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The Ethics of Doing Ethics

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Abstract

Ethicists have investigated ethical problems in other disciplines, but there has not been much discussion of the ethics of their own activities. Research in ethics has many ethical problems in common with other areas of research, and it also has problems of its own. The researcher’s integrity is more precarious than in most other disciplines, and therefore even stronger procedural checks are needed to protect it. The promotion of some standpoints in ethical issues may be socially harmful, and even our decisions as to which issues we label as “ethical” may have unintended and potentially harmful social consequences. It can be argued that ethicists have an obligation to make positive contributions to society, but the practical implications of such an obligation are not easily identified. This article provides an overview of ethical issues that arise in research into ethics and in the application of such research. It ends with a list of ten practical proposals for how these issues should be dealt with.

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Notes

  1. This was written in 1965 but as editor-in-chief of Theoria and a frequent reviewer for other journals I can attest that even today a sizable number of academic manuscripts in philosophy lack references to the last few decades of research on their respective topic, and some have no references at all.

  2. A search in Philosopher’s Index in December 2015 yielded 779 references containing both the keyword “Wittgenstein” and at least one of the keywords “ethics”, “ethical”, or “moral”. In comparison, a similar search for “Bentham” and the same three words yielded 293 outcomes.

  3. Hippias of Elis (c460-c415 BC) seems to have been the first to list the predecessors on whom he relied. It was soon established as a standard that one should give proper recognition to one’s sources, but compliance was highly variable. Especially in the fourth century BC, charges of philosophical plagiarism were commonplace. (Chroust 1961).

  4. A few famous examples: The striking similarity between Descartes’ cogito ergo sum and a passage in St. Augustine’s De Trinitate may be attributable to cryptomnesia (Smith 1998). C. G. Jung reported a coincidence between a narration in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and a story in Justinus Kerner’s Blätter aus Prevost (1833), and found reasons to believe that it might be a case of cryptomnesia (Jung [1905] 1966). Ferber and Zentner (1993) proposed the same explanation for the resemblance between an aphorism in Nietsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft and a passage in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

  5. Analects, gleanings from reading.

  6. This is not a new insight. In his “Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie” (“On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy”, 1796) Kant criticized the proponents of what he described as “an alleged philosophy in which one does not have to work but just has to listen to and enjoy the oracle inside oneself”. These would-be philosophers believed that “with a single penetrating glance of a genius into themselves” they could achieve “all that which can be achieved with diligence, and rather more than that”. But real philosophy, as he saw it, was hard work (Kant 1912, p. 390).

  7. In the JSTOR corpus that contains a large and fairly representative part of the scholarly journal literature, 23.9 % of the journal authors of articles in ethics (moral philosophy) from the years 1990–2011 were female. See www.eigenfactor.org/projects/gender.

  8. However, in bioethics most consultancy takes place in a clinical setting and is paid for by healthcare providers. (Agich 1990, p. 392).

  9. http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/ucm277114.htm.

  10. Incidentally, in the year 2000 the same company withdrew its financial support of the Hastings Center shortly after the centre’s journal published an issue containing articles critical of how the company marketed one of its products. It had been the centre’s largest annual corporate donor (Elliott 2001, p. 10).

  11. Much of the impetus for the development of research ethics after World War II came from reactions against nuclear weapons and unethical medical experiments. The 1968 document from the MIT faculty that led to the founding of the Union of Concerned Scientists has a strong focus on the destructive uses of scientific knowledge. (http://www.ucsusa.org)—No criticism is intended in pointing this out. On many occasions a focus on avoiding misuses of science has been most appropriate.

  12. This was in part repeated a quarter of a century later. In May 2015 Peter Singer was scheduled to speak at a philosophy festival in Cologne, but his invitation was revoked at short notice due to statements on bioethics that he had made in a recent interview (Streeck 2015). According to the organizers of the festival, his participation would have been incompatible with their “humanistic-emancipatory” commitments (Olbert 2015).

  13. This can be compared to the social consequences of the choice of topics for cost-benefit analysis (Hansson 2007).

  14. The latter standpoint has been almost universally recognized. The only exception seems to be the19th century therapeutic nihilists, according to whom it was sufficient for medical doctors to describe and explain the diseases of their patients; they did not have to cure, alleviate or prevent disease (Wiesemann 1991).

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  1. Division of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Brinellvägen 32, 10044, Stockholm, Sweden

    Sven Ove Hansson

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Hansson, S.O. The Ethics of Doing Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 23, 105–120 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-016-9772-3

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