The Science Community Is Starved For Ethical Standards

Two years ago, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the largest organizations of practicing researchers in the world, circulated a questionnaire among its members in an effort to identify what they thought should be the highest priority for the science profession. Among 57 possible choices offered by the questionnaire, the membership cited the development and articulation of ethical principles as the most urgent requirement of today's science profession. The response to the AAAS poll is clear evidence of the hunger suffered by scientists for guiding ideals that would shape the principles of conduct governing individual researchers and the science community at large. Are we, indeed, leading our creative lives in a work atmosphere that is essentially indifferent to the ethical implications of our endeavors? Ironically, a perusal of scientific journals seems to reveal that the recognition and articulation of ethical principles are not burning issues. Discussion of such matters is virtually absent from scientific literature. Opportunities to discuss or learn about ethics have practically disappeared from academic programs, and they have almost never been a component of scientific curricula. Concerns about ethics traditionally have been in the realm of the humanities, not in science. And as science has grown almost to the point of dominating academic communities, discussions of ethical matters have become increasingly rare. I believe that the ethical starvation suffered by so many researchers today attests to inadequate consideration of the schism between the notion of "science" and the notion of "ethics." The growth of science over the past 50 years has been the source of startling technological improvements, medical advances, broadened engineering capabilities, and new energy sources. On the other hand, science and its allied technologies have developed the capability to undermine the environment, and finally the ability to destroy life on earth. The beautiful game of creative thinking has given rise to marvelous advances, intellectual and utilitarian, and the same game has spawned the capability for limitless damage to mankind and the space around us. And as the juggernaut of scientific progress presses forward, in its wake has appeared an increase in the occurrence of fraud and sophistry among scientists. Today, with major environmental crises arising on all sides, exacerbated by the technological consequences of science, and with commercial and military dollars and objectives gaining in influence over the scientific community, the intellectual elegance of science is being subordinated. And so we find ourselves in our current state of science saturation and ethics starvation. I have a strong conviction that professional scientists perceive a need for the development of a set of ideals of professional conduct and for increasing the relevance of ethical standards in selecting or rejecting specific lines of scientific research. In light of this, it is appropriate to seek answers to two questions: How do ethics help to shape science? And can science shape ethics? Until the middle of the 20th century, science grew with the momentum of free motion in the vast spaces available for investigation. There were rich grounds for nurturing an expansion of learning about the world and its nature. For example, consider the vast range of phenomena that were open to intellectual analysis by Charles Darwin in his explorations of the worlds of geology, oceanography, biological evolution, and plant physiology. In the last two decades, the kind of open-ended expanse explored by pioneering individuals has increasingly become a jam-packed arena. Scientific progress occurs in an environment whose crowding effects are suggestive of the perpetual bumping of vibrating objects in Brownian motion. We have a dense population of researchers colliding with one another as they vie for funding that is clearly insufficient to support the entire science enterprise. The freewheeling of the pioneer scientist has given way to a profession under duress. The tight interactions prevailing among today's scientists, compounded by the intensifying sense of competition among them, results in occasional aberrant behavior that will manifest itself in cheating, corruption, and sophistry. But more debilitating than these occasional aberrations, in my opinion, is the acceptance by the science enterprise of contracts that indenture scientists to commercial and military sources of money. So, here is the center of our question: Can ethics intervene against the unhealthy trends in our science? Can a sense of morality give the scientist guidance in confronting these unhealthy trends? Can ethical awareness bring about the adoption of healthier objectives for intellectual pursuits, and serve as a counterbalance to the pathology of our crowded profession? The response of professional scientists to the AAAS questionnaire was clear: Serious scientists are increasingly uncomfortable with the ad hoc pursuit of dollars at the expense of freedom and objectivity in scientific study. I believe that professional scientists are aware that our society is losing confidence in the products of science and technology, and indeed there is a loss of confidence even in the averred objectivity and altruism of research. It also seems to me that scientists are becoming more aware that the malversation of science is frequently making it a source of dangerous technologies and complex contrivances for the destruction of both people and their environments, instead of a healthy understanding of ourselves and of the world around us. It seems that many scientists are uneasy about the lack of principles of conduct, about the deficiency of guiding ideals for our profession. The scientific profession is at a stage of uncertainty, a time of ethical foot-shuffling, as we wait to be conditioned by a loud and clear imposition of ethical standards. I take the position that satisfying the appetite of science professionals for ethical principles and ethical understanding can indeed go a long way toward maintaining the positive values of science. Can science help to shape ethics? I have asked this question of numerous friends and acquaintances, and almost always I have received responses to the general effect that ethics are essentially social functions, and therefore they are in a completely different realm from factual science. Being concerned with social functions, ethics belong to the social sciences, they argue, so they can't really be influenced by science. I disagree with such responses. It is true, of course, that in the past ethics have been concerned primarily with ideals and principles of social conduct. Ethics of behavior, of course, antedated science. And one could safely say that science had nothing to do with the devising or endorsement of the Golden Rule or of the established ideals of honesty, temperance, and charity. On the other hand, it is easy to identify, as examples, any number of events that have brought science into the realm of ethics. Again the example of Darwin comes to mind: When his revelations concerning biological evolution created a major shift in the concept of the relationship of humans to other animals, the boundaries that previously limited ethical relationships to family, clan, or nationality were disrupted. The human race suddenly found itself related to a much broader range of species- -and the potential for ethical concerns was extended to a far wider radius as evolutionary concepts were accepted and humans realized their relationship to other animals. Eighty years later, the then-emerging science of ecology further extended the domain of ethical concern. By establishing that organisms exist in interrelated communities, and that these communities give way to natural sequences of change, Frederic E. Clements of the Carnegie Institution established the concept of ecological succession. By describing how communities of organisms involved dependencies between species for their energy and sustenance, Arthur G. Tansley of Cambridge University defined the concept of energy flow through communities. And by revealing the dependence of different species upon one another for livable spaces, Charles Elton of Oxford University developed the concept of the ecological niche. Collectively, these ecological advances made it possible to realize that human beings are members of a biological community rather than solo performers on an anthropocentric stage. The science of ecology introduced the human race to the realization that the very existence of human communities depends upon finding an accommodation to a biological community. It revealed that long-term human survival relies on achievement of some balance of society with the communities of organisms, on the flow of energy through biological communities, and on the perpetuation of a biological niche for the human race. The science of ecology presented the facts that humans truly are components of the environment and that, consequently, they have an ethical as well as a selfish responsibility to share in the maintenance of that environment. The sciences of evolution and ecology have thus combined to expand greatly our range of ethical concerns. Science has brought about the realization that ethical behavior at the social level among humans is not enough. Through science, our ethical concerns have been extended to include a concern for our biological communities, their energy-flow systems, and the preservation of a livable niche for ourselves in the biological world. Scientific discoveries have reinforced the earlier lessons of evolution and ecology, and it is perhaps these lessons that best serve as the basis for contemporary answers to questions concerning the concordance between science and ethics. I assert that it is clearer today than ever before that the two are inextricably bound together. Ethics can change science. And science has forced ethics out of a purely social set of humanistic strictures into a wider radius encompassing now the entire biota of the earth we inhabit. I assert that ethics must indeed shape the science we do, and that our science inevitably will shape the ethics of future generations. There is an opportunity for a major concordance between science and ethics. A. Carl Leopold is W.C. Crocker Scientist Emeritus at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

The Science Community Is Starved For Ethical Standards

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