Interaction

November 15, 2005

Ethics Investigations: How does good citizenship intersect with teaching and research on campus?

The morning Terri Schiavo died, a crowd packed into a standing-room-only lecture hall at the Medical School to hear two experts examine the ethical intricacies of the case.

Likewise, in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, a variety of venues on campus sponsored debates placing the disaster into a framework of ethical concerns.

At universities across the country, discussions of ethics are no longer consigned to one or two philosophy courses. Students and faculty members are finding that the language of ethics allows them to dissect an immense range of problems in an equally varied range of disciplines.

At Stanford, the signs are everywhere. Starting with the Class of 2009, students must fulfill a new requirement, Education for Citizenship, one of whose areas is Ethical Reasoning. The university is home to the Center on Ethics, the Center for Biomedical Ethics and the undergraduate Program on Ethics in Society. Websites, student groups and interdisciplinary classes, projects and conferences attest to ethics' newly privileged position. It's even on the radio: the Sept. 27 episode of Philosophy Talk, the weekly radio show hosted by philosophy professors Kenneth Taylor and John Perry, was on war and ethics (http://www.philosophytalk.org/index.htm).

It is not hard to see why. Business and policy students see their future professions wracked by scandals. Developments in stem-cell research and reproductive and life-prolonging technologies have set off debates that spill over to the political arena, where "ethics" is routinely invoked on both sides. In an age of faith-based politics, "ethics" often is used as a synonym for "values" or "beliefs." Add to that the growing gap between rich and poor and an increasingly endangered environment, and you have a long list of occasions for scholarly evaluations of right and wrong, just and unjust.

But is that what ethics is? Distinguishing between right and wrong? Or deciding what is more right than something else? Lately it has come to mean "legal"; cooking the company books frequently is described as an "ethical" violation. Or "responsible"—as in business owners having an "ethical" duty to their community, however that is defined. Or "Christian." Or "fair."

Regardless of one's definition, these questions and the concerns that prompt them have made themselves felt in everyday instruction and research across the Stanford campus. It is not a question of following the latest academic trend; indeed, ethics has a long history in the curriculum. Rather, it has become a question of necessity as people in all disciplines grapple with some of society's stickiest dilemmas. What follows is an overview of some of our most outstanding initiatives.

Ethics in Society Program

The foundation that undergirds ethics instruction at Stanford is undoubtedly the Ethics in Society honors program (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS). Its classes range widely. Since 2001, the program has provided faculty-development funds for nearly two-dozen ethics-oriented courses cross-listed in about 20 disciplines. All students may take the courses, though space is limited. Like all professors interviewed for this article, program director Debra Satz, an associate professor of philosophy and chair of the Philosophy Department, reported that enrollments are on the rise.

L.A. Cicero Participants at the Global Justice workshop, sponsored by the Center on Ethics: Deborah Rhode (left) and Judy Lichtenberg and Debra Satz.

"Maybe that's Enron-driven, or religion-driven, but it's also because the humanistic side of the Philosophy Department came back into its own," she said last spring. "The more technical classes are still big, but ethics appeals to a wide audience." It also appeals to donors: the Ethics in Society program last year received $1 million from Buzz and Barbara McCoy, which was matched by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

"We have the greatest students," Satz said of the honors program. A 2003 graduate won a Marshall Fellowship after writing a thesis on the sale of kidneys by villagers in India. Three of the seven 2004 graduates were Phi Beta Kappa. Members of the Class of 2005 did projects on capital punishment, immigration, fetal rights, and transgendered people and health insurance. These are students, in other words, for whom ethical considerations don't stay in the classroom and newspapers don't stay outside. Satz herself participated in an Oct. 21 Reunion Homecoming panel called "Hurricane Katrina as a Natural Disaster, a Man-Made Catastrophe, and a Failure of the Social Contract."

In addition to providing instruction, the program co-sponsors the "Ethics at Noon" and "Everyday Ethics" series of talks, the latter of which most recently featured departing Athletics Director Ted Leland speaking about sports ethics.

Center on Ethics

A frequent collaborator with the Ethics in Society program is the Stanford Center on Ethics (http://ethics.stanford.edu). Its associate director, Lawrence Quill, said he spent his first year on campus trying to drum up interest among the faculty in teaching ethics-related classes, which the center helps fund. By now they're beating a path to his door, though in his case it's actually a wooden ramp leading to a temporary module behind Green Library. "Ideally, the Center and the Program in Ethics in Society would be housed together, in a location other than a trailer, which sends an inappropriate symbolic message," the center's strategic plan, released in September, stated.

Quill has helped professors write syllabi for classes in engineering, environmental studies, anthropology and psychiatry; helped set up websites; organized conferences; run research workshops at the Humanities Center; and is now trying to get funding for fellowships and lectureships.

He characterizes his extraordinarily busy schedule as that of a "roving diplomat."

"The great challenge at the center is getting faculty to come together; we act as international translators," Quill said. The goal from the start, said center director Deborah Rhode, the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law, was to create a place where people from all seven schools could collaborate; this was especially true for the professional schools, each one of which, though perhaps committed to widening its own ethics curriculum, can be insular by nature. After the fall of Enron, she said, "we thought there was no better time to launch the center." Representatives of the Hoover Institution and all of the schools sit on the center's policy board, a fact that Rhode and Quill emphasize to show that the center is open to everyone.

There are few foundations eager to fund ethics projects, Rhode said, so the center chooses its programs carefully, stressing issues certain to stir interest. Leadership is a matter of particular concern, and last February the center co-sponsored (with entities at Harvard and Princeton) a conference on moral leadership, the papers from which will be published in 2006 (http://ethics.stanford.edu/mlconference/index.html). It also is collaborating with the Business School's Center for Leadership Development and Research and in February will co-sponsor (with the Institute for Research on Women and Gender) a conference on women and leadership.

"We have very limited resources," Rhode said, noting that the center's programs are well attended nonetheless.  "If you build good programs, people will come." But, she added, Stanford must do more. "We need to build a community that's concerned. Stanford has both an opportunity and an obligation to do a better job in supporting ethics research."

Center for Biomedical Ethics

At the other end of campus is the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, directed by David Magnus, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford (http://scbe.stanford.edu). The distance between the two ethics centers was bridged most recently on Oct. 24 when they co-sponsored an event called "Healthcare and Hurricane Katrina." Last March, Magnus and Rhode appeared on stage together at the Schiavo event. Attendees, primarily medical personnel and students, wondered aloud about the role of the physician – the title of the event, after all, was "When Life Should End – Who Should Decide?"

"How do we educate our students about these issues?" one medical professor asked. "With panels like these and across the curriculum," Rhode answered. "We need to build this kind of discussion into our instruction."

L.A. Cicero Hank Greely, the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and chair of the Center for Biomedical Ethics steering committee.

The bioethics center was established in 1989. Bioethics used to be a multidisciplinary area, Magnus pointed out, where philosophers, theologians, scientists, sociologists and physicians would meet to discuss points in common. Now it has become an interdisciplinary field unto itself, with its own journals and canon. Professionals contribute their particular expertise but have also developed a common vocabulary.

"High school kids come up to me now and say they want to be bioethicists!" Magnus said, adding that 10 or 20 years ago, planning for such a career would not have been possible.

There are about 20 teaching and administrative staff members at the center, a change from the early years, when it was primarily what Magnus described as a "research ethics shop." It has an annual budget of about $4 million, devoted to four principal areas: medical research, education, service (benchside and bedside consultation) and outreach. Unlike the Center on Ethics, the Center for Biomedical Ethics can hire faculty, and a search is under way to fill a joint appointment with the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Bedside consults concern medical intervention along the lines of the Schiavo case. Benchside consults, on the other hand, aim to help scientists figure out how far they can go with their experiments. The mostly widely publicized of such cases was that of stem-cell expert Irving Weissman, who sought advice regarding the transplantation of human cells into the body of a mouse. (The experiment has not yet taken place.)

Someone who often ferries between law and medicine is Hank Greely, the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law, chair of the Center for Biomedical Ethics steering committee and one of the field's more ubiquitous figures. (Weissman called Greely about the mice experiment.)

Greely began drifting over to the scientific side of things about 15 years ago, in part drawn by his wife, a physician, and in part by scientists who, he found, were not without passion despite their white coats. Health insurance law, neuroscience, genetic testing and assisted reproduction have been among his passions since then. Who could not be passionate about, say, the ethical repercussions of developing MRIs that literally read minds? Or the use of drugs to gain 100 points on the SAT? Or not only fixing a medical problem but also enhancing someone's physical abilities? Or using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to screen cells of three-day-old embryos for genetic defects?

Such projects evoke strong feelings and some pretty predictable warnings.

"I'm not generally fond of slippery-slope arguments," Greely said recently. "As moral actors, we live on slippery slopes."

Stem-cell research is the most headline-grabbing issue. Magnus and Greely both participated at a September conference, "Bioethics and Governments: Comparing French and American Responses to New Human Technologies," sponsored by the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies on (http://francestanford.stanford.edu).

And Greely was one of the authors of an amicus brief earlier this year asking the California Supreme Court to take jurisdiction of several lawsuits challenging Proposition 71, the stem-cell initiative, which established the state Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The court declined to put the case on a fast track; as a result, two of the suits were consolidated in Alameda County Superior Court and a third, filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children on behalf of Mary Scott Doe, a fictitious embryo, is in federal court in Riverside.

School of Engineering

Law students who made their way to the Schiavo event probably walked by the Engineering School, home to yet another cluster of faculty and students trying to weigh the ethical implications of their professional activities. (Actually, Quill worried that not enough people made it across campus to the Medical School that day, a lament echoed by other people who run programs or sponsor events spanning schools.)

L.A. Cicero Professor Robert McGinn

Engineering undergraduates all must take one class in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, which Professor Robert McGinn helped launch in the early 1970s. Increasingly they choose his oversubscribed, cross-listed seminar, Ethical Issues in Engineering.

To help him choose from among the more than 80 students who routinely show up, McGinn has them fill out cards. What motivated them to enroll? he asks. The answers often include personal experiences: One student wondered about car design after his family suffered an accident; another mentions recycling; another worries about planned obsolescence.

What he gleans from their notes—he has repeated the exercise since 1997—is that students "have no way of thinking about ethics." They all expect to be confronted with ethical issues in their profession, he says, and they virtually all say they have no preparation for making the relevant decisions.

This "gap," as he described it, was the subject of a 2003 article in Science and Engineering Ethics in which he presented data from four years of surveys of engineers and students showing that "treatment of engineering-ethical issues is neglected or given short shrift in most technical engineering courses at Stanford"(http://www.opragen.co.uk).

"Forewarned is forearmed," McGinn said in his office one day early in Spring Quarter. "They need an early warning system in place to be prepared, to help them be critically analytical. They can resolve to adapt" to unethical situations in their future jobs, such as acquiescing to an unsafe building project, "or they can resist." Almost all his students say they have never studied anything specific about ethics, so he starts from the beginning, "unpacking the ethical obligations inherent in new technology, new building structures, and new innovative contexts."

"I try to teach them, What does it mean to be a professional?" McGinn said. The word "professional" originated in early modern Europe, he points out, when men would "profess" to a particular code of conduct or ethics. They were under oath to behave themselves. Their professional actions, in other words, were framed from the start by a series of moral requirements. That context has been lost, McGinn believes, but students today must recover it: "They cannot decontextualize their work," he said. "They must always keep the impact in mind and internalize a disposition toward ethical practices."

(McGinn, incidentally, shares Greely's distaste for the metaphor of the slippery slope. "All slopes aren't the same," he noted at the France-Stanford meeting on bioethics, adding that sensible shoes can help.)

The Center on Ethics helped to fund McGinn's seminar (he also teaches Ethics and Public Policy) and assisted him in creating the "Ethical Issues in Engineering" website (http://ethics-dev/engineering), which includes tutorials that let students go through the process of deciding, for example, what the acceptable social and moral costs of designing a given building or car are.

On the research front, McGinn is overseeing the social and ethical component of the vast 13-university National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN), of which Stanford is a part. He currently is tabulating the results of a survey of NNIN personnel to gauge their understanding of the implications, costs and possibilities of their research, and he presented the preliminary results of his survey at the bioethics center.

The Environment

For McGinn, who describes himself as a "no-harm guy," acting ethically as an engineer in large part means taking responsibility for the consequences of one's acts. So ethics is, essentially, doing the right thing—by one's community, one's profession, the world at large.

For those in the environmental sciences, the world at large is understood not just in terms of its inhabitants but in physical terms. The second website that Quill helped develop concerns, precisely, environmental ethics (http://ethics-dev/environment). The project was spearheaded with Suki Hoagland, executive director of the Interdisciplinary Program on Environment and Resources (http://iper.stanford.edu) and a member of the Faculty Leadership Committee for the Stanford Institute for the Environment, where colleagues in an array of natural and social sciences are working on environmental projects that often entail ethical concerns  (http://environment.stanford.edu).

Recently, Hoagland taught Global Environmental Ethics, which forms the core of the incipient website.

"We're creating an ethical framework for thinking about our responsibility to the planet," she said, admitting that definitions are not easy. "Once you add the physical component of the environment and move from individuals to communities and institutions, including the globe itself, traditional definitions don't serve as well. There's an ongoing debate on the parameters of ethics, which is part of what I hope we'll develop this quarter. We don't want just one definition or framework; we need to create a spectrum of plausible definitions, which are then the foundations for our case studies."

Those case studies, which appeared on the website as the quarter progressed, are examined through the lens of environmental and other international treaties. For example, how does one balance international intellectual property rights and the distribution of AIDS medication in poor countries (a subject she spoke on for the Ethics at Noon series)? How does one tease out the ethical implications of pollution from the content of the Basel Convention, which regulates trade in hazardous waste? Where should one stand on eco-tourism?

"I've never called this ethics," Hoagland said, though that's what it's getting called these days. "I care about access, justice and fairness."

(A similar course, Environmental Ethics, is taught at the Law School.)

In addition to helping set up the environmental ethics website, the Center on Ethics is working on an initiative with the Institute for the Environment on climate-change policies. A related project explores how visual representations of the environment influence policy outcomes and what the subsequent ethical issues are.

When she arrived at Stanford, Hoagland said, "Students told me they didn't know you could study the environment and people at the same time." That nexus, which she has helped create, is probably as good a place as any to be called environmental ethics.

Graduate School of Business

David Brady, the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Leadership Values and deputy director of the Hoover Institution, has little patience with what he deems to be imprecision in current ethical definitions. He has introduced a case-based course on applied ethics at the Graduate School of Business that aims to show future leaders and managers how to approach such dilemmas as balancing ethics and profitability.

L.A. Cicero David Brady, the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Leadership Values and deputy director of the Hoover Institution.

"We don't believe there is any such thing as business ethics," Brady said, referring to himself and his teaching colleague, Dale Miller. "There's something called ethics and it's applied to business." People too often think things are ethics that aren't, he said. "Ethics is the application of moral principles to problems. It's a reasoned approach based on axioms of moral theory."

Before business students start their regular two-year course of study, they must take a five-session, 10-hour course on ethics systems and moral principles. But after that, there are slim pickings.

According to a letter to the Business School's magazine in 2002 from Senior Associate Dean David Kreps, there is a very good reason why there are relatively few courses at the school with the word "ethics" in their title.

If it's an elective, he said, many students will elect to skip it. The answer is to weave discussions of ethics into all (or nearly all) coursework. "This approach means that ethical concerns become part of the big picture rather than being marginalized," he wrote, a viewpoint nearly identical to that expressed in the Center on Ethics' recent strategic plan, which pointed to "the perception among many faculty that teaching ethical responsibility is someone else's responsibility, which can be satisfied through a single mandatory course or distributional requirement that marginalizes coverage." (A 2003 statement on ethics and management from Robert Joss, dean of the Graduate School of Business, can be found at http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/about/fromthedean_ethicscurriculum.html.)

Though critics, both at the GSB and elsewhere, may think that more electives couldn't hurt, the school clearly has become a beacon. In the recent biennial report "Beyond Grey Pinstripes," sponsored by the World Resources Institute and the Aspen Institute, the Business School was named as the leader among business schools for its incorporation of matters of ethics and corporate responsibility into the curriculum (http://www.beyondgreypinstripes.org/).

There's clearly a market for "business ethics" at the Business School. A student sought help from Quill last year to set up a website on business ethics, which now bears the imprimatur of the Center for Leadership Development and Research (http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/cldr/teaching/ethics.html). The Brady/Miller seminar attracted double the projected enrollment last year, not surprising in light of research by David Montgomery, the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing, Emeritus, that "a reputation for ethics and for caring about employees" is high among MBAs' motivations for choosing one employer over another (http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0405/research_montgomery_careers.shtml).

An occasional colleague of Brady's and of Magnus' is Margaret Eaton, a former senior research scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics, a pharmaceutical and medical lawyer and a founding member of the Bioscience Business Ethics Center at the Claremont Colleges. Eaton teaches an interdisciplinary medical ethics class, Ethical Issues in the Biotech Industry, which was open to students from the schools of law, business, medicine and humanities and sciences. If Quill (and others, including the Commission on Graduate Education, which is poised to release its final report) express concern that researchers at the professional schools can too easily remain behind those safe walls, Eaton provided the antidote, as she found herself walking back and forth among four registrars' offices to make sure all the students could take the class.

In her opinion, most students at the Business School probably will not retain the ethical lessons of the mandatory mini-course they take when they arrive, given the rigorous regimen that follows. They need a reminder, she said: "I'm a minority, but I think they welcome my contribution. I teach about [the pharmaceutical industry], which I think is one of the world's crucial industries, and in which America is a leader, so I think it needs a lot of attention paid to it. You can't teach about the pharmaceutical industry without bumping into a myriad of ethical questions."

And students from around campus cannot help but bump into each other in her class. Ethics provides future doctors, future lawyers, future scientists and future business leaders with a common ground, though they tread upon it in their own fashion. "What they care about is so different," Eaton recalled. "Medical students want to provide good patient care, Ph.D. students care about technology and MBA students want to run a successful enterprise. I love that dynamic.

"Also, they act different culturally. The MBA students are the most outgoing, and the Ph.D. students are the most reticent. Every year I see that the MBA students, because they're acculturated, are bold and aggressive. They'll engage immediately, while the doctoral students hold back—until the MBA students say something wrong or off the mark, and then they feel compelled to jump in. It's totally fun."

 'It's Making a Difference'

There are those—Satz, of the Ethics in Society program, is one—who say brushing up on one's ethics in professional school is insufficient. Rather, it must be incorporated from the very start into all facets of education, thought and action, not treated as an elective or an add-on. Rhode made the same point at the Schiavo event.

"Social problems have an ethical component," Satz said, "and they can't be solved with technical knowledge alone." Stanford students, enormously well prepared in matters of fact, perhaps lag (as McGinn found the engineering students did) in matters of reasoning.

Medical students and pre-med students, Satz noted, are especially interested in her program's classes, which once again raises the question: Is ethics a question of how one thinks (the reasoning component of the new undergraduate requirement, or Brady's application of moral principles) or what one thinks (the criteria used when building, operating, prescribing, selling) or what one does? For Quill, all human relationships entail ethics; for Hoagland, that's true as well for environmental relationships. Humanities and Sciences Dean Sharon Long told Stanford Report in March that "all disciplines touch on moral and ethical issues." Yet Hoagland's new students and McGinn's engineers said they did not know what ethics was. Or, better put, they knew what the problems were but did not know to put the name "ethics" on them.

"Ethics isn't just one thing," Satz said. "We're exposing students to a diversity of thought, to different ways of thinking about ethical considerations. Ethics is everywhere, but there is also a scholarly discipline of ethics. It's found mainly in philosophy, but also in political theory and religious studies."

Indeed, "ethics" is everywhere on campus. It belongs to no particular discipline and is critical to them all. "Citizenship" is being incorporated (or reincorporated) into liberal arts curricula across the nation, and reasoning and choice, causes and effects, and morals and values (not just expertise) are once again regarded as essential to the finest undergraduate and professional educational programs. "Ethics" provides a meeting place for chemical engineers, lawyers, philosophers, sociologists, physicians and economists. It provides, in short, a language to professionals and scholars who want to do the right thing and who need tools for thinking about how to do that.    

"We're responding to problems," Rhode said, pointing to the examples of Hurricane Katrina, Terri Schiavo and leadership, "and it's making a difference."