Teaching science at the university level: What about the ethics?

Ethics in science is integrated into an interdisciplinary science course called “Science, Technology and Society” (STS). This paper focuses on the section of the course called “Societal Impact on Science and Technology”, which includes the topics Misconduct in Science, Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, and the Use of Human Subjects in Research. Students in the course become aware not only of the science itself, but also of the process of science, some aspects of the history of science, the social responsibilities of scientists, and the ethical issues in science. Teaching techniques include the instructor sharing experiences as a scientist with the students, sharing books and resources with students, utilizing current sources of information like the weekly “Science Times”, inviting guest speakers, and utilizing portfolios to assess student learning. This paper was delivered orally at the National Academy of Sciences’ “Convocation on Scientific Conduct”, 6–7 June 1994.     

Why teach ethics in science and engineering?

The following views were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Seminar “Teaching Ethics in Science and Engineering”, 10–11 February 1993 organized by Stephanie J. Bird (M.I.T.), Penny J. Gilmer (Florida State University) and Terrell W. Bynum (Southern Connecticut State University). Opragen Publications thanks the AAAS, seminar organizers and authors for permission to publish extracts from the conference. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of AAAS or its Board of Directors.     

Experience and inference: how far will science carry us?

This paper begins with a view of the remarkable understanding of infant and child development that has evolved from research and observation. The limitations of this contribution from science to the multi-dimensional context-based individuality of each human in his or her intersubjective realm are then considered. For a contemporary view we must recognize the influence of the variability of experiences and the inferences drawn from them. Inferences involve symbolization and culturally derived archetypes as illustrated in a clinical example.     

Looking to the future: will behavior analysis survive and prosper?

Behavior analysis as a discipline currently is doing relatively well. How it will do in the future is unclear and depends on how the field, and the world at large, changes. Five current characteristics of the discipline that appear to reduce the probability that it will survive and prosper are discussed and suggestions for improvement are offered. The areas of concern are (a) the small size and limited power of the discipline, (b) the growing focus of applied behavior analysis on autism spectrum disorders and little else, (c) the esoteric nature of much basic research, (d) the proliferation of "applied" research that really isn't applied, and (e) the widespread use of imprecise and potentially harmful technical language.     

The ‘will to believe’ in science and religion

Conclusion The Will to Believe defines the religious question as forced, living and momentous, but even in this article James asserts that more objective factors are involved. The competing religious hypotheses must both be equally coherent and correspond to experimental data to an equal degree. Otherwise the option is not a live one. If I say to you Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan, it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. Analogously, in A Pluralistic Universe James is at pains to convince the reader that his own religious hypothesis is just as objective, makes just as much sense, etc. as alternative possibilities: the only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it [pluralistic pantheism] is a fully coordinate hypothesis with monism. This world may, in the last resort, be a block universe; but on the other hand, it may be a universe only strung along, not rounded in and closed. Reality may exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I do insist. Here, once again, before the will to believe can be employed, the objective factors of competing hypotheses, their equal coherence and correspondence, must be brought out.When reconstructed, James' overall outlook has a qausi Kuhnian taint to it- though obvious differences remain. Much of what goes on in evaluating competing scientific hypotheses is either not forced, or not living, or not momentous, but rather typical, dead, and avoidable, in short very normal. But there are moments in the history of science where the decision between hypotheses might well be forced, living and momentous, and sometimes James comes close to recognizing this.Analogously, a good deal of what goes on in religion is not forced, not living or not momentous - in short it is all too normal. In The Varieties of Religious Experience for example, James proposes to ignore the institutional branch of the religious domain and to concentrate on personal and psychological factors, his reason being that the institutional aspect concentrates on the routine, the normal. Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch. Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. and again The word religion, as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to organize themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing; so that when we hear the word religion nowadays, we think inevitably of some church or other.Clearly here religion has a normal, i.e. trivial side, just as does science. On the other hand, there are revolutionary moments in religion, such as that of choosing between theism and materialism in Pragmatism, or choosing among theism, monistic pantheism and pluralistic pantheism in A Pluralistic Universe. Such moments involve the will to believe and are clearly more personal than their counterparts in the domain of normal institutionalized religion. Going further, there are no doubt differences of degree between the will to believe decisions in science and the will to believe decisions in religion. These have been explicated in more specific terms by Ian Barbour in his article, Paradigms in Science and Religion. ...each of the subjective features of science... is more evident in the case of religion: (1) the influence of interpretation on data, (2) the resistance of comprehensive theories of falsification, and (3) the absence of rules for choice among paradigms. Each of the corresponding objective features of science is less evident in the case of religion: (1) the presence of common data on which disputants can agree, (2) the cumulative effect of evidence for or against a theory, and (3) the existence of criteria which are not paradigm-dependent. It is clear that in all three respects religion is a more subjective enterprise than science. But in each case there is a difference of degree - not an absolute contrast between an objective science and a subjective religion. Barbour correctly notes that the ...choice is not between religion and science, but between theism, pantheism, and naturalism, let us say, as each is expressed in a particular historical tradition. No basic beliefs are capable of demonstrable proof. James sometimes comes close to recognizing this but his oscillation on the status of the everyday world of common sense, or the perceptual world, causes him not to see the issue clearly. When the animated world of the perceptual is taken as the all inclusive really real, science is viewed as an abstract, second class citizen. But James offers what we would consider a more sophisticated and adequate perspective when he views the world of common sense, having become linguistified, as itself suspicious, and consequently views all three tiers - common sense, scholastic philosophy, and science - as regional ontologies, or language games in Wittgenstein's terminology - and opposes all three to a more primordial or prereflexive level. When James takes this second approach it is easier to see that the basic distinction he began to make in The Will to Believe was between the scientific and religious domain where the will to believe was to be employed, and the domain of ordinary religion and science. Finally this position anticipates his ultimate metaphysical outlook, viz. pure experience as approachable through language on a series of diverse regional levels, but nonetheless not completely describable within language.It is important to recall that in The Varieties of Religious Experience James distinguishes between the science of religions and what he calls living religion: [T] he science of religions may not be an equivalent for living religion; and if we turn to the inner difficulties of such a science, we see that a point comes when she must drop the purely theoretic attitude, and either let her knots remain uncut, or have them cut by active faith. The study of religion, in short is not the activity of religion; the latter is animated, personal, and, we would argue, necessitates a commitment in terms of the will to believe. Once again, however, James hesitates over offering the same two-fold delineation in other areas of science. On the one hand he tells the reader that science-has ended by utterly repudiating the personal point of view. On the other hand, he offers the following comment a few pages later on in a footnote: ...the divorce between scientist facts and religious facts may not necessarily be as eternal as it at first sight seems, nor the personalism and romanticism of the world, as they appeared to primitive thinking, be matters so irrevocably outgrown. The final opinion may, in short, in some manner now impossible to forsee, revert to the more personal style, just as any path of progress may follow a spiral rather than a straight line. If this were so, the rigorously impersonal view of science might one day appear as having been a temporarily useful eccentricity rather than the definitely triumphant position which the sectarian scientist at present so confidently announces it to be. The burden of this paper has been to indicate that when James' two-fold outlook on perception and/or common sense is properly reconstructed, the raproachment between science and religion is not so impossible to forsee.

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Happiness: When does it lead to self-indulgence and when does it lead to self-denial?

Previous research on self-gratification in children has found that happiness, compared to a neutral affective state, sometimes causes self-indulgence and sometimes causes self-denial. Review of this research led to the hypothesis that happiness leads to self-indulgence when children have no reason to believe that excessive self-gratification is morally wrong but that happiness promotes selfdenial when children fear that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral rule. In the present study, children were first placed in either a happy or neutral mood. They were then given an opportunity to help themselves freely to a reward supply, but half the children in each affect condition were warned that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral rule whereas the other half were not. In the absence of information that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral standard, happiness produced self-indulgence, but when children were told that excessive self-gratification would be wrong, happy children denied themselves significantly more than neutral-mood children. It was suggested that happiness motivates children to try to sustain their elevated mood; the behavioral route to maintaining positive mood, however, depends on how children perceive the moral implications of their actions.     

Patents and ethics: Is it possible to be balanced?

In this presentation, principles of ethics are confronted with the desire of the inventor to make a profit. To this end the presentation is focused on patent protection. Patents should guarantee the return of an inventor’s investment and profit and, on the other side, ensure availability — by patent disclosure — of the invention for the society when the patent terminates. Recent patent applications made by inventors are infringing this principle and societies are paying an unexpected price for these practices. Patent claims are too broad and disclosures too poor. Extreme examples will be discussed. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “The Ethics of Intellectual Property Rights and Patents,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 23–24 April, 2004.     

Conditional advice and inducements: are readers sensitive to implicit speech acts during comprehension?

Conditionals can implicitly convey a range of speech acts including promises, tips, threats and warnings. These are traditionally divided into the broader categories of advice (tips and warnings) and inducements (promises and threats). One consequence of this distinction is that speech acts from within the same category should be harder to differentiate than those from different categories. We examined this in two self-paced reading experiments. Experiment 1 revealed a rapid processing penalty when inducements (promises) and advice (tips) were anaphorically referenced using a mismatching speech act. In Experiment 2 a delayed penalty was observed when a speech act (promise or threat) was referenced by a mismatching speech act from the same category of inducements. This suggests that speech acts from the same category are harder to discriminate than those from different categories. Our findings not only support a semantic distinction between speech act categories, but also reveal pragmatic differences within categories.     

Science on the periphery: Can it contribute to mainstream science?

Science is a global phenomenon that knows no frontiers. But in the real world, production and efficient utilization of scientific knowledge are highly concentrated in a few countries. A large majority of countries—those on the periphery, contribute precious little to the growth of scientific knowledge. Indeed, the distribution of science is even more skewed than is the distribution of wealth among nations. As a result, peripheral countries are left out of the intellectual discourse that is at the very foundation of the knowledge enterprise. The extent of this skewness and the relative neglect of the perihpery can be seen in some quantitative form from publication and citation data. However, while it may be true that mainstream science has not greatly benefitted from the efforts of the periphery, scientifically advanced societies are certainly benefitting from the traditional medical and agricultural knowledge base of the peripheral societies. Countless numbers of plants used in the traditional medical systems of India, China, Africa and Latin America are being drafted into the western system of medicine. A number of multinationals are learning from folk medicine and are gathering tons of plant material from these regions for the manufacture of modern medicine. Ironically, very little transfer of knowledge from ancient to modern systems takes place in the pheripheral countries themselves. Even when it does occur, it does not result in the manufacture and marketing of products for profit. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the ORSTOM-UNESCO conference on 20th Century Science—Beyond the Metropolis; September, 1994, Paris.