Learning lessons about ethics

To what extent should a formal education in ethics be part of the university physics curriculum? When this question is raised in the physics community, the response is often that there is no significant problem with fraud in physics, and hence that including ethics in the curriculum is unnecessary. Even raising the question is viewed by some as a waste of time at best and insulting at worst. I would argue, however, that such a response takes an overly narrow view of the role of ethics in physics.

“Ethics” refers to the standards of conduct associated with our actions as professional physicists. Our professional activities extend beyond traditional research to include a wide range of other activities that we do in support of research, teaching and our interaction with the rest of society. That we consider ethics to apply to the full range of these activities is important to the health of the physics community.

The “cold fusion” affair provides an interesting example. When Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced ten years ago this month that they had achieved fusion at room temperature in a table-top experiment, their declaration was, by all accounts, premature. Although a full examination of all the intricacies of the story would require a book (see, for example, Frank Close’s Too Hot to Handle: The Race for Cold Fusion), several simple observations can be made.

The fact that many others tried – and failed – to replicate the experiments of Pons and Fleischmann can be viewed as evidence that the scientific community can effectively weed out erroneous results, and hence that “the system” works. However, an enormous price was paid (in both time and money) to investigate these results. Had Pons and Fleischmann delayed in going public, these resources could have been used in a more productive manner. At the same time, it is important to recognize that they did not have the luxury of making their decisions in a vacuum. They had potentially made a discovery that could have been incredibly rich in patent rights, and their university was anxious to share the wealth.

There are many lessons that can be drawn from the cold-fusion affair. One is that real-world decisions are made in a complex environment that makes ethical decisions more challenging to implement. Another is that society can pay a steep price for ethical lapses of this sort.

Ethics for physicists

Ethics does not just apply to high-profile cases such as cold fusion. Many of us, in much less dramatic settings, have had to face the fact that some research results we have disseminated are in some way inaccurate. A calculation may have been performed incorrectly, an instrument may have been wrongly calibrated, an important factor may not have been accounted for, or a simple typographical error may have crept into a paper.

In many cases, these errors could reasonably be classified as acceptable (and, to some extent, expected) mistakes that are made in the course of scientific exploration. However, it is important for us to always question whether we have rushed our results into print prematurely. I expect all of us have read a paper where this seems to have been the case.

But there are many other situations in physics where we confront decisions that have an ethical component. For example, can we be sure that our data have been analysed and reported fairly? Does a particular individual deserve co-authorship on a paper? Are the projections we made in our grant proposal realistic? When we are asked by someone outside the scientific community for our expert opinion on a particular topic, do we have enough expertise to provide it? Are we taking our share of the responsibility for ensuring that society is getting adequate technical advice from the physics community? Are we providing guidance and training to our students that is appropriate for the current job market?

Teaching students ethics

One way of helping physicists to appreciate the role that ethics plays in their lives is to include it in the undergraduate curriculum. At Eastern Michigan University in the US, we offer a seminar course in ethics for our physics majors, who meet for one hour each week to discuss readings from a wide range of resources. We begin by discussing the five basic principles of ethics that were described in 1993 by the philosopher and ethicist David Resnik. According to him, one should

• not harm others needlessly (the non-malificence principle);
• promote the welfare of others (the beneficence principle);
• allow rational people the right to self-determination (the principle of autonomy);
• treat equals as equal (the formal principle of justice);
• distribute goods on the basis of need or merit (the material principle of justice).

These principles can be viewed as the foundation of scientific ethics. For instance, the principles of non-malificence and beneficence presumably help guide our choice of research topics.

We then spend some time in the course discussing specific codes of ethics developed by various professional organizations. Even the most basic and apparently obvious principles can open the door to complex questions, particularly those involving conflicting standards. The rest of our course is devoted to studying specific issues, historical incidents, or particular individuals, with an eye to understanding how physicists have handled difficult decisions in the past.

For example, we look at Richard Feynman’s presence on the committee that investigated why the space-shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986, and examine his brief service on a textbook review committee for the state of California (see Ethical examples). The ethical questions of these case-studies are then used as a spring board for discussing the rights and responsibilities of physicists who are asked to provide the public with technical advice.

Another topic for discussion is the role physicists have played in weapons-related research. Fortunately, a huge amount of information is available on how physicists approached issues surrounding the development of the first atomic bomb, the fusion bomb and anti-missile or “Star Wars” technology. We also explore a wide range of ethical issues associated with the publishing process by examining the “instructions to authors” found in journals, reading editorials on the information explosion, and studying publications that contain glaring errors. Budgetary issues are another topic. These range from the very local, such as the appropriate use of grant money, to the much bigger picture of how physicists attempt to influence elected politicians to allocate more money to physics research. Projects such as the International Space Station (now under construction) and the defunct Superconducting Super Collider provide well documented case-studies.

One aspect of a student’s scientific training can be addressed particularly effectively in an ethics course. Most lab work that students do at high school and in their early college years consists of experiments in which they are guided step-by-step to verify laws that they have already seen presented elsewhere. This type of work fosters a skewed view of research as nothing more than an attempt to verify the known. As a result, data that are inconsistent with “the known” are often tossed out by the student without explanation.

While we try to teach students to report all of their data – unless they can be eliminated due to clear equipment or human error – this requirement is often dismissed by the students as unnecessarily time-consuming and too likely to distract from the “correct” results. But by examining case-studies, a course in ethics gives us the chance to convince students that there is a reason why we should not summarily discard data, namely that to do so is misleading and may actually result in treasure being pitched with the trash.

In my experience, many students who have completed the course maintain an ongoing interest in ethical issues. For example, one former student went so far as to write a Masters thesis on how ethical issues could be incorporated into the high-school physics curriculum. And with the drive in the US to incorporate written assignments in all facets of the high-school curriculum, ethical issues in science are a natural topic for this written component.

Barriers to overcome

The longer-term impact of our course on ethical issues in physics is more difficult to assess. Since it was instigated in 1988 about 60 students have taken the course. I recently collaborated in a survey of over 100 physicists in the US (not an entirely random selection), which showed that while there is a significant core of interest in ethics courses, there are at the same time significant barriers that must be overcome before ethics can be fully integrated into the physics curriculum (see Science and Engineering Ethics 1998 4 473). Chief among these are the discomfort with offering physics credit for a non-technical course and the difficulty of finding someone with the time and interest to develop and teach ethics. Despite the presence of such barriers, I believe it is worthwhile to continue to press for the development of ethics courses. While the physics community has survived up to now without most of its members receiving any formal education in ethics, it is nevertheless useful to reconsider whether the status quo is in our long-term interests. After all, as the issues we face become more complex, it becomes increasingly useful for us to consider some of these complexities before we encounter them – and having a clear picture of some of the basic ethical tenets will undoubtedly help.

The current situation is rather like being asked to analyse the motion of a block on an inclined plane before being taught about Newton’s second law of motion or the properties of friction. The analysis of the problem is possible without the background information and practice, but this is surely not the most effective approach in problem solving. One of the basic principles in academia is that we pass our knowledge on to the next generation of learners. This allows them to expand the knowledge base, rather than having to learn all of what we know by trial and error. Why not take the same approach with ethics?