Reflecting on the use and abuse of scientific data facilitates students’ ethical and epistemological development

Scientists use judgment in deciding what and how much data to present in publications but science degrees rarely address this issue. Instead, scientific knowledge is presented as certain and students have limited opportunities to use their own judgment in the laboratory. A consequence of this may be that students approach science with a moral absolutist mindset, believing that science is about learning facts and scientists have little need to exercise ethical judgments in relation to data. Students may also hold different ethical standards for themselves and professional scientists. We draw on data from a first-year science module to show that these views can be challenged by encouraging students to reflect on their own behavior and that of famous scientists in situations with varying degrees of professional ethical ambiguity. We provide evidence of significant transitions in students’ thinking, suggesting that reflection on these issues may lead to substantial epistemological and ethical development. By the end of the module, many students had moved from an initial position of certainty to the acceptance of multiple viewpoints or to a more mature understanding of the evidence-based nature of science, as well as gaining the ability to critique decisions and make ethical judgments

Towards a Framework for Understanding Fairtrade Purchase Intention in the Mainstream Environment of Supermarkets

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Despite growing interest in ethical consumer behaviour research, ambiguity remains regarding what motivates consumers to purchase ethical products. While researchers largely attribute the growth of ethical consumerism to an increase in ethical consumer concerns and motivations, widened distribution (mainstreaming) of ethical products, such as fairtrade, questions these assumptions. A model that integrates both individual and societal values into the theory of planned behaviour is presented and empirically tested to challenge the assumption that ethical consumption is driven by ethical considerations alone. Using data sourced from fairtrade shoppers across the UK, structural equation modelling suggests that fairtrade purchase intention is driven by both societal and self-interest values. This dual value pathway helps address conceptual limitations inherent in the underlying assumptions of existing ethical purchasing behaviour m odels and helps advance understanding of consumers’ motivation to purchase ethical products

Ethics, Integrity and Policymaking

This Open Access book provides illustrative case studies that explore various research and innovation topics that raise challenges requiring ethical reflection and careful policymaking responses. The cases highlight diverse ethical challenges and provide lessons for the various options available for policymaking. Cases are drawn from many fields, including artificial intelligence, space science, energy, data protection, professional research practice and pandemic planning. Case studies are particularly helpful with ethical issues to provide crucial context. This book reflects the ambiguity of ethical dilemmas in contemporary policymaking. Analyses reflect current debates where consensus has not yet been achieved. These cases illustrate key points made throughout the PRO-RES EU-funded project from which they arise: that ethical judgement is a fluid enterprise, where values, principles and standards must constantly adjust to new situations, new events and new research developments. This book is an indispensable aid to policymaking that addresses, and/or uses evidence from, novel research developments

Ethics, Integrity and Policymaking

This Open Access book provides illustrative case studies that explore various research and innovation topics that raise challenges requiring ethical reflection and careful policymaking responses. The cases highlight diverse ethical challenges and provide lessons for the various options available for policymaking. Cases are drawn from many fields, including artificial intelligence, space science, energy, data protection, professional research practice and pandemic planning. Case studies are particularly helpful with ethical issues to provide crucial context. This book reflects the ambiguity of ethical dilemmas in contemporary policymaking. Analyses reflect current debates where consensus has not yet been achieved. These cases illustrate key points made throughout the PRO-RES EU-funded project from which they arise: that ethical judgement is a fluid enterprise, where values, principles and standards must constantly adjust to new situations, new events and new research developments. This book is an indispensable aid to policymaking that addresses, and/or uses evidence from, novel research developments

The Ethics of Ambiguity in Quintilian

In a list of twelve stylistic and grammatical errors of oratory, the fourth-century grammarian Donatus includes the fault of amphibolia, a transliteration of a Greek word that Donatus further defines as an ambiguitas dictionis. This understanding of ambiguitas dictionis as a flaw in composition is unique neither to the texts of late antiquity nor to technical grammatical treatises, and one can find ample cautioning against it in pedagogical texts both before and after Donatus. In his first-century Institutio Oratoria, for instance, Quintilian similarly cautions against writing ambiguous language and encourages his students to compose lucid and straightforward Latin, particularly in regard to syntax

Out of Practice: The Twenty-First-Century Legal Profession

Lawyering has changed dramatically in the past century, but scholarly and regulatory models have failed to keep pace. Because these models focus exclusively on the practice of law as defined by the profession, they ignore many types of work that today\u27s lawyers perform and many sources of ethical tension they encounter. To address these shortcomings, I examine significant twentieth- and twenty-first-century social dynamics that are fundamentally altering contemporary lawyers\u27 work by broadening and blurring the boundary between law and business. Within the resulting boundary zone, a growing number of lawyers occupy roles for which legal training is valuable but licensure is not required. I argue that the ambiguity surrounding these roles—regarding what constitutes legal practice, what roles lawyers play, and what professional obligations attach—creates opportunities for abuse by individual lawyers and for ethical arbitrage by sophisticated corporate clients. The proliferation of these roles gives rise to key ethical tensions, ignored by existing models of the profession, that threaten to extinguish the profession\u27s public-facing orientation in favor of its private interests. I conclude that we cannot effectively understand and regulate the twenty-firstcentury legal profession until we move beyond the rigid constraints of existing models and begin to study the full range of roles and work settings—both in and out of practice—that today\u27s lawyers occupy

Bringing hope to crisis: critical thinking, ethical action and social change

INTRODUCTION This paper departs from this point to consider whether and how crisis thinking contributes to practices of affirmative critique and transformative social action in late-capitalist societies. I argue that different deployments of crisis thinking have different ‘affect-effects’ and consequences for ethical and political practice. Some work to mobilize political action through articulating a politics of fear, assuming that people take most responsibility for the future when they fear the alternatives. Other forms of crisis thinking work to heighten critical awareness by disrupting existential certainty, asserting an ‘ethics of ambiguity’ which assumes that the continuous production of uncertain futures is a fundamental part of the human condition (de Beauvoir, 2000). In this paper, I hope to illustrate that the first deployment of crisis thinking can easily justify the closing down of political debate, discouraging radical experimentation and critique for the sake of resolving problems in a timely and decisive way. The second approach to crisis thinking, on the other hand, has greater potential to enable intellectual and political alterity in everyday life—but one that poses considerable challenges for our understandings of and responses to climate change..

On Probability and Cosmology: Inference Beyond Data?

Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the Universe or its initial state this becomes a particularly pressing issue. How to assess the probability of the Universe as a whole is empirically ambiguous, since we can examine only part of a single realisation of the system under investigation: at some point, data will run out. We review the basics of applying Bayesian statistical explanation to the Universe as a whole. We argue that a conventional Bayesian approach to model inference generally fails in such circumstances, and cannot resolve, e.g., the so-called 'measure problem' in inflationary cosmology. Implicit and non-empirical valuations inevitably enter model assessment in these cases. This undermines the possibility to perform Bayesian model comparison. One must therefore either stay silent, or pursue a more general form of systematic and rational model assessment. We outline a generalised axiological Bayesian model inference framework, based on mathematical lattices. This extends inference based on empirical data (evidence) to additionally consider the properties of model structure (elegance) and model possibility space (beneficence). We propose this as a natural and theoretically well-motivated framework for introducing an explicit, rational approach to theoretical model prejudice and inference beyond data

The potential of neuroeconomics

The goal of neuroeconomics is a mathematical theory of how the brain implements decisions, that is tied to behaviour. This theory is likely to show some decisions for which rational-choice theory is a good approximation (particularly for evolutionarily sculpted or highly learned choices), to provide a deeper level of distinction among competing behavioural alternatives, and to provide empirical inspiration for economics to incorporate more nuanced ideas about endogeneity of preferences, individual difference, emotions, endogeneous regulation of states, and so forth. I also address some concerns about rhetoric and practical epistemology. Neuroscience articles are necessarily speculative and the science has proceeded rapidly because of that rhetorical convention. Single-study papers are encouraged and are necessarily limited in what can be inferred, so the sturdiest cumulation of results, and the best guide forward, comes in review journals which compile results and suggest themes. The potential of neuroeconomics is in combining the clearest experimental paradigms and statistical methods in economics, with the unprecedented capacity to measure a range of neural and cognitive activity that economists like Edgeworth, Fisher and Ramsey daydreamed about but did not have