Phil 133 (Ethics in Science)
Spring 2010
FINAL EXAM REVIEW SHEET
Important concepts, terminology, and issues:
utilitarian (or consequentialist) ethics
Kantian (or deontological) ethics
virtue ethics
For each of these, be able to explain (and recognize) the basic approach to identifying what is ethical and what is unethical. Be able to give a justification for (or against) following a particular course of action in terms of utilitarian, Kantian, or virtue ethics.
How might the goods a scientist values differ from those valued by an ordinary member of society?
What sort of obligations do scientists have to society? What are the possible sources of those obligations?
What makes knowledge valuable (whether to scientists or to non-scientists)? How does this affect the sort of research in which scientists ought to engage?
For each of these questions, you should have something reasonable to say. It will be helpful here to draw on possible differences between scientists and lay people (e.g., for scientists, the main goal is building accurate knowledge) and on the relationships between scientists and lay people (e.g., in terms of access to knowledge, funding relationships, etc.)
What counts as "objective" knowledge? How does the concept of "objectivity" vary in different cultural contexts?
What aspects of scientific research might be affected by racial, gender, or other biases, and how?
The Asquith article on primatologists will be helpful here.
What ethical obligations do researchers have to experimental animals?
Why do scientists have a duty to treat experimental animals in certain ways?
Why do scientists view experiments with animals as desirable or necessary?
Nuremberg Code
Declaration of Helsinki
Belmont Report
I don't expect you to memorize these three sets of standards! Rather, be able to talk about differences in emphases, specific features that appear in one set of standards but not another (e.g., IRB in Helsinki but not in Nuremberg, "justice" made an explicit goal in Belmont but not the other two, etc.), and how Nuremberg and Belmont especially are responses to particular historical events.
What were the main criticisms of the Nazi doctors on ethical grounds?
What were the main criticisms of the Nazi doctor on scientific grounds?
How do the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki differ in their emphasis on the most important constraints on experiments with human subjects?
How might the doctors in the Tuskegee experiment have seen themselves as importantly different from the Nazi doctors?
What ethical similarities do you see between the doctors in the Tuskegee experiment and the Nazi doctors?
What role should the subject's desires play in an experiment with human subjects?
What are some of the ethical complications of medical research in the developing world?
Authorship – who is entitled, what responsibilities accompany it.
Scientific notebooks and record keeping – why does it matter?
Patents – how does this kind of scientific ownership claim work? What kind of bargain is being struck between the patent holder and the public? Are there cases where the spirit of the bargain doesn't work out so well?
Scientific misconduct, fabrication, falsification, plagiarism
Ought the definition of scientific misconduct to include "other practices that seriously deviate from those that are commonly accepted within the scientific community"?
Strategies for punishing or preventing scientific misconduct.
Training relationships
Relations between competitors and collaborators
Peer-review system
How do international collaborations make certain scientific decisions complicated (e.g., when to publish, where to publish, etc.)?
Here, Traweek's articles on the high energy physicists at KEK will be helpful.
How should scientific results be communicated to the public?
Exam format:
Shorter objective items: (40%)
Interpretive items related to short case studies: (60%)
I will be most interested in your thoroughness in identifying interests, obligations, and the likely consequences of various courses of action, and the reasons you give for prioritizing the interests and obligations as you do, or for judging certain courses of action as preferable to others.
For each case, you will be asked one or two of the bulleted questions above, but you will not know which questions go with which cases until you take the exam!
Cases will be posted/distributed at least 2 weeks prior to the exam. One of the cases will be a re-examination of "The Jessica Banks Case."
FOR THE EXAM, YOU WILL BE PERMITTED TO PREPARE (AND USE) FOUR (4) PAGES (8.5" by 11", front and back) OF NOTES.
Exam
is Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 9:45 AM-12:00 noon.
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