Ethics is the effort to guide one’s conduct with careful reasoning. One cannot simply claim ‘X is wrong.’ Rather, one needs to claim ‘X is wrong because (fill in the blank).’
Adam Briggle and Carl Mitcham
While practitioners need to know and understand the core ethical principles supporting responsible use of, and research in, fields like mathematics, they also need to anticipate and recognize when elements of established practice standards are in conflict within a single case or situation. That is, remembering (“knowing”) the ethical guidelines is necessary, but not sufficient, for ethical practice; the ability to reason with/from the guidelines is also required.
Professional ethical standards that can be leveraged to inform what constitutes ethical practice are not rules, but guidance. They require judgement and there must be training for that judgment to develop. Experience on the job does not suffice; not everyone will have the type of experience(s) that build this kind of judgement, but we still hope every practitioner would be able to develop this judgement – and be able to use it when needed.
An example comes from computing: Andrew McNamara, Justin Smith, and Emerson Murphy-Hill reported that neither students nor practitioners in software development could use the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) ethical practice guidelines to make decisions about ethical challenges when the guidelines were provided without training in how to use them.
Instead, Ethical Reasoning (the paradigm; this site; and my books) takes the perspective of Adam Briggle and Carl Mitcham on Page 38 of Ethics and Science: An Introduction that “(e)thics is the effort to guide one’s conduct with careful reasoning. One cannot simply claim ‘X is wrong.’ Rather, one needs to claim ‘X is wrong because (fill in the blank).’”
This is the main reason for my focus on ethical reasoning, rather than the memorization or comprehension/retention of the ethical practice standards.
Also, ethical reasoning can be done with/applied to any source documents. This means that, as different topics in responsible conduct of research, or “ethics” in the domain, or different dimensions of practice (study or data collection design; data analysis; analysis interpretation; etc.) become important, or as individuals move to different institutions with different policies, their ethical reasoning can adapt to new materials because they would not have been trained solely to comprehend or retain static material.
