Ethics and the University

Michael Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134677498
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Ethics and the University brings together two closely related topics, the practice of ethics in the university ("academic ethics") and the teaching of practical or applied ethics in the university.
This volume is divided into four parts:
* A survey of practical ethics, offering an explanation of its recent emergence as a university subject, situating that subject into a wider social and historical context and identifying some problems that the subject generates for universities
* An examination of research ethics, including the problem of plagiarism
* A discussion of the teaching of practical ethics. Michael Davis explores how ethics can be integrated into the university curriculum and what part particular cases should play in the teaching of ethics
* An exploration of sexual ethics
Ethics and the University provides a stimulating and provocative analysis of academic ethics which will be useful to students, academics and practitioners.

Part I
INTRODUCTION

1

THE ETHICS BOOM, PHILOSOPHY, AND THE UNIVERSITY

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,…we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

With these words Charles Dickens began A Tale of Two Cities, rebuking all those “noisy authorities” who would claim for their age some priority over others. No age is without some experts to declare it the best of times and others to declare it the worst. Yet, Dickens would not, I think, deny that times change. His rebuke must, then, be directed at those who, without good evidence, declare that their age differs in some important way from others. The age in which one lives always looks different from those of which one knows little or nothing.

I have, I admit, a personal stake in this reading of Dickens. I want to claim that our present concern with “ethics” distinguishes this age from others. I am therefore a candidate for Dickens’ rebuke. To avoid it, I shall proceed in this way. I shall begin this chapter by considering what the “ethics boom” is supposed to be; then examine the evidence for the boom; and, having shown the boom to be real, explain why we are having it. The boom’s novelty, its connection with academic philosophy, is a corollary of that explanation and an appropriate way to introduce our subject; ethics and the university.

What boom?

Looking back over the last three decades, what I seem to see is not one boom but many. The first is in medical ethics. By the early 1960s, physicians were already struggling with many questions they did not feel prepared to answer. Medical technology made it possible to keep patients alive long after they had no hope even of consciousness. What did doing one’s best for the patient mean in such circumstances? When, if ever, may a physician justifiably cease trying to preserve life when there is hope of preserving it?

Medical technology was also becoming increasingly expensive. Physicians confronted hard questions of distribution. Do we buy a dialysis machine to keep a few dozen patients alive or instead spend the money on an outpatient clinic that will serve many more people but perhaps save no lives? How do we decide who gets dialysis if we can’t provide dialysis for all who need it? Should physicians make such decision? If not physicians, who?

Medical technology was also changing the practice of medicine. The old personal relationship between physician and patient, the symbol of which was the house call, was becoming increasingly impractical. The progress of medicine seemed to force physicians to specialize more, to depend more on tests that could only be performed in an office or at a hospital, and to cooperate more closely with other physicians. The lone doctor with their little black bag was going the way of the passenger train and the forty-acre farm. In this less personal environment, traditional practices like giving a placebo looked much harder to defend. Lying to an old friend for his or her own good seems one thing; lying to a helpless stranger, another.

Physicians spoke of these changes in the way they practiced medicine as raising issues of “medical ethics.”¹ At first, they talked about these issues among themselves. Soon, however, they recognized that they were not equipped to resolve them. So, as befits an era of increasing specialization, they began looking for help from specialists in ethics. Medical schools had no such specialty. But every university had courses with “ethics” in the title. Usually, these were taught by philosophers. So, going for help to philosophers seemed to make sense. And, at a few universities, that is what members of the medical faculty did.

They were surprised by what they found. Philosophers, it turned out, taught moral theory, not practical ethics. And the moral theory to which they devoted most of their time was far from practice. The philosophers liked to call it “meta-ethics.” A whole course might concern a question like whether “good” is a natural or a non-natural property. Some philosophers openly doubted that philosophy could “bake bread.”

But, at a few universities, philosophers and physicians agreed to talk anyway. They focused on particular cases the physicians found troubling. Soon the philosophers saw connections between their traditional concerns and problems the physicians were posing. For example, philosophers had long studied personal identity, the criteria by which we may decide when, despite apparent change, I remain the same person and when I have become someone or something else. Criteria of personal identity seemed relevant to questions of terminating life support. If, for example, personal identity presupposed the possibility of consciousness, a physician might be justified in terminating life support as soon as the patient’s brain died. The patient would have ceased to exist as a person.

By the late 1960s, the conversation between physicians and philosophers had advanced enough to become institutionalized. The first clear evidence came in 1969 with the founding of the Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences in Hastings-on-Hudson, just north of New York City. The Hastings Center, as it is commonly known, is still the most important think tank for medical ethics in the world. The Center was conceived as an interdisciplinary enterprise, one in which theologians, lawyers, and social scientists, as well as philosophers and physicians, were to work together on the problems facing medicine (and related fields). Yet, from the beginning, philosophers were central to its work.

About the time the Hastings Center was getting started, philosophers elsewhere, either alone or teamed with a physician, began teaching courses in medical ethics. These courses – whether a seminar in a medical school or in a graduate or undergraduate program – tended to mix moral theory with specific problems that concerned physicians. A good mix proved hard to find. The first philosophical text in medical ethics did not appear until 1976.² Most of the early texts took a form already popular in philosophy, the anthology of primary sources, arranged by “problem,” and designed to provoke discussion.

The boom in legal ethics has a different history. The central event is certainly Watergate. John Dean’s observation that lawyers seemed shockingly over-represented among those appointees of President Nixon guilty of criminal wrongdoing struck a chord with lawyers. In 1974, some states decided to require a course in legal ethics as a condition for admission to the bar. Others followed quickly. The requirement took many law schools by surprise. Legal ethics had until then been an optional course struggling to survive in an increasingly rich curriculum. My own experience will illustrate the difference between the way legal and medical ethics developed.

In the spring of 1974, I was a young assistant professor of philosophy in a department that had one of the earliest courses in medical ethics. One day my departmental chair called me into his office and asked what I knew about legal ethics. “Nothing,” I replied. “No matter,” he said. “You’re smart. You do ethics and philosophy of law. The rest you can learn.”

He had, he said, received a call from the law school. They needed a three-credit course in legal ethics by next spring. No one on their faculty could teach it. They hoped the philosophy department would do for legal ethics what it had done for medical ethics. He was asking me because the medical ethics people were too busy and I was the only member of the department besides himself who knew much about law. The law school was prepared to pay handsomely. They would give me the fall to teach myself what I needed to know. All they asked was that the course be given next spring to the senior class. When I hesitated, he smiled, “I know what you’re thinking. What can a philosopher tell lawyers about their own ethics? Don’t worry, lawyers are like doctors: if they’re desperate enough to ask a philosopher’s help, they need it.” Thus began my initiation into professional ethics.

I went over to the law school that fall. What I found surprised me. Lawyers needed much less help than physicians had. The legal literature was significant (though not philosophically sophisticated).³ Lawyers had been teaching legal ethics for some time. There were a few good texts.⁴ Lawyers had specialists in ethics in a way physicians did not. Indeed, the law school was already planning to hire one of those specialists for the following year.

Still, lawyers were not so different from physicians. In 1970, the American Bar Association (ABA) had replaced its model “Canons of Ethics,” originally adopted in 1908 but much amended since, with a new “Code of Professional Responsibility.” The Code distinguished between “canons,” “mandatory rules,” and “ethical considerations.” There was a good deal of confusion about the distinction. Underlying this confusion were deeper questions: Was there a difference between legal ethics and professional responsibility? Was the Code just another statute or something else? If something else, what? How did the answer to these questions affect the way the Code should be interpreted? How did it affect what a lawyer should do?

When most people think of Watergate, they think only of lawyers and politicians. But I think of engineers too. Spiro Agnew resigned as Vice President of the United States not because of what he had done as Nixon’s Vice President but because of what he had done while holding office in Maryland. He had solicited bribes from civil engineers seeking state contracts. Many had paid. Engineers all over the country were appalled that so many engineers could be involved in such a flagrant violation of professional ethics. The scandal contributed to the unease engineers already felt about the part engineers had had in the then-recent controversies surrounding the faked testing of Goodrich’s A-7D airbrakes, the Ford Pinto’s exploding gas tank, and the DC-10’s misdesigned cargo door. Many were also concerned about what was happening to the engineers who had warned the public of the danger posed by the Bay Area Transit Authority’s computer controlled trains.⁵

In 1975, an anonymous donor offered the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) $500,000 to improve the philosophy department. IIT’s president, a chemist, convinced the donor to give the money to establish an “ethics center” to do something about the ethics of engineers, scientists, architects, and other professionals. The model was to be the Hastings Center. The following year the organization at which I now work, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, was established. Perhaps only by coincidence, the University of Maryland established its Center for Ethics and Public Policy in the same year.

IIT’s work in professional ethics followed the pattern of medical ethics, beginning with engineering. Faculty in philosophy, engineering, and the social sciences met to discuss engineering ethics, using cases like the DC-10 cargo door to understand the part engineers had (or could have) in what were ultimately corporate decisions. Soon the philosophers and engineers were team-teaching a course. Eventually, the philosophers taught it alone. Similar courses in architecture ethics and computer ethics followed.

The boom in business ethics seems to date from this period as well. Other professions – accounting, nursing, journalism, financial analysis, public administration, dentistry, and so on – each have their own story. For example, interest in the ethics of scientific research seems to have become significant only in the early 1980s. Only in the last few years has it begun to have the proportions of a boom (as I shall explain in Chapter 3). And only in this decade has interest in academic ethics become noticeable. Any boom is yet to come.

Evidence of the boom

This is the “boom” we are talking about; an increased interest in ethics spreading unevenly from one profession or occupation to another. What evidence is there that this boom is more than apparent?

One feature of the ethics boom seems to be a growth in codes of ethics. What evidence do we have of this growth? In 1980, the Ethics Resource Center (ERC) surveyed 105 corporations they knew to have a code of ethics. Of those responding, fifty-eight percent indicated that their code was less than four years old.⁶ When the ERC repeated its survey in 1990, they identified 1,700 companies with a code of ethics.⁷ Clearly, there has been a boom in corporate codes of ethics. What about codes of ethics for professions?

My center collects professional codes. In 1981, we had 241 professional codes on file. By 1989, we had 338; by 1997, the number had risen to 764.⁸ Though not as dramatic as the growth in business codes, the growth in professional codes is still substantial. But that growth seems to be due almost entirely to the organization of new professional societies rather than to the adoption by existing societies of codes where none existed before. That is not surprising. Generally, adopting a code of ethics is part of organizing a profession. Organizing a profession is itself part of the ethics boom.

Looking through our files, I noticed an interesting pattern. Many of the present codes were adopted during the last twenty-five years, replacing codes adopted before 1920. So, for example, not only did the ABA replace its Canons of Ethics with the code of Professional Responsibility in 1970; in 1982, it replaced that code with the “Model Rules of Professional Conduct.” The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) did something similar. In 1978, it replaced a code of ethics dating from 1912 with an entirely new document; and then, in 1990, replaced that document with another.

The two ABA codes have at least one other feature in common with the two new IEEE codes, one shared with most of the codes adopted in the last twenty-five years. The new codes bear surprisingly little resemblance to their predecessors. Many of the old provisions have simply disappeared. Many new provisions have no counterpart in the older code.⁹

My examination of the Center’s collection of professional codes leads me to conclude that, in American history, the only period comparable to the years 1970–95 in number and importance of professional codes adopted are the first two decades of this century. So, here is more evidence of a boom.

Courses in ethics should also provide evidence of the boom. What has changed in the last twenty-five years? Let me begin with my own experience. When I was an undergraduate in the early 1960s, the philosophy department in which I majored had only one undergraduate course in ethics, what we would now describe as an advanced course in moral theory.¹⁰ The graduate school I attended had two, one in contemporary moral theory and one in the history of moral theory. There was no course in applied (or practical) or professional ethics. Indeed, I’m sure I never heard any of those terms until I left graduate school.

Neither my college nor my graduate school was unusual in its course offerings. Their offerings had been typical of American universities since at least the late 1940s. Yet, ten years after I received my Ph.D., most of the courses I was teaching were new. The most popular introduction to philosophy was Moral and Social Values. A course in (what we now call) applied (or practical) ethics, it was organized around topics like abortion, euthanasia, war, poverty, and suicide. The advanced undergraduate courses included Legal Ethics, Medical Ethics, and Business Ethics as well as a course called “Ethical Theory” (which focused on normative theories, not meta-ethics). True, I had changed institutions during the 1970s. But that change does not explain the change in what I taught. All those courses except Ethical Theory had been added during the 1970s. Much the same happened at many other institutions during the same period.¹¹

Here then is evidence of a boom in teaching ethics. There is more. For example, a significant number of philosophers now have their primary appointment in a medical school (often in a department of medical humanities). Not only do these philosophers teach ethics to medical students, many also sit on hospital ethics committees or make rounds with physicians. None of this even seemed possible in 1970.

Something similar has happened in business and government. Twenty-five years ago no one even talked seriously about ethics training for “practitioners.” Today ethics training is common. My own center has done ethics training for government as well as for trade associations and businesses. Other ethics centers, including the Ethics Resource Center in Washington, D.C. and the Josephson Institute in California, have also done ethics training in business and government. My center’s list of professional societies even includes an International Society of Ethicists (ISE) for “consultants in the application of Ethics.” The ISE was founded in 1985.

Publications are another possible source of evidence for a boom. What do we find? Again, let me begin close to home. In 1980, my center published a selective annotated bibliography of work in engineering ethics.¹² It listed 536 items, including Congressional hearings, court cases, and general works in professional ethics. In 1990, we were asked to update the bibliography. After a preliminary search of the literature, we concluded we could not. So much had been published on engineering ethics in the intervening decade that we could not do a useful update without adding staff.

Engineering ethics is, I should add, a relatively small part of professional ethics. How small may be gauged by considering that engineering still does not have its own journal of professional ethics.¹³ Among disciplines having at least one such journal already are: agriculture, criminal justice, ecology, journalism, international affairs, and law. Business ethics already had two in 1980 (and now has at least four). And medical ethics not only has at least four journals but its own four-volume encyclopedia.¹⁴

Since we are now looking for evidence of a boom in ethics publications, I should point out that none of today’s many journals of applied or professional ethics is more than twenty years old.¹⁵ So, here is more evidence of a boom.

What about ethics centers as a measure of the boom? Here the evidence is just as impressive. The Hastings Center seems to have been the first ethics think tank in the world. IIT’s center, Maryland’s, and Bentley College’s Center for Business Ethics seem to be among those tied for first ethics center not primarily concerned with medical ethics. We keep a registry of ethics centers. As of August 1989, it listed 308 in the United States, 25 in Canada, and 8 elsewhere in the world. By 1997, the number in the U.S. had grown to 347. Though the number in Canada had actually dropped to 10, the number elsewhere had more than tripled to 26. England alone had 14 by then.¹⁶

Some explanations of the ethics boom rejected

Taken together, this evidence seems to establish that the boom in ethics is real. So, the question becomes: Why now?

One possible answer is that a particular scandal, Watergate, caused the boom. If Watergate had not happened, there would have been no boom. We must reject this explanation. As I have described the boom, it began before Watergate, with medical ethics in the early 1960s. Medical ethics cannot be dismissed as “the exception that proves the rule.” There are at least two reasons: First, we can point to boom-related activity in other fields before Watergate. For example, the ABA rewrote its code of ethics (the first time) in the late 1960s. Second, medical ethics by itself is just too important to be treated as a “mere exception...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Professional Ethics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Series editor's preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Research Ethics
• Part III Teaching Ethics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index