Association Plans March Meeting
The Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) will convene its Fourth Annual
Meeting March 2-4, 1995, at the Stouffer Concourse Hotel in Crystal City, Va. Keynote speaker
will be William Galston, Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. Galston is on
leave from the University of Maryland, where he is a professor in the School of Public Affairs and
a senior research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. He is the author of five
books and numerous scholarly articles; his most recent book is Liberal Purposes (Cambridge,
1991).
The plenary case study will focus on a case entitled "This Case Sucks: Beavis, Butt-Head, and TV Content," prepared by the Harvard Business School. The preliminary program reveals presentations focused on a wide range of ethical issues. Amy Gutmann, Director, University Center for Human Values at Princeton, will moderate a panel entitled "Putting Democracy in Its Place."
Some additional sessions:
The 1995 meeting will introduce a new feature, Breakfast with the Authors. Association members were invited to nominate their own recent books, which must be related to the Association's interests and goals. Conference registrants will sign up for breakfast on Friday and Saturday, with the author of their choice.
For information or registration, contact Brian Schrag, Executive Secretary, Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, 410 N. Park Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405 (812/855-6540; FAX 812/855- 3315; Bitnet: APPE@INDIANA; Internet:APPE@INDIANA.EDU).
"The Reporting of Ethics and the Ethics of Reporting," a conference meeting on March 4-5 in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of APPE, will offer an opportunity for practicing journalists and scholars to discuss the role of values in journalism. Cosponsors are the Poynter Center, The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation and The Annenberg Washington Program.
Some conference highlights:
Plans are underway for the second workshop, which will meet May 21-26, again in Bloomington. Even as these words are typed in early January, nominations for participants in the workshop are flowing in from the university members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (the Big Ten plus the University of Chicago). At this moment, we have 17 nominees from seven of the fourteen universities. ("Fourteen?" you say. "I thought it was the Big Ten plus one." True -- but of course the Big Ten is really eleven these days, and we also count the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign as two different universities, as we do IU-Bloomington and IUPUI.) We expect at least eleven more nominees from two other universities, making at least twenty-eight nominees out of a possible thirty participants.
Once again, the workshop will run from Sunday to Thursday, and will be followed by a one-day event open to the academic public. The seminar, "Mentoring and Teaching Research Ethics," will feature a keynote address by Stephanie J. Bird, Ph.D. Bird oversaw the Association for Women in Science's "Mentoring Project," which examined the obligations and challenges involved in mentoring responsible researchers. The seminar will meet from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., including lunch.
Bird, president of the Association for Women in Science in 1990 and 1991, was principal investigator and coordinator of the group's three-year effort to develop activities and materials for college students pursuing careers in math, science and technology. Two books were published as part of the project: A Hand Up: Women Mentoring Women in Science and Mentoring Means Future Scientists: A Guide to Developing Mentoring Programs Based on the AWIS Mentoring Project.
Bird, who has a doctorate in physiology, develops research ethics programs as special assistant to the associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Bird's keynote address will be followed by panel responses and discussion from the floor. Participants also will work in small groups on at least one case study on mentoring. Mentoring in the sciences will be emphasized, but the seminar will be relevant to anyone interested in mentoring and research ethics, regardless of discipline.
The only fee for the mentoring seminar is $10 to cover the cost of lunch. The fee will be waived for Indiana University faculty, staff and students, as well as for participants in the 1994 or 1995 "Teaching Research Ethics" workshops. Space is limited, so pre-registration is required by April 15.
For more information and registration forms, contact Kenneth D. Pimple, Project Director, Teaching Research Ethics, The Poynter Center, 410 N. Park Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405. Phone: 812/855- 0261. Fax: 812/855-3315. Internet: PIMPLE @INDIANA.EDU. Bitnet: PIMPLE@INDIANA.BITNET.
Although formally out of the office, Smith will not be out of sight. His sabbatical plans call for him to leave Bloomington only for brief stays, and he will remain actively involved in center projects. Smith plans to begin his sabbatical by focusing like a laser beam on genetics. He will complete a chapter for the book of essays growing out of the project entitled "Religion, Morality and the Professions in America," which will feature professional geneticist. (See related story, page 3.) This interest led him to a genetics lab somewhere on the IU campus, where, as a participant observer, he acquired the useful skills of sorting and irradiating Drosophila melanogaster. (That's fruit flies, folks.) During the spring semester, he has been adopted by another lab, this one working with micro-organisms. In addition, he is auditing an undergraduate genetics course and logging some time with medical students in their genetics rotation at the IU School of Medicine.
Meanwhile, in the director's office, Dworkin handled the Center's annual budget conference with the dean. He reports that the Center is still solvent and that, to date, we have not committed any torts.
And on the home front, Research Associate Ken Pimple and his wife Jennifer Livesay are the justifiably proud parents of Gwendolyn Ruth Pimple Livesay, born January 2 (7 lbs. 13 oz., 20 in.). Although staff had not played Pass the Baby at this writing, the first pictures reveal a beautiful daughter with a full head of dark hair.
Richard Miller, IU Religious Studies, is focusing on pediatric health care delivery teams. Research for Miller, has meant "hanging out," doing rounds, observations and interviews in a pediatric intensive care unit and a pediatric burn unit.
When he began, Miller said, he wanted to explore these professionals' efforts to help children cope with acute physical pain and emotional trauma. The idea, he said, "was to see to what extent they could help children make sense of their lives in a situation of acute suffering."
He found this question was not relevant to the observation sites, however. The children in the units were intubated and sedated, which limited their opportunities to interact with the health care team. But, he said, "I still stayed on the site because it was so incredibly compelling and I just couldn't pull myself out of it."
Miller hoped to conduct a moral and cultural analysis. He wanted to identify the personal or professional values that mattered and to define the broader civic responsibilities professionals saw themselves as serving, to explore "their own fabric of professional and moral motivations," he said.
In some cases, he found "a tight connection" between religious background and professional practice, Miller said. He was surprised to observe that respondents were "remarkably articulate about their religious values and rather unabashed about talking about them."
One individual explicitly attributed the choice of pediatrics to a commitment to reduce suffering, which grew directly out of his religious background. Another individual attributed her motivation to a belief that she was living out some of the basic social justice teachings of Christianity.
In general, Miller said, the professionals he studied were deeply concerned with improving the lives of children. "Virtually everyone said they had once worked with adults and decided to move to children," he said, "because they found adults' noncompliance was just too much of an obstacle. With kids,they felt they had more control, and they were more optimistic."
During Miller's six weeks on the units, almost all the patients were hospitalized as a result of trauma. Only one patient had a congenital disease, he said; "the rest were virtually all preventable." He concluded that all parents should be required to walk through a PICU.
Miller devised a tentative typology to categorize the cases, which included four categories. First, some children were hospitalized because of criminal abuse. Miller would include almost all children injured in automobile accidents in a second group, who were hospitalized because of negligence, such as failure to use car seats or seat belts. A third group were injured as a result of parental noncompliance, such as failure to give a child necessary medications. The fourth and final group were the victims of "honest accidents."
"My eyes were opened to the social and economic causes of injury," Miller said, "and you have to include the elements of poverty and undereducation." He was struck by the fact that these issues are not apparent in the current conversation about health care reform. "Blaming the victim is not politically attractive," Miller said, "but one ingredient in our debates about health care ought to be to what extent we can improve accident prevention."
Compounding the difficulty of dealing with acutely injured children, Miller said, is "the premium placed on family autonomy." Health care professionals are confronted by preventable tragedies that are the result of what he describes as "parental malfeasance." But the professionals must honor honor the parents' authority. Professionals must "negotiate a series of decisions and judgments with strangers, some of whom are responsible for the problem. They're caught within this tension of having to be morally neutral or at least having to declare a kind of moratorium on moral judgment and deal with the case in the present." Miller almost immediately found himself sympathetic with the professionals caught in that stressful situation.
Another observation is that the work of a participant observer is hard to do. "You have to hang around," Miller said, "and it's just not easy to do. I felt horribly intrusive and conspicuous. I was very fortunate to have people who really welcomed me into their environments, but I still always felt like an alien. It's methodologically and psychologically hard work."
Miller was intellectually prepared for the role. "I had read all about the problems of ethnographers, anthropologists and journalists changing the field by virtue of being there and the awkwardness of the insider/outsider status," he said. "But the emotional ambivalence and awkwardness came home to me in ways the literature can't quite capture."
Miller describes his six weeks of participant observation as "immeasurably rewarding as a human being as well as an academic. I can't translate these rewards directly into a book chapter, but I know I'll never be the same parent again."
The group is studying actual cases, hoping to generate meaningful guidance that is based on reality. The project ultimately will generate a book, to be published by the IU Press.
During its first year, the group focused on Huntington disease (HD), analyzing cases provided by Quaid, who directs IU's presymptomatic testing program for the disorder, and other testing centers. HD provides a unique paradigm: It has passed through the entire cycle of testing, from linkage testing based on genetic markers through discovery of the gene and direct genetic testing, and it offers ten years of experience in counseling and diagnosis. During the second year of the project, the focus has expanded to include other late onset disorders.
In an effort to collect additional cases, group members have hit the road. Quaid and Dworkin traveled to several centers that conduct presymptomatic testing (University of British Columbia, Boston University and Vanderbilt); Granbois and Quaid attended the Annual Meeting of the Huntington Disease Society of America; Granbois attended a conference on adoption sponsored by the University of Minnesota; and Gramelspacher attended the joint meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values, American Association of Bioethics, Society for Bioethics Consultation and American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics. Smith acquired two cases when he served on an NCHGR review panel in Washington, D.C. Working group members also have corresponded with researchers throughout the country. These efforts have generated cases on breast cancer, familial adenomatous polyposis, autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease and familial Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and additional cases involving HD.
In September, the group convened a small invitational meeting for members of families at risk for late onset genetic diseases, along with professionals who counsel and test for the disorders. The meeting, intended to provide a reality check for the working group's analyses, offered helpful insights into the lives of those who confront these issues daily on a personal and professional level.
The group's senior consultants will return to Indiana University again in May to review this year's work.
The group convened for its first fall meeting of the year on September 30 for a discussion of Michael Walzer's essay, "Moral Minimalism," led by our own Ken Pimple. Walzer's essay was published in From the Twilight of Probability: Ethics and Politics, ed. William R. Shea and Antonio Spadafora (Canton, Mass: Science History Publications, 1992). In this essay, Walzer explores the concept of a minimal morality shared across cultural boundaries, and from there ponders whether there might be some hope of creating a shared "maximal" morality.
Roger Janelli, Professor of Folklore, led the group's second meeting on October 28. The session focused on Janelli's recent book, Making Capitalism: The Social and Cultural Construction of a South Korean Conglomerate (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). The book is an exploration of the political economy of one South Korean conglomerate.
The final meeting of the semester was a public lecture by Lawrence H. Keeley, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Keeley 's talk was entitled"War Before Civilization: Modern Myths and Prehistoric Realities." (See related story, p. 5.)
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Curran began his talk with a response to the work of Robert Bellah and colleagues. Their thesis is that Americans' primary language today stresses individualism as a way to express themselves and understand the world.
Curran described a more communitarian ethic. He agrees that religious and biblical precepts contribute to the development of a communitarian approach, but he noted some problems.
He contended that church-state separation, enshrined in the First Amendment, does not rule out the participation of religious voices in the dialogue about the common good. The conversation can be enriched by the inclusion of profound theological ideas. Curran concluded with an exploration of how communitarian ideas might work out in public institutions, including religion, higher education and politics.
Lawrence H. Keeley, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, presented a talk on November 7 entitled "War Before Civilization: Modern Myths and Prehistoric Realities." The talk was sponsored by the Culture and Conflict working group of the ICGCWP.
According to Keeley, , archaeologists and anthropologists have ignored evidence of widespread and destructive warfare in "pre- state" societies. Keeley calls this neglect the pacification of the past; he defined social scientists' misperceptions about pre- state societies as "myths." The "myth of primitive war" holds that war in pre-state societies is highly inefficient when compared to warfare of civilized states; the "myth of prehistoric peace" holds that pre-state people are inherently peaceful. Keeley contends that both myths can be challenged by archeological and ethnographic data. Keeley' book, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press in March .
Alan Weisbard, Associate Professor of Law and of Medical Ethics at the University of Wisconsin's Schools of Law and Medicine in Madison, presented two talks at IU on November 14-15. In the first, a lecture entitled "On the Sources and Methods of Jewish Bioethics: Something Old, Something New," he discussed the particular contributions of Jewish thought to the on-going conversations of bioethics.
He also presented a paper entitled "Tales of the City -- Part Deux, The Academic Health Center: Reflections of a Partially Kept Bioethicist." The story raised some of the issues encountered by someone hired and paid as a bioethicist.
Weisbard has crafted a professional career bridging scholarly research, public policy development and public service. Following assignments in developing law and public policy on a wide range of bioethical issues at both federal and state levels, he currently teaches law students, medical students, graduate students in philosophy and the sciences and undergraduates.
Weisbard has published numerous scholarly articles in legal, medical and philosophical journals. He has a particular interest in the relevance of religious teachings and traditions to the making of public policy in our pluralistic society. His visit to IU was cosponsored by The Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program.
In his presentation, "Why is Plagiarism Wrong?," Kroll considered plagiarism as a teacher of college composition. He argued that several common arguments are not really persuasive.
One is an analogy to stealing: Plagiarism is taking someone else's ideas. If we respect property rights in physical property, we should respect property rights in intellectual property.
But when a student plagiarizes, the original author loses nothing. If plagiarized works are published or sold, of course, the plagiarist may steal revenues from the original author, but that possibility is usually irrelevant for a college composition class. Even when plagiarized work is sold, it is not really the ideas or words that are stolen, so much as the proceeds from them. If someone steals my car, I can no longer use it; if someone plagiarizes my ideas or words, however, those words and ideas are still available to me.
The analogy to stealing can also be seen to be defective when we think about the norms for quoting, Kroll pointed out. A student who puts quotation marks around a sentence and adds a citation is following commendable scholarly practice; without those quotation marks and that citation, the student has committed one of the few intellectual offenses for which expulsion is seen as an appropriate sanction. If plagiarism is like stealing, why should such a small change make such a large difference? If someone were to steal my car, I would be unlikely to commend an acknowledgment of its source.
Kroll considered two other commonly advanced arguments, which focus respectively on the importance of independent work and the importance of just desserts. He found both inadequate to explain plagiarism's unique place in the academy and inadequate to convince students that plagiarism is wrong.
For Kroll, the strongest argument is the argument that plagiarism is lying; the plagiarist intends to deceive her or his readers by leading them falsely to believe that they are reading original work. Truthfulness is at the heart of education, and plagiarism is a perversion of that core value.
Last updated: 22 January 1996
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~poynter/nl1994-2.html
Comments: pimple@indiana.edu
Copyright 1996, The Trustees of Indiana University