Thinking critically in medicine and its ethics: relating applied science and applied ethics

ABSTRACT While interest in philosophy and medicine has burgeoned in the past two decades, there remains a need for an analysis of the intellectual activity embodied in good medical practice. In this setting, ethical and scientific decision-making are complexly interrelated. The following paper, collaboratively written by physicians and philosophers, presents a view of applied (clinical) science and applied ethics. Making extensive use of illustrations drawn from routine case material, we seek to indicate a variety of philosophic issues to be found in daily practice, elucidate various levels of critical reasoning within the medical setting, and demonstrate a remarkable similarity between medical and ethical decision-making.     

Schopenhauer on the ethics of suicide

The concept of death is of special importance in Schopenhauer's metaphysics of appearance and Will. Death for Schopenhauer is the aim and purpose of life, that toward which life is directed, and the denial of the individual will to life. Despite his profound pessimism, Schopenhauer vehemently rejects suicide as an unworthy affirmation of the will to life by those who seek to escape rather than seek nondiscursive knowledge of Will in suffering. The only manner of self-destruction Schopenhauer finds philosophically acceptable is the ascetic saint's death by starvation. Here the individual will to life is so completely mastered as to refuse even the most basic desire for nourishment, and thereby passes into nonexistence in complete renunciation of the individual will. Schopenhauer's attitude toward suicide nevertheless embodies an inconsistency. If, as Schopenhauer believes, the aim of life is death, and death is an unreal aspect of the world as appearance, then there appears to be no justification why the philosopher should not rush headlong into it - not to affirm the will to life in an abject effort to avoid suffering, but in order to fulfill life's purpose by ending it for distinctly philosophical reasons immediately upon arriving at an understanding of the appearance-reality distinction.     

Collaborative learning in engineering ethics

This paper discusses collaborative learning and its use in an elective course on ethics in engineering. Collaborative learning is a form of active learning in which students learn with and from one another in small groups. The benefits of collaborative learning include improved student performance and enthusiasm for learning, development of communication skills, and greater student appreciation of the importance of judgment and collaboration in solving real-world problems such as those encountered in engineering ethics. Collaborative learning strategies employed in the course include informal small group discussions/problem solving, role-playing exercises, and cooperative student group projects, including peer grading. Student response to these techniques has been highly favorable. Realizing the benefits of collaborative learning is a challenge to both teachers, who must give up some control in the classroom, and students, who must be willing to take greater responsibility for their learning. An earlier version of this paper was presented by the author 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 The author teaches courses in Science, Technology and Society and is Director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars Program, a dual-degree program in engineering and humanities/social sciences.     

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.     

The ethics of social science research

ABSTRACT Ethical thinking about social science research is dominated by a biomedical model whose salient features are the assumption that only potential harms to subjects of research are relevant in the ethical evaluation of that research, and in the emphasis on securing informed consent in order to establish ethical probity. A number of counter-examples are considered to the assumption, a number of defences against these counter-examples are examined, and an alternative model is proposed for the ethical evaluation of social science research: a model which can cope with the systemic harms (harms other than those to participants as participants) which have been identified. This model is based on John Rawls's idea of original position reasoning and treats social science research as an institutional feature of the basic structure of society.     

Scientific misconduct and science ethics: a case study based approach

The Schön misconduct case has been widely publicized in the media and has sparked intense discussions within and outside the scientific community about general issues of science ethics. This paper analyses the Report of the official Committee charged with the investigation in order to show that what at first seems to be a quite uncontroversial case, turns out to be an accumulation of many interesting and non-trivial questions (of both ethical and philosophical interest). In particular, the paper intends to show that daily scientific practices are structurally permeated by chronic problems; this has serious consequences for how practicing scientists assess their work in general, and scientific misconduct in particular. A philosophical approach is proposed that sees scientific method and scientific ethics as inextricably interwoven. Furthermore, the paper intends to show that the definition of co-authorship that the members of the Committee use, although perhaps clear in theory, proves highly problematic in practice and raises more questions that it answers. A final plea is made for a more self-reflecting attitude of scientists as far as the moral and methodological profile of science is concerned as a key element for improving not only their scientific achievements, but also their assessment of problematic cases.     

Educational technologies and the teaching of ethics in science and engineering

To support the teaching of ethics in science and engineering, educational technologies offer a variety of functions: communication between students and instructors, production of documents, distribution of documents, archiving of class sessions, and access to remote resources. Instructors may choose to use these functions of the technologies at different levels of intensity, to support a variety of pedagogies, consistent with accepted good practices. Good pedagogical practices are illustrated in this paper with four examples of uses of educational technologies in the teaching of ethics in science and engineering. Educational technologies impose costs for the purchase of hardware, licensing of software, hiring of support personnel, and training of instructors. Whether the benefits justify these costs is an unsettled question. While many researchers are studying the possible benefits of educational technologies, all instructors should assess the effectiveness of their practices.     

Croatia founded a national body for ethics in science

The Committee for Ethics in Science and Higher Education (CESHE) was created in Croatia as a national body appointed by the Parliament. Thus Croatia became one of a handful of countries with national means of responding to allegations of scientific misconduct. The Committee’s duties, with the help of the Ethics Code, include promotion of ethical norms and values in science and higher education. The CESHE will work on cases of possible research misconduct and alleged disregard for the ethical norms associated with research.     

The science of public messages for suicide prevention: a workshop summary

There is minimal guidance for efforts to create effective public messages that increase awareness that suicide is preventable. To address this need, several agencies in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Annenberg Foundation convened a workshop consisting of suicide prevention advocates and persons with expertise in public health evaluation, suicide contagion, decision-making, and marketing. "Logic models" were used to define intended messages and audiences, assumed mechanisms of change, and outcomes. This summary describes some of the challenges and opportunities identified by workshop participants in evaluating public awareness campaigns in suicide prevention, technical assistance needs, and a proposed research agenda.     

Applications of neural networks in training science

Training science views itself as an integrated and applied science, developing practical measures founded on scientific method. Therefore, it demands consideration of a wide spectrum of approaches and methods. Especially in the field of competitive sports, research questions are usually located in complex environments, so that mainly field studies are drawn upon to obtain broad external validity. Here, the interrelations between different variables or variable sets are mostly of a nonlinear character. In these cases, methods like neural networks, e.g., the pattern recognizing methods of Self-Organizing Kohonen Feature Maps or similar instruments to identify interactions might be successfully applied to analyze data. Following on from a classification of data analysis methods in training-science research, the aim of the contribution is to give examples of varied sports in which network approaches can be effectually used in training science. First, two examples are given in which neural networks are employed for pattern recognition. While one investigation deals with the detection of sporting talent in swimming, the other is located in game sports research, identifying tactical patterns in team handball. The third and last example shows how an artificial neural network can be used to predict competitive performance in swimming.