Scope of the Course:
This seminar will present ethical issues that arise in the course of doing research, primarily in the natural and social sciences, but includes issues in the humanities. We will look at the basic informal norms that operate in research communities, analyze their philosophical foundations, and discuss the practicality of various kinds of formal regulations.
Pedagogical Approaches:
We will make extensive use of case studies involving actual research. These are more interesting than hypothetical situations and portray some of the ethical ambiguities that can arise in real life. They also illustrate how scientific communities respond to ethical breaches. We will follow the tradition in Research Ethics classes of having more-or-less formal debates about concrete ethical dilemmas. (There is even an Ethics Bowl that IU participates in!) The debate format encourages us to look at the complexity and opposing considerations inherent in many ethical issues. Because this is a small class, there will be more emphasis than usual on class discussion and oral presentations.
Major Topics:
The semester will be divided into five sections. To get started, we'll begin with some pretty straightforward ethical breaches -- plagiarism and data fabrication. We'll then look at some philosophical attempts to provide a foundation for our individual ethical convictions in the hopes that ethical theory will help us resolve disputes about more controversial questions in research ethics. The third unit will focus on ethical aspects of research using human subjects and attempts to regulate such research using Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). As the choice of textbooks indicates, we'll spend at least a couple of weeks on the ethics of animal research, an area in which there are strongly conflicting views. To finish the semester we'll raise the classic Faustian question of whether some research questions are so intrinsically dangerous that no one should pursue them and talk a bit more generally about the social responsibility of scientists.
Looking Ahead to the Research Paper:
Your end-of-semester paper can be on a topic of your choice (with my approval) so you might start thinking early on about what you'd like to do. Obvious possibilities are aspects of research ethics that are either covered or are alluded to in your textbooks but which we will not be discussing much in class, e.g., conflicts of interest, scientists giving expert testimony in courts, writing for a lay audience. You may also choose something directly related to issues that we did study in class as long as you delve into it much more deeply and use other examples, e.g., research involving alcohol, research on human subjects who are unable to give informed consent, experiments involving chimeras, a philosophical analysis of the concept of civil disobedience as applied to animal rights groups. In general, I discourage the choice of a topic in medical ethics that is centered on the physician-patient relationship instead of research.