How much time should we spend on ethical theory, principles, and methods?
We currently devote about 20% - 25% of the semester to ethical principles and decision-making methods: Lectures 2, 3, and 4. Our approach is novel and perhaps controversial. We are not following the standard method for teaching "Responsible Conduct of Research," which is to hold a seminar featuring different local experts serially addressing the core NIH topics. So, the head of the IRB visits to explain the rules regarding use of human subjects; then the IACUC chair discusses the use of animals, after which the sponsored program director discusses intellectual property. And so on down the line of prescribed NIH topics. To the extent that ethical principles and decision-making procedures are introduced, they are either briefly surveyed at the beginning of the course or occasionally alluded to in the course of this or that person's lecture. Result: relevant policies and regulations are covered, but students gain little sense that they are part of a community of moral discourse. A community of scholars who know they can rely on each other for guidance. A community of researchers who know how to think systematically when they encounter a new ethical challenge or a question for which there is as yet no policy.
Insofar as the received "RCR training" paradigm lacks philosophical rigor and intellectual cohesion, it tends to reinforce the idea that ethics is a matter of following rules established by authorities. It may also tend to reinforce the idea that the professions are narrow fields in which experts become proficient in a particular method but do not have responsibilities beyond their technical area. To think of research ethics as rule-following, however, is to reinforce an impoverished notion of the professions. The professions at their best are vibrant critical moral communities of discourse. Each individual professional must know how to reason well, behave conscientiously, and exercise independent judgment. For professionals are the first-line conscience of society, especially when society faces new, perhaps even dangerous, ethical questions. Even when there are no rules, professionals must know how to figure out what to do.
The academic research community prizes independent judgment and critical thinking. Nascent professionals must not only learn the current regulations governing their field. They must also catch the enthusiasm of those leading professionals who are thinking rigorously and self-critically about their work. How can we motivate young professionals to assess the rules they are following? To prepare for the potential consequences of whistleblowing? Or to prepare for the consequences of knowingly disobeying a professional rule if it entails actions that offend one's deepest sensibilities?
Excellence in research is not an act, as Aristotle might say, but a habit. It requires the exercise of emotion as well as reason. It is not sufficient to know what rule applies in each case. One must also want to observe the rule, that is, one must actually try to follow it. Actions stem from desires, and desires from emotions. Thinking about harms--to human beings, to animals, to the environment--stimulates the emotions. The importance of harm--injury, whether physical or psychological--is often overlooked as a moral tutor. Focusing on harm can help us to achieve the ambitious objectives of this short course. In a mere fourteen hours of student contact, we hope not simply to help students memorize their professoinal codes of conduct. We hope to help them feel the human impulse--the concern and care for victims--that lies underneath the code. We aim both to inform and help develop each person's resolve to act wisely, courageously.
How can a mass-enrolled 1.0 credit introductory course begin to make headway on such ambitious objectives? Ethics education is most productive when it engages what Hume called the sympathies, feelings, including feelings of revulsion at acts of hatred and violence. Our course uses case studies of harm to research subjects (Nazi research on prisoners, Tuskegee non-treatment of syphilis, abuse of monkeys, etc.) to motivate our students' sympathies with the sufferings of those harmed in research. In a Humean approach, ethics education focuses on empirical and psychological—rather than metaphysical and theological—considerations. What factors incline us toward, or restrain us from, misbehavior and cheating? By building a new course responsive to these considerations we believe we will do a more effective job helping students cultivate the three sensibilities most effective in restraining misbehavior: recognition of the dignity of persons; empathy with the suffering of sentient beings; and a deep sense of membership in a moral community.
Motivation is critical; genuine interest in a subject provides impetus to discover the principles that explain revulsion at research misconduct. Discovering the underlying ethical principles will allow us to solve other, analogous, cases. So we begin with "heels," individuals who have clearly harmed others through their research misconduct. Our goal is not to provide extensive historical analyses of these cases but rather to evoke deep personal investments in preventing future harmful research. When the course is taught by an instructor who consistently ties various speakers and topics to the underlying four ethical principles, student's emotions can be appropriately stimulated, nourished, and directed by reason. By focusing on the suffering of victims of research misconduct, students see immediately that ethics matters, that respect for others is critical, and that ethical reflection must be systematic and principled.
Our experience suggests that students taught professional codes as abstract rule-following lack the historical context and emotional investment needed to penetrate the codes to their underlying principles. Students who on their own come to see that professional codes matter as responses to harmful actions learn to care about the rules and adopt them more robustly as their own. The reason is not necessarily because they agree with all the rules, but rather because they resonate with the ethical commitments the rules express. Our course presents case studies intended to evoke emotions in order to nurture the virtues of honesty, respect, beneficence and coscientiousness. We emphasize the principles introduced in Lectures 2-4 to provide tomorrow's professionals not only with good reasons but also with right emotions. Combined with guiding principles, right emotions will sustain students through the difficult times when they must blow a whistle, object to a practice, or refuse to act on a policy they find immoral. And they will be prepared furthermore, to deal with the more mundane, pesky, everyday--but still objectionable--issues found in poor research design, misinterpretation of data, or projects with few redeeming social benefits.
By taking primary aim at the development of our students’ moral sensibilities and critical reasoning, our approach strives to hone both reason and practice.
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