Why too many scientists steer clear of ethics
Date: December 6, 2006
Time: 4:47am est

If you want to jumpstart your own thoughts on the tricky subject of scientific endeavor vs. ethical restraint on research, I recommend this surprisingly candid critique by University of Pennsylvania sociologist and bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe. Entitled " Reasons Scientists Avoid Thinking about Ethics ," it appeared in the journal Cell last June. In it, Wolpe explores eight reasons scientists themselves have given-in moments of candor-for avoiding ethical reflection (or at least ethical debate in the public square), everything from "I am not a trained ethicist" to "ethics impedes scientific progress."

Wolpe is to be credited for dealing with a very touchy and timely topic, for insisting that setting ethical on research is "unremarkable" and to be welcomed as something positive, and for penning the following:

Scientists have an obligation, individually as well as collectively, to reflect on the ends, not just the means, of scientific work. Ethical conversation should be part of "normal science" in every laboratory, academic center, and corporate office.

The negative, although not surprising, dimension to this analysis is the underlying reduction of "ethics" to proper professional behavior, and the foregone conclusion that public debate and consensus is the final word on what makes right, right and wrong, wrong. While noting that some disagreements on bioethical issues seems interminable, he tries to console the reader by saying that's OK:

At the boundaries of the consensus are areas of ethical debate, but that is how it should be. The public discourse eventually may make its way to consensus, but in ethics, process is at least as important as product.

It would seem that the author's world-view is typically secular. In such a world view, there is no such thing as ultimate reference points for moral conduct, much less exceptionless moral norms. In such a view, right & wrong can only be settled by consensus-which is true if we believe that moral normativity has no other source than the sphere of personal preferences.

Wolpe's reason # 7 especially got my attention: "Knowledge is intrinsically good." The idea here is that if it is possible to know something, then we should go ahead and learn about it. Again to his credit, Wolpe raises some very good questions: Is all knowledge fair game? Is there such a thing as forbidden knowledge (scientific or otherwise)? And he rightly points out that, to their credit, most scientists would maintain professional checks on the pursuit of scientific knowledge. While the 'ends-justify-the-means' rationale can always look tempting, most scientists would agree that one cannot pursue scientific know-how at the cost of harming others. One cannot, for instance, use people as human guinea pigs without their consent-no matter how useful the results might be. And some kinds of knowledge might, indeed, be definitively out of range, such as broad studies of the effects of hypothermia on the human body; even if enough people were willing to submit themselves to life-threatening submersion in frigid water, such experimentation would still be ethically untenable. When scientists in Nazi Germany engaged in cruel hypothermia experiments on unwilling prisoners of concentration camps, they were driven not only by the aura of knowledge, but by their conviction that their human guinea pigs were sub-human.

While most scientists are willing to admit that there should be ethical limits to the means employed in the pursuit of knowledge, there are also scientists who are more than willing to breach commonly held moral boundaries. Today, the prospect of unlocking the secrets of human genetic enhancement or of understanding the mechanisms of human cell growth is all quite alluring. Currently, the best entryway to such knowledge happens to be the human embryo.

Tragically, for many scientists-and for a growing sector of the general public-the use of human embryos created at will in the laboratory for research purposes is non-problematic. It is to be hoped that sustained public discussion of the mo ral status of the human embryo can open new doors for Americans to see and embrace the truth of the matter.]]>

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