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Some of the answers to my question Are academic ethics global or local? indicate the possibility that academic ethics themselves (rather than just laws and policies affecting academics) may change over time.

What is the actual process by which academic ethics may be altered? More specifically, is the process:

  • Top-down, in which regulatory agencies, funding sources, legislatures, etc. push down new rules onto academics, who are expected to internalize them as normative? (e.g. "Please take note that fooing the bar is now against our Code of Ethics. If you do not cease all bar fooing activity by the end of the fiscal year, your grant will not be renewed.")

  • Bottom-up, in which written codes of ethics, laws, funding guidelines, etc. are modified as time goes on to match popular consensus? (e.g. "According to our recent surveys, 95% of academics and 82% of the general public Agree with the statement 'It should be considered unethical when academics foo the bar.'. For the 2020 fiscal year, we should make not fooing the bar a requirement for funding.")

The question can alternately be phrased as asking about the nature of academic ethics themselves - whether the "true state" of what is ethical and what is not is part of written rules of academia (and thus reflected in applicable policies, laws, procedures, etc.), or part of the unwritten rules.

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  • Slowly, reading some of the questions posted on here about « my supervisor published my work without my name included »...
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 13:42
  • @SolarMike perhaps, but what is the "endgame" for such a scenario? Is this going to be solved by tougher laws, or will only a popular movement solve this?
    – Robert Columbia
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 14:07
  • A « scenario »? So you think it does not happen? Under the carpet then ...
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 14:08
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    @SolarMike I think you need to look up what the word "scenario" actually means.
    – Tobias Kildetoft
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 14:12
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    @SolarMike Sometimes, you need to look past the first definition in the dictionary and look at the others (as well as how terms are generally used in everyday conversation rather than their "official" definition).
    – Tobias Kildetoft
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 14:17

2 Answers 2

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I'm sure both processes happen.

The latest Common Rule for human subjects is a great top-down example. https://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2019/01/07/nih-implementation-of-the-final-rule-on-the-federal-policy-for-the-protection-of-human-subjects-common-rule/

This process reinvestigated human subject ethics in the context of modern-day genetics. It almost required specific informed consent for the collection of deidentified tissue, with periodic renewals of consent and the ability to yank consent. Picture what that would do to say, developed perpetual cell lines used for research! MANY universities were waiting anxiously to see what would come out of that process and there were very large discussions on how such requirements would be met. We even modified our CLINICAL operations to accommodate anticipated changes that never happened!!

I say this is a great top-down example because the ethics are, and still remain, hard to figure out. Stakeholders had to get together and form consensus. Nobody knew what the outcome would be when the process started.

As an example of bottom up, there is the example of neurosurgeons that now require sham surgeries before adopting a new procedure. This fell out of human fetal tissue transplant attempts. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1733639 There is no relevant reg, but I'm sure this is now incorporated into RSRB discussion.

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  • Can you give an example of the opposite process, where changes in ethical rules existed informally for some time (but represented "real" norms with real enforcement, even if only through social pressure) and were only later codified as official rules that could easily be looked up by anyone? E.g. "In the late 1990's, there was a wide-scale movement that wearing blue hats was unethical. Although this rule was never codified in any formal Code of Ethics or similar document until 2015, there is ample evidence that blue-hat-wearers frequently got their tires slashed and rarely received tenure."
    – Robert Columbia
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 17:56
  • @RobertColumbia -- that would require some real research, but off the top of my head, some of the bigger ethical failures were well-recognized as ethical failures at the time, but codifying them as regs was not always easy. Nazi human studies, Tuskegee, Milgram,....
    – Scott Seidman
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 18:08
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    Another one that springs to mind is a population of neurosurgeons that now require sham surgeries before adopting a new procedure. This fell out of human fetal tissue transplant attempts. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1733639 There is no relevant reg, but I'm sure this is now incorporated into RSRB discussion.
    – Scott Seidman
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 18:14
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Top down makes little sense. Regulations are independent, generally, of ethics. Some regulations embody ethical principles and some don't. On the other hand, behaving ethically shouldn't require regulation.

Bottom up, as you state it, makes little sense. I isn't "consensus" that makes a thing ethical or not. At one time, in the US, there was (somewhat less than universal) consensus that slavery was appropriate and necessary to the well being of the country.

Ethics itself derives from principles and from theoretical concepts of the nature of humanity and our world. These principles are debated by philosophers and others and only evolve slowly. Very slowly. Most of the ethical principles at play today are very old.

Applied ethics, however, is a bit different. Applied ethics needs to apply the ethical principles to changes as they evolve. The rise of automation, for example, has caused rethinking of some of the economic principles used to organize modern society. What is right in this context, derives from fundamental principles of what is right.

But new thinking about applications of ethics only permeates through a society slowly as there are vested interests at play that may be (relatively) disadvantaged by new thinking. I don't know my history well enough to know when plagiarism, for example, became an issue. But far enough back, I doubt that anyone thought much about it. But when new knowledge started to be associated with individuals, and those individuals depended on it for their livelihood, it became more and more of an issue. I doubt that Aristotle, for example, gave a thought to it. That implies a sometimes bottom up (permeate) and sometimes top down (recognize and codify) process. Not a dichotomy, but also, only applicable to applied ethics not ethical principles.

To give an example, the Tuskegee Experiment was unethical, though there were, apparently, no laws or regulations at the time to prevent it's being carried out. Afterwards, laws and regulations were created to make it obvious to everyone that it was wrong. But it was still unethical and immoral in the absence of any such regulations. It isn't the laws and regulations, later passed, that made it unethical.

What the laws and regulations did, however, was to make it easier for others to make proper judgements without actually considering the ethics and making their own determination. "Do this, and you will avoid an ethical trap."

Had those who carried out the experiment done a proper ethical analysis they would (or at least should) have realized that it was unethical.

But, again, those rules and laws are just already existing ethical principles being applied.

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  • Maybe my experience is atypical, but IME 99% of actual "ethics" discussions have really been about regulatory or funding compliance ("the agency won't allow us to do X while receiving their funding"), not about "what's right" ("doing X is wrong because of the following timeless reasons unrelated to who is formally in charge of what").
    – Robert Columbia
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 15:11
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    But those aren't ethics discussions. It is just a different realm.
    – Buffy
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 15:30
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    Perhaps if someone wants to tell you it is an ethical requirement, they are trying to avoid telling you that you are just being required to do something due to an imbalance of power or authority. They are trying to give you the responsibility rather than taking in on themselves. There is, for example, no ethical consideration in crossing the street against the light or in the middle of the block when it is safe, but there are still regulations.
    – Buffy
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 15:39
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    There are many universities closely examining policies related to international collaborations right now because of an NIH mandate, so top-down could work. In fact, most RSRB policies in the US are in place to make sure NIH compliance is met.
    – Scott Seidman
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 17:33
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    In fact nexus.od.nih.gov/all/2019/01/07/… was largely about the reapplication of ethical principles to research carried out in the modern genetic age. EVERY university I know was waiting with bated breath to find our what was going to be in this policy, so they could adhere to it.
    – Scott Seidman
    Commented Mar 18, 2019 at 17:35

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