Preface

This volume aims to introduce students of science and philosophy to issues that are sometimes thought peripheral to real science or real philosophy. As an introduction, it necessarily simplifies, hopefully in a manner that stimulates further reflection. With regard to those who doubt the centrality of ethics to science or science to ethics, our claim for centrality is argued from multiple perspectives. But most importantly, given the central influence of science on the character of the contemporary world and of ethics in human affairs, not to reflect on the ethics–science relationship is to limit self-understanding in the technoscientific human condition.

A brief word is in order here about how we conceive of both science and ethics as actors on the social stage. As for science, since the 1970s the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society (STS) studies has been arguing that science cannot properly be understood solely as a cognitive enterprise or method of knowledge production. Science is situated in economic, cultural, and political contexts that it both reflects and influences. Science and society co-construct each other through ideas and scientifically based technologies in ways that make ethics all the more relevant, even crucial, to the self-understanding of scientists. From an STS perspective, science must be recognized as technoscience, a view implicit in many of the arguments to be explored.

As we saw in the previous two chapters, science is more than the practice of scientists, and ethics is an issue not only within the scientific community but also for the larger society within which modern science exists. Those chapters, however, were largely limited to politics. This chapter highlights interactions between science and culture. The term “ideational culture” denotes something much broader than politics and policies, namely, the attitudes, values, goals, practices, and beliefs that comprise a way of life and a way of ordering and making sense of experience. Science entails certain methods and practices for obtaining knowledge, as well as a set of theories or ideas. Yet these are not the only methods or theories to be found in human cultures, and science finds itself constantly interacting with the other methods and theories prominent in the contemporary world. The story of the Templeton Foundation illustrates the issues that arise when we adopt this wider perspective on science and its relationship to other spheres of society. This chapter then goes on to map four modes of interaction between science and culture. The final chapter considers the professional ethics of engineers, which is an important bridge between scientists and material culture.

Setting the stage: the Templeton Foundation

John Marks Templeton was born in 1912 in Winchester, Tennessee, not far from where John Scopes in 1925 was tried for teaching evolution in the public schools. A lifelong member of the Presbyterian Church, Templeton thus grew up in a culture in which the relation between science and religion took dramatic form as a conflict between biblical theology and the theory of evolution. He attended Yale University, earned a degree in economics (1934), and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. An extremely successful career in financial investment led to the creation of Templeton Growth Ltd. (1954).

This book differs from many other introductions in philosophy, and even more so from those in science. It does not so much summarize existing knowledge – although it does some of that – as attempt to open a space for critical reflection on a spectrum of questions that were rarely asked until the late twentieth century. Philosophy and ethics deal with perennial questions, but here they are associated with new issues that nevertheless promise to become perennial in a world increasingly dependent on science and technology. By means of case references and interpretative arguments, the chapters that follow invite philosophical attention to the relationship between ethics and science, on the part of students and practitioners in the fields of both philosophy and science. The introductory chapter provides a quick intellectual geography of the terrain to be explored.

Setting the stage: the Manhattan Project

On August 2, 1939, Nobel Prize physicist Albert Einstein signed a letter (written by the Austro-Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd) addressed to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The world’s preeminent scientist felt a moral responsibility to inform the president of recent developments in nuclear physics. Scientific advances had raised the possibility of creating nuclear chain reactions that could unleash vast amounts of energy. This new knowledge might lead to the construction of bombs more powerful than any previously imagined, and Einstein concluded that Nazi Germany might already be pursuing such weapons. Roosevelt responded with an initial allocation of US$6,000 for preliminary research. This was the beginning of what became the “Manhattan Project,” a massive, secret effort by the United States to build the atomic bomb. The project eventually employed 160,000 people working at centers in remote locations including Hanford, Washington; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The push to build “the gadget” (as the scientist-engineers called it) was the most expensive research and development (R&D) project to that point in history.

The final chapter once again expands appreciation of the ethical dimensions of science, this time into the domain of engineering. Expansion is justified insofar as engineering is a kind of applied science – although that is not all it is. Additionally, all scientific research is increasingly dependent on engineered instrumentation to form the interactive technoscience that founds the contemporary human-built world. Scientific engineers who have been at the forefront of constructing this world have also been leaders in ethical reflection on professional responsibilities. Codes of ethics for engineers, for instance, anticipated codes of ethics for scientists by more than half a century. Considering the ethics–engineering relationship is thus useful both to help place the ethics–science relationship in perspective and to stimulate further reflection on that relationship.

Setting the stage: the Challenger and Columbia disasters

After the Manhattan Project, one of the most iconic and important fusions of science and engineering was the US Apollo program, launched in a 1961 speech by President John F. Kennedy when he announced the goal of “landing a man on the moon” by the end of the decade. Scientists and engineers worked together to design a vehicle and sociotechnical system capable of accomplishing a politically defined goal. The Cold War successor to the Apollo program was created in 1972 when President Richard Nixon announced that NASA (the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) would develop a permanent space station and reusable shuttle to provide regular service between it and Earth. The original vision was of a shuttle that would be, not just politically but also commercially, beneficial and provide regular service by the mid-1980s.

Following a review of some historical cases of fraud and misconduct in science, Chapter 4 considered key elements of GSP (good scientific practice) or RCR (responsible conduct of research). Yet well before public and professional attention was directed toward GSP or RCR in general the ethical practice of research had become an even more public and controversial issue in relation to two special types of scientific work, those having to do with the use of humans and animals in research. Interestingly, the issue of the ethical treatment of animals actually preceded that of the proper treatment of human beings, at least as a popular issue. Because of its greater salience today, however, it is appropriate to deal first with scientific research involving humans before turning, in the following chapter, to a discussion of research involving nonhuman animals.

Setting the stage: clinical trials in developing countries

One of the most human-intensive areas of science is that of experimental studies or trials of medical therapies. There are many more types of research with humans, including biological and genetic, psychological and social scientific, and even pedagogical research. But clinical trials research raises most issues in the most intensified form, and it is in the biomedical area that ethical standards have been developed and then extended to other types of research on human beings. The single most salient issue not raised in the biomedical area itself concerns the appropriateness of extending or adapting the standards of biomedical research to biological, genetic, psychological, and social scientific research involving human subjects.

As indicated in Chapter 2, norms are forms of behavior expected by and constitutive of a group; ethics involves an effort at critical reflection on such norms. These norms can be implicit or explicit, the outgrowth of custom and tradition or the outcome of rational decision. This chapter gives a slightly more expansive account of the norms constitutive of science, in preparation for considerations of the complexities of their practical realization. It concerns the norms of science in a general sense – as these have developed historically and become implicitly constitutive of science as a knowledge-producing activity. It argues for a foundational distinction between myth (narrative) and science (nonnarrative rationality) and highlights the institutionalization of modern science that began shortly after Galileo Galilei’s encounter with the church. The final sections survey epistemological and social norms intrinsic to the conduct of science.

Setting the stage: Galileo and the church

In the pantheon of science, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) are often taken to exemplify the ideal. But given his historical priority and conflict with church authority, it is Galileo who is commonly thought to be the most heroic figure – and thus to present in vivid form the general norms of science, even insofar as he was forced to betray them.

Chapter 3 introduced the epistemic and social or behavioral norms in science as a method of knowledge production and as a social institution. These norms were described in general terms by the sociologist Robert Merton as communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (known by the acronym CUDOS). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, questions arose in society and among a new generation of social scientists about the extent to which the normative ideals of science actually govern scientific practice. To what extent are scientists really living up to the normative ideals that science seems to espouse? Chapters 4, 5, and 6 examine various realities of science that pose challenges to its ideal normative structure. The present chapter digs into the details of operationalizing the norms of science and considers some of the scandals that have occurred as a result of their breach.

There are numerous ethical issues associated with scientific research, which presents a challenge for organizing them into a logical framework. Alphabetically they range from avoiding conflicts of interest and honesty in reporting results to protecting human subjects and recognizing intellectual property. Positively good scientific practices (GSP) or the responsible conduct of research (RCR) are often summarized under the rubric of scientific integrity or responsibility. Negatively, the official US governmental definition of scientific misconduct identifies FFP (fraud, falsification, and plagiarism) as the most egregious failures. Sometimes specifics are analyzed in terms of professional responsibilities to oneself as a scientist, to the scientific community, or to society as a whole. Another common organizer considers ethical issues in relation to the three overlapping, iterative moments of planning, conducting, and reporting research. This chapter adopts a version of the last organizer and distinguishes anticipating, doing, and disseminating research. But it should be recognized that any such framework is to some extent simply a matter of convenience rather than a natural kind. What is most important is to call attention to a number of specific possible experiences in which there will be ambiguities and dilemmas, temptations to cut corners, or opportunities to exercise strength of character. Critically analyzing these experiences helps to cultivate and reinforce appropriate institutional norms in the practice of science.

Ethical theories (as introduced in Chapter 2) begin with descriptions of behaviors that are considered moral and seek to explain why they are so considered. As such ethical theories also provide perspectives on the norms incorporated into science as a social institution, mapped out in the sociology of science (Chapter 3). Additionally, theories provide different frameworks for examining and promoting institutional norms in the practice of science (Chapters 4, 5, and 6). But the relationship between ethics and science can also be reversed. It is possible to ask not only what ethics has to say about science, but also what science has to say about ethics. Science can be used to try to respond to the “why” question about behavioral norms. The present chapter thus considers efforts to use, for example, decision science, evolution, and psychology to give scientific explanations for human behavior and some associated moral beliefs. Thus, whereas the previous three chapters focused on the ethical assessment of issues related to the practice of science, the present chapter turns to considerations of how science can be used to give an account of these practices.

Setting the stage: sexual harassment among scientists

In a 2009 issue of the peer-refereed scientific journal PLoS ONE, Min Tan (from the Guandong Entomological Institute, Guangzhou, China) and colleagues published a study of the practice of fellatio among fruit bats. According to the paper abstract: