexue Yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Research), 2007, (3): 86–92     

Business ethics and computer ethics: The view from Poland

An Aristotelian approach to understanding and teaching business ethics is presented and defended. The newly emerging field of computer ethics is also defined in an Aristotelian fashion, and an argument is made that this new field should be called “information ethics”. It is argued that values have their roots in the life and practices of a community; therefore, morality cannot be taught by training for a special way of reasoning. Transmission of values and norms occurs through socialization — the process by which an individual absorbs not only values but also the whole way of life of his or her community. It follows that business ethics and information ethics can be considered kinds of socialization into a profession: role learning and acquiring a new self-identification. This way of understanding fields of applied ethics is especially important for their proper development in Central-Eastern Europe because of endemic factors which are the result of recent political developments there.     

“Ethics wars”: Reflections on the Antagonism between Bioethicists and Social Science Observers of Biomedicine1

Social scientists often lament the fact that philosophically trained ethicists pay limited attention to the insights they generate. This paper presents an overview of tendencies in sociological and anthropological studies of morality, ethics and bioethics, and suggests that a lack in philosophical interest might be related to a tendency among social scientists to employ either a deficit model (social science perspectives accommodate the sense of context that philosophical ethics lacks), a replacement model (social scientists have finally found the “right way” of doing ethics), or a dismissal model (ethics should be abandoned all together as a misconstrued veil of power). Increased awareness of differences in styles of reasoning and objects of research interest might help to overcome the hostility, and an anthropological project is presented as an invitation to a dialogue informed by awareness of such differences.This paper was first presented at the 4S/EASST Conference in Paris, August 25–28,2004 in a panel co-convened with Richard Tutton, who came up with ‘‘Ethics Wars’’ as the appropriate title for the state of affairs we wanted to discuss. Bryn William-Jones contributed to the panel and provided detailed and very useful comments to the paper. The project on which the article reports was financially supported by the Swedish Ethics in Healthcare Programme (Grant 2000/56) and the Danish Social Science Research Council (Grant 24-03-0219).     

Teaching ethics in engineering and computer science: A panel discussion

At a conference, two engineering professors and a philosophy professor discussed the teaching of ethics in engineering and computer science. The panelists considered the integration of material on ethics into technical courses, the role of ethical theory in teaching applied ethics, the relationship between cases and codes of ethics, the enlisting of support of engineering faculty, the background needed to teach ethics, and the assessment of student outcomes. Several audience members contributed comments, particularly on teaching ethical theory and on student assessment. This panel discussion took place at a mini-conference, Practicing and Teaching Ethics in Engineering and Computing, held during the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, Washington, D.C., March 8–9, 1997. Biographical information on panelists: Charles Glagola is an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Florida. He is a registered professional engineer in the states of Florida and Alabama. Before coming to academia, he had extensive industry experience culminating with his owning and operating a construction and engineering firm in Pensacola, Florida. He currently teaches engineering ethics as part of a professional issues course in the Department of Civil Engineering, and a one-hour engineering ethics course that is offered to all engineering students through the College of Engineering. Moshe Kam is professor of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University. He heads Drexel’s Data Fusion Laboratory which specializes in multisensor systems and robot navigation. His professional interests include detection and estimation, distributed decision making, forensic applications of image processing, and engineering ethics. Michael Loui is professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate dean of the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 1990 to 1991, he served at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. His scholarly interests include computational complexity theory, theory of parallel and distributed computation, fault-tolerant software, and professional ethics. Caroline Whitbeck is a philosopher of science, technology and medicine and is the Elmer G. Beamer-Hubert H. Shneider Professor in Ethics at Case-Western Reserve University. She also directs the WWW Ethics Center for Engineering & Science— http://ethics.cwru.edu— under a grant from the National Science Foundation. The focus of her current work is practical ethics, especially ethics in scholarly and scientific research. Her book, Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research, will appear from Cambridge University Press in winter 1997–98.     

正义的战争与战争的正义——关于战争伦理的反思

War can be defined as organized political violence among two or more nations. In accordance with the purpose, processes and results of war, the ethics of war generally comprises three aspects: right ethics, action ethics and duty ethics. The most important issue in ethics of war is “justice”. “Justice” and “injustice” as a conceptual pair do not prescribe the objective character of war but rather convey a subjective attitude and ethical position that have the potential to compel a populace to either support or oppose a war. Translated by Zuo Gaoshan and Xi Yunpeng from Lunlixue Yanjiu 伦理学研究 (Studies in Ethtics), 2005, (6): 43–48     

Teaching ethics and technology with <Emphasis Type="Italic">Agora</Emphasis>, an electronic tool

Courses on ethics and technology have become compulsory for many students at the three Dutch technical universities during the past few years. During this time, teachers have faced a number of didactic problems, which are partly due to a growing number of students. In order to deal with these challenges, teachers in ethics at the three technical universities in the Netherlands — in Delft, Eindhoven and Twente — have developed a web-based computer program called Agora (see www.ethicsandtechnology.com). This program enables students to exercise their ethical understanding and skills extensively. The program makes it possible for students to participate actively in moral reflection and reasoning, and to develop the moral competencies that are needed in their later professional practice. The developers of the program have tried to avoid two traps. Firstly, they rejected, from the outset, a cookbook style of dealing with ethical problems that applied ethics is often taken to be and, secondly, they wanted to design a flexible program that respects the student’s as well as the teacher’s creativity, and that tries to engage students in moral reflection. Agora meets these requirements. The program offers possibilities that extend beyond the requirements that are usually accepted for case-exercises in applied ethics, and that have been realised in several other computer models for teaching ethics. In this article, we describe the main considerations in the development of Agora and the features of the resulting program.     

Teaching ethics: More than an honor code

An honor code is certainly a good place to start teaching engineering students about ethics, but teaching students to live honorably requires far more effort than memorizing a code of ethics statement or applying it just to academic performance. In the School of Engineering at Grand Valley State University, we have followed the model provided by the United States Military Academy at West Point. For our students this involves an introduction to the Honor Code as part of a larger Honor Concept at the very beginning of their studies and then making it an integral part of their preparation as engineers. The challenge is significant because the culture at large does not support living with an Honor Concept. This paper will begin with a discussion of the cultural context in which we must teach, because that context has changed significantly in the years since many faculty members were students themselves. The rest of the paper will detail the approach that we have taken to teach ethics as an engineer’s way of life. “The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be. All human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.” Plato An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2005 conference, Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology, Linking Workplace Ethics and Education, co-hosted by Gonzaga University and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 9–10 June 2005.     

现代语境中的伦理学和伦理学家

Ethics in the modern context is under the dual pressure of scientific-technological rationality and market commercialization, which has led to breakthroughs in the original boundaries of knowledge and academic methodology. The gradual separation of the domain of public life and that of private life in modern society and the former’s increasing pressure on the latter, in addition to the above dual pressure on ethics, is causing a dramatic transformation of the structure of ethical knowledge itself. All of these raise new theoretical problems for ethics and ethicists in the modern context. Answering and solving these problems makes sense for the future development of ethics as one of the classic humanities, and tests modern ethicists’ ability to realize their moral and theoretical duties. Translated by Yan Xin from Daode yu wenming 道德与文明 (Morality and Civilization), 2007, (4): 4–9     

What can we learn by looking for the first code of professional ethics?

The first code of professional ethics must: (1)be a code of ethics; (2) apply to members of a profession; (3) apply to allmembers of that profession; and (4) apply only to members of that profession. The value of these criteria depends on how we define “code”, “ethics”, and “profession”, terms the literature on professions has defined in many ways. This paper applies one set of definitions of “code”, “ethics”, and “profession” to a part of what we now know of the history of professions, there by illustrating how the choice of definition can alter substantially both our answer to the question of which came first and (more importantly) our understanding of professional codes (and the professions that adopt them). Because most who write on codes of professional ethics seem to take for granted that physicians produced the first professional code, whether the Hippocratic Oath, Percival’s Medical Ethics, the 1847 Code of Ethicsof the American Medical Association (AMA), or some other document, I focus my discussion on these codes. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A utilitarian argument against torture interrogation of terrorists

Following the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, much support for torture interrogation of terrorists has emerged in the public forum, largely based on the “ticking bomb” scenario. Although deontological and virtue ethics provide incisive arguments against torture, they do not speak directly to scientists and government officials responsible for national security in a utilitarian framework. Drawing from criminology, organizational theory, social psychology, the historical record, and my interviews with military professionals, I assess the potential of an official U.S. program of torture interrogation from a practical perspective. The central element of program design is a sound causal model relating input to output. I explore three principal models of how torture interrogation leads to truth: the animal instinct model, the cognitive failure model, and the data processing model. These models show why torture interrogation fails overall as a counterterrorist tactic. They also expose the processes that lead from a precision torture interrogation program to breakdowns in key institutions—health care, biomedical research, police, judiciary, and military. The breakdowns evolve from institutional dynamics that are independent of the original moral rationale. The counterargument, of course, is that in a society destroyed by terrorism there will be nothing to repair. That is why the actual causal mechanism of torture interrogation in curtailing terrorism must be elucidated by utilitarians rather than presumed.