Ethics : responsible scientific conduct 1 ’ 2

Nutrition researchers and practitioners may wonder what ethics has to do with their professional activities and investigations. Given widely held impressions about ethics, such questioning, not to speak of outright skepticism, is understandable. Ethics committees in the US Congress virtually identify ethics with the policing and censorship ofcongressional representatives for breaking house rules. Many social scientists equate ethics with social customs and personal emotion and assume that ethical norms are either relative to specific societies or based on personal feelings. Most ethicists find elements of truth in the above assumptions but view them as fundamentally flawed (1, 2). First, ethics should not be equated with all judgments concerning what is right or wrong. For example, with respect to decisions over the rightness or wrongness ofkeeping or breaking certain rules of a group, it would indeed be ethically wrong to break rules that pertain to moral values like honesty and promise keeping. Insofar as the rules of a group involve many types of nonmoral values-including aesthetic, economic, practical, social, and professional values-judgments as to what may be right or wrong are often unrelated to ethics. The statements, “Now that is a good centrifuge,” “That was a bad movie,” and “For a new member ofCongress, that was bad protocol,” respectfully involve practical, aesthetic, and professional-group value judgments, not ethical judgments. Second, claims respecting social or psychological relativism usually assume, because there are so many divergent opinions over the rightness or wrongness ofsocial issues such as euthanasia, capital punishment, abortion, and infanticide, that ethics must be relative. Ethicists fully recognize the fact of such diversity and recognize, in addition, that ethical judgments vary in relation to different social and historical situations and that ethical principles do not constitute nonbreakable absolutes (1, 2). The view that different people and societies hold different and conflicting basic ethical principles does not constitute convincing grounds for ethical relativism. Rather, ethicists generally hold that over time and across cultures, agreement exists as to actions that are fundamentally destructive to human relationships on the one hand and fundamentally constructive to them on the other (1-3). The purpose ofthis essay is to identify ethical issues and questions relevant to scientific conduct. We consider the topic in four sections: what ethics is and is not, ethical treatment of human subjects and nonhuman subjects, ethical interactions with colleagues and trainees, and ethical behavior toward the public, media, and funding sources. Landmark references to ethical writings and codes ofethics are noted. Underlying all the sections are the ethical principles of respect for people, beneficence (ie, kindness or charity) toward others, and justice. It is our hope that this paper will serve as a springboard for discussion among nutrition scientists and clinicians. Rather than giving answers, we are seeking to highlight issues that merit thoughtful consideration and debate.