Science & Technology

Nomination For Enshrinement in the Hall Of Bad Ethics Ideas: A Hippocratic Oath For Scientists

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Nope. No sewing machine. It will cause too much “harm.”

A blogger for the Lindau Nobel community asks, as a follow-up to a discussion raised in one of the august group’s recent meetings, whether scientists should have to take an oath similar to that traditionally (but not universally, by the way) taken by physicians, a pledge to “do no harm.”

No. Next question!

This is not merely a bad idea, but an arrogant and ignorant one. The medical profession is dedicated to healing, without regard to who is being healed. “First, do no harm” is a rational and excellent absolute principle, one that relieves the profession of the burden of many (but not all) complex utilitarian dilemmas that doctors and other health professionals may not be equipped to solve. Medicine is much narrower than science, and its limitations more clear. Most people would agree with doctors on what constitutes “harm” in 99% of the situations where the issue would be raised. Not so science, where one man’s monstrosity is another’s giant step for mankind. Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: Are Fake Dwarves Unethical?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Remember, Disney didn’t cast little people as the dwarfs either…he cast ink.

The advocacy group “Little People of America” is crying foul because the seven dwarves (or dwarfs, if you’re Walt Disney) in “Snow White and the Huntsman” were played not by real little people (who don’t like being called dwarves, just playing them for money) but by digitally-altered normal-sized actors.

A representative of the group told the gossip web site TMZ that the studios should be “casting people with dwarfism as characters that were specifically written to be played by little people … and other roles that would be open to people of short stature.”

Your Ethics Quiz of the Day: Do movie makers have an obligation to cast small people in small people’s roles? Is it unethical to use special effects to do avoid casting them? Continue reading →

Watch Out, John Malkovich…You Can’t Trust Siri!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

NO, JOHN! SIRI’S A SPY!!!!!

Wired reports that IBM has banned Siri, iPhone’s voice-activated digital assistant, its headquarters network. Employees trying to use John Malkovich’s new friend will be foiled. Why? IBM CIO Jeanette Horan told MIT’s Technology Review that the company worries that conversations with Siri might be stored somewhere. And indeed they are. Siri relays everything she hears to an Apple data center in Maiden, North Carolina. What happens to it then is anybody’s guess. Continue reading →

A Dinosaur Brain Fart From Fox

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

“All right, who farted?”

Here’s a rule that I would like to propose: if a news outlet can’t find a reporter who has the education and analytical ability to comprehend a complex concept, then the story shouldn’t be covered at all. Better no coverage than misleading coverage. What do you think?

Of course, this would mean that about half of all news stories wouldn’t be covered, since if journalists had the ability to understand those topics, they would have entered professions other than journalism.

Fox News shocked the world this week by announcing that a new study had shown the dinosaurs farted themselves out of existence: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: “Gaia” Scientist James Lovelock

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

James Lovelock

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened. The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now. The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.”

With that admirable statement of candor and humility, renowned earth scientist James Lovelock did what everyone in the climate change debate should be doing, and should have been doing all along. He admitted the uncertainty of climate science, the fallibility of models and projections, and the fact that the extent, speed, predictability and causes of climate change are still far from certain. If other scientists involved in this critical issue had Lovelock’s integrity,  perhaps ignorant pundits, journalists and politicians would not feel so justified in calling skeptics about climate change the equivalent of Holocaust deniers. Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “A Last Word on the Kevin Coffay Sentence”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Brain chemistry?

Michael, who is the reigning Comment of the Day champion, comes up with another here regarding the Kevin Coffay sentence and the mitigating factor in juvenile crimes, supported by brain chemistry research, that adolescents are not as capable of rational decision-making as adults, and therefor should not be punished as severely for their reckless acts. This is his post regarding “A Last Word on the Kevin Coffay Sentence.”

“Don’t go overboard with the studies that show adolescents are incapable of being responsible, thinking rationally, or evaluating risks. If you look at such studies, they are done in a vacuum and merely state that older people are BETTER at evaluating risks (duh). The main point is that our brains continue to develop until 25 or so. Much like Titanic research, however, this research is interpreted wildly and without considering evidence to the contrary. Continue reading →

A Last Word on the Kevin Coffay Sentence

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Keven Coffay, the teen who drove drunk, killed three of his friends as a result and fled the wreck as they lay trapped and dying, has prevailed in his effort to get the original 20 year prison sentence (for involuntary manslaughter) reduced. Now he may be released as early as next spring, on parole from his new, lenient, 8 year sentence. I won’t re-iterate my views on Coffay’s case, which are already here and here. I will make this additional observation.

In his column today, George Will discusses the science behind the growing consensus that life sentences without the chance of parole qualify as “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the 8th Amendment. I don’t disagree with his conclusion, nor do I doubt, as the father of a teen-age son, that the brain chemistry of teens dictate special calculations and analysis when trying to decide on what is just punishment for crimes arising from the recklessness and poor judgment of adolescents as opposed to adults. Continue reading →

Umpire Accountability, As The Day of the Robots Fast Approaches

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

If Robby replaces you, Larry, it's your own fault.

Are baseball’s umpires trying to get themselves replaced by machines? Or perhaps baseball’s brass are conspiring to allow incompetent and lazy umpires to do themselves in, as their miserable work wins over the traditionalists and the Luddites to mechanical ball and strike-calling and their overseers refuse to take decisive action against the worst officials they have. Whatever the explanation, today’s debacle ending the Tampa Rays-Red Sox game in Boston showed an appalling lack of accountability and professionalism in a segment of the game that is critical to its credibility and integrity. Continue reading →

From Massachusetts: Proof That It CAN Happen Here…and Does; That It CAN Happen To You…and Might.

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Tortured. At his Special Needs school. By good people like us.

As I recently wrote to a commenter on another post, Ethics Alarms is not intended to catalogue every prominent example of unethical conduct, and not just because attempting to do so would require a fleet of bloggers. If it is discussed here, an incident usually requires some kind of ethical analysis to determine whether it is ethical or not, or has larger cultural or societal significance. That the incident at the center of this post was unethical (as well as illegal), there can be no doubt, and that, ironically, is why it is worthy of special attention. The conduct is self-evidently horrific and beyond justification, and yet it occurred anyway, in a community, state and nation where virtually every sentient citizen over the age of nine would say that it could never happen—not here, not in the United States of America, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The fact that it did happen is both a revelation and a warning.

Film footage under seal since 2002 was finally shown in a Massachusetts courtroom this week. The film shows how the staff of a school for special needs students in Canton, Mass., the Judge Rotenberg Center, strapped a disabled 18-year-old student named Andre McCollins to a table and proceeded to torture him, administering 31 jolts of electricity to the screaming boy over a seven hour period. Lawyers defending the school in a lawsuit have claimed that the atrocity was “treatment,” but other evidence indicates that it was punishment—for  McCollins’ defiance of a teacher’s demands that he remove his jacket in class. Continue reading →

“Titanic” Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

This is Titanic week, as all of you who don’t live in tunnels like prairie dogs must know. It has been a century since the sinking of the Great Unsinkable, with the deaths of 1500 souls including some of the great artistic, financial and industrial greats of the era. James Cameron’s 1997 film is also returning this week in 3-D, which means that the misconceptions, false accounts and outright misrepresentations the film drove into the public consciousness and popular culture will be strengthened once again. I think it would be ethical, on this centennial of the tragedy, for those in a position to do so to make a concerted effort to honor the victims and their families by honoring the truth. Thanks to Cameron, this is impossible. Continue reading →