This book represents my experience teaching graduate students in Biomedical Science at Hood College. Being science majors, the students have a limited background in philosophy and ethics. Most of the graduate students are employed at area research laboratories while also pursuing a Master of Science degree. Their practical day-to-day experience in scientific research is helpful in discussions of responsible conduct of research cases. Being aware of increased cases of misconduct the United States established the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Their publication, Introduction to the Responsible Conduct of Research, defines misconduct as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. Concern for the breach of public trust with repercussions in scientific funding has led to mandates for courses in ethics for students pursuing a scientific career. In addition, the Human Genome Project megaproject funded Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Research (www.genome.gov/ELSI/) recognizing that the genetic information produced by the project would come with applied ethical dilemmas. Teaching can be understood as conveying knowledge from generation to generation. Likewise systems of morality are collective acquisitions built up over millennia with social norms and values that aim to maintain social order. Research does not support the premise that knowing the rules of conduct will prevent misconduct. Indeed, compliance with rules can give a false sense of security, especially if the ethical reasoning grounding the rules is not understood. Therefore, I try to sketch a path through the potential phases and avenues of a scientific career, imagining that a person may do basic research, serve on ethics committees, and engage the public in ethical use of new advances in genetics. As a result the content of this text is divided into three parts. The first part deals with foundational material on science and ethics and cases that highlight proper scientific professional conduct. The second part deals with clinical research through which a research discovery is moved to the bedside of patients and the ethical parameters of the transition. The third part sketches the ethical dilemmas evolving from progress in genetic information to clinical applications. Helping students find a moral compass, a grounding of why one ought to behave in ethical ways in their profession and more generally in life is challenging. Doing so increases their awareness and mine of potential dilemmas and how to deal with them ethically.

From climate to vaccination, stem-cell research to evolution, scientific work is often the subject of public controversies in which scientists and science communicators find themselves enmeshed. Especially with such hot-button topics, science communication plays vital roles. Gathering together the work of a multidisciplinary, international collection of scholars, the editors of Ethics and Practice in Science Communication present an enlightening dialogue involving these communities, one that articulates the often differing objectives and ethical responsibilities communicators face in bringing a range of scientific knowledge to the wider world. In three sections—how ethics matters, professional practice, and case studies—contributors to this volume explore the many complex questions surrounding the communication of scientific results to nonscientists. Has the science been shared clearly and accurately? Have questions of risk, uncertainty, and appropriate representation been adequately addressed? And, most fundamentally, what is the purpose of communicating science to the public: Is it to inform and empower? Or to persuade—to influence behavior and policy? By inspiring scientists and science communicators alike to think more deeply about their work, this book reaffirms that the integrity of the communication of science is vital to a healthy relationship between science and society today.

Can we trust our intuitive judgments of right and wrong? Are moral judgements objective? What reason do we have to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong? In Conversations on Ethics, Alex Voorhoeve elicits answers to these questions from eleven outstanding philosophers and social scientists: Ken Binmore Philippa Foot Harry Frankfurt Allan Gibbard Daniel Kahneman Frances Kamm Alasdair MacIntyre T. M. Scanlon Peter Singer David Velleman Bernard Williams The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas about ethics. They also provide unique insights into their intellectual development - how they became interested in ethics, and how they conceived the ideas for which they became famous. Conversations on Ethics will engage anyone interested in moral philosophy.

Joining the Dialogue offers an exciting new approach for teaching academic research writing to introductory students by drawing on communication ethics. Holding to the current view that academic writing means situating ourselves in a research community and learning how to join the research conversations going on around us, Joining the Dialogue proposes that how we engage in dialogue with other researchers in our community matters. We not only read, acknowledge, and build on the research of others as we compose our work; we also engage openly, attentively, critically, and responsively to their ideas as we articulate our own. With this in mind, Joining the Dialogue is geared to helping students discover the key ethical practices of dialogue—receptivity and response-ability—as they join a research conversation. It also helps students master the dialogic structure of research essays as they write in and for their academic communities. Combining an ethical approach with accessible prose, dialogic structures and templates, practical exercises, and ample illustrations from across the disciplines, Joining the Dialogue teaches students not only how to write research essays but also how to write those essays ethically as a dialogue with other researchers and readers.

This book, written in the form of a dialogue, is an introduction to several ethical theories and to four major contemporary moral issues: euthanasia, abortion, animal rights, and capital punishment.

A Dialogue on Free Will and Science is a brief and intriguing book discussing the scientific challenges of free will. Presented through a dialogue, the format allows ideas to emerge and be clarified and then evaluated in a natural way. Engaging and accessible, it offers students a compelling look at free will and science.

Today we hear renewed calls for a dialogue between science and religion: why has the old question of the relations between science and religion now returned to the public domain and what is at stake in this debate? To answer these questions, historian and sociologist of science Yves Gingras retraces the long history of the troubled relationship between science and religion, from the condemnation of Galileo for heresy in 1633 until his rehabilitation by John Paul II in 1992. He reconstructs the process of the gradual separation of science from theology and religion, showing how God and natural theology became marginalized in the scientific field in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the dominant trend among historians of science, Gingras argues that science and religion are social institutions that give rise to incompatible ways of knowing, rooted in different methodologies and forms of knowledge, and that there never was, and cannot be, a genuine dialogue between them. Wide-ranging and authoritative, this new book on one of the fundamental questions of Western thought will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history of science and of religion as well as to general readers who are intrigued by the new and much-publicized conversations about the alleged links between science and religion.