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Creativity: Ethics and Excellence in Science
Creativity explores the moral dimensions of creativity in science in a systematic and comprehensive way. A work of applied philosophy, professional ethics, and philosophy of science, the book argues that scientific creativity often constitutes moral creativity―the production of new and morally variable outcomes. At the same time, creative ambitions have a dark side that can lead to professional misconduct and harmful effects on society and the environment.
In this work, creativity is generally defined as the development of new and valuable outcomes such as significant truths, illuminating explanations, or useful technological products. Virtue and accompanying ideals are emphasized as a moral framework. Intellectual virtues, such as love of truth, intellectual honesty, and intellectual courage, are themselves moral virtues. Further moral topics concerning scientific creativity are serendipity and its connection with moral luck, the paradoxes of moral motivation, scientific misconduct arising from unbalanced creative ambitions, forbidden knowledge, creative teaching and leadership in science, and the role of scientific creativity in good lives.
In this work, creativity is generally defined as the development of new and valuable outcomes such as significant truths, illuminating explanations, or useful technological products. Virtue and accompanying ideals are emphasized as a moral framework. Intellectual virtues, such as love of truth, intellectual honesty, and intellectual courage, are themselves moral virtues. Further moral topics concerning scientific creativity are serendipity and its connection with moral luck, the paradoxes of moral motivation, scientific misconduct arising from unbalanced creative ambitions, forbidden knowledge, creative teaching and leadership in science, and the role of scientific creativity in good lives.
162 pages, Hardcover
First published February 28, 2007
2 people want to read
About the author
Mike Martin
117 books22 followersMike Martin is a freelance writer and workplace wellness consultant. He has written and published thousands of articles about workplace issues for magazines and publications in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. He has worked in human resources for over thirty years and has experience both as a senior manager and a union representative. For the past fifteen years he has worked with dozens of small, medium and large organizations in the areas of workplace intervention and conflict management.
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March 1, 2022
A collection of essays looking at different topics concerning moral creativity (the production of new and morally valuable products) in the sciences.
This was a textbook for a course I took in college. I had taken a semester off and returned with renewed enthusiasm, enrolling in this course on Professional Ethics with a couple friends.
The thing I remember this book most for is the idea of compartmentalization, a tunnel-vision way of missing the bigger picture due to "focusing one's efforts in one area while ignoring distracting factors." I kept telling myself that I needed to re-read this book to bookmark this specific quote, which had an impact on me at the time:
(I don't know why I didn't just look it up in the index. I need to get in the habit of using those more. Although I'm very happy to have gone through the entire book again. Anyways, that page is double dog-eared in my copy now.)
It impacted me at the time because atomic history has some significant milestones here in New Mexico. The Trinity site, for example, was not far from the school I was going to, and I visited there with friends from that school. This quote's impact on me now is still there but a little different since I've been working; it's more about how difficult it can be not to compartmentalize. I can imagine massive projects with multiple companies/agencies working on it, across multiple classification levels intentionally designed with national security in mind so that few people see the full picture, so that the individual employee is working on and only knows a piece of a piece. How does he take a step back and look at what he's doing? (Arguably, this person could be troubling himself with matters better suited for those few who know more about the project.)
The essays could probably be read separately, although it might help to go through the first few first to get definitions down. The later essays/chapters cover diverse topics ranging from the role of luck in science to what moral creativity looks like in leadership and teaching.
The author strikes me as having a holistic philosophy, in which opposite ideas need to also be considered as interwoven. This reconciliation shows up in suggestions about how science teaching might be improved by not just going over equations and theories but also about the people who discovered them and their history; how "left-brain" critical and "right brain" creative thinking are two complementary sides of the same coin; and how it is important to innovate and create new ideas while also noting "perhaps it is more important to appreciate and conserve what is valuable."
The author is pretty good at presenting alternative views and then moderating between them. One example is with the creativity paradox, how non-moral scientific creativity can sometimes have moral ends. In defining the paradox, the author cites an H. G. Wells character who says:
But then the author recalls a counterexample with Gertrude Elion, whose desire for service did make a discovery, by developing drugs that help children with leukemia.
Overall the author's views continue this theme of moderation, although sometimes this means a statement that seems extreme is followed by one that is more tempered. The chapter about Forbidden Knowledge explores questions like Can science undermine our values and should we censor it because of that? Ultimately the perspective conveyed is something like "We shouldn't censor science because we don't know the full outcomes or implications of what we haven't yet studied." In discussing this the author says: "The goal should be to seek truth using the best scientific methods, and then adjust our moral, political, and religious views accordingly." If this were the case, to me it doesn't seem like issues like compartmentalization would be problems. However, the author follows up later with the more temperate: "[The] scientific ethos has served us well, both through technology and in understanding the world. It needs to be balanced with other vital ideals, including justice and compassion."
Some other observations from this reading:
Additional duties for scientists. On top of scientific inquiry and discovery, the author lists some other things scientists ought to consider their responsibilities. One is to "lean over backwards to identify alternative explanations for the results and also provide all information that can aid other researchers." (How could my conclusions be mistaken? What other information might be pertinent?) Another is how scientists can help out "democratic control over science," in which "informed participants educate each other and respond respectfully to competing preferences, reaching 'tutored preferences' and rational compromises." Scientists can aid this process by "[educating] other citizens about the promise and perils of their research."
Arbitrariness of human judgment in the sciences. Elsewhere the author dispels the idea that science is completely objective, because scientists are human and have their own agendas and motivations. Here, the author drives home the role of chance in conducting the right experiment, conducting the experiment right, getting the right results, interpreting results correctly, how the science is received by the scientific community and the public at large. And that's when things all go right. Chance also plays a role when recovering from when things go wrong: The results may not have been what you were looking for, but do they still communicate something meaningful though unexpected?
While not something I remember the book for, I think sections like this must have been more influential than I thought because it's something I mulled over a lot around that time. (Slight tangent: It reminds me of a scene from Tolstoy's Resurrection, the trial where a jury wrongfully convicts a person of murder. The judge catches the mistake and asks court officials what they think. Both go along with it: One official is worried about public perception, another hands it over to chance. The judge accepts the verdict because he's in a hurry, and the result is that a person "in the wrong place at the wrong time" is sentenced to Siberia. I figure mistakes like this happen everywhere, even in science.)
Engineering as a model for moral creativity. As something of an engineer myself, I appreciated this description of how coming up with solutions to problems in a scientific domain need not be so different from other domains:
Also liked the idea of different people putting their heads together and coming up with a solution that worked for the whole group.
This was a textbook for a course I took in college. I had taken a semester off and returned with renewed enthusiasm, enrolling in this course on Professional Ethics with a couple friends.
The thing I remember this book most for is the idea of compartmentalization, a tunnel-vision way of missing the bigger picture due to "focusing one's efforts in one area while ignoring distracting factors." I kept telling myself that I needed to re-read this book to bookmark this specific quote, which had an impact on me at the time:
Richard P. Feynman cautions against compartmentalization in his reflections on the Manhattan Project. His original motivation and justification for participating in building the first atomic bomb was to defeat Hitler, as well as to prevent the Nazis from making an atom bomb first. For several years he was immersed in the technical aspects of the work. He expresses regret, however, that when Nazi Germany surrendered he was so absorbed in his work that he did not pause to reassess his participation. The experience taught him that "if you have some reason for doing something that's very strong and you start working at it, you must look around every once in a while and find out if the original motives are still right."
(I don't know why I didn't just look it up in the index. I need to get in the habit of using those more. Although I'm very happy to have gone through the entire book again. Anyways, that page is double dog-eared in my copy now.)
It impacted me at the time because atomic history has some significant milestones here in New Mexico. The Trinity site, for example, was not far from the school I was going to, and I visited there with friends from that school. This quote's impact on me now is still there but a little different since I've been working; it's more about how difficult it can be not to compartmentalize. I can imagine massive projects with multiple companies/agencies working on it, across multiple classification levels intentionally designed with national security in mind so that few people see the full picture, so that the individual employee is working on and only knows a piece of a piece. How does he take a step back and look at what he's doing? (Arguably, this person could be troubling himself with matters better suited for those few who know more about the project.)
The essays could probably be read separately, although it might help to go through the first few first to get definitions down. The later essays/chapters cover diverse topics ranging from the role of luck in science to what moral creativity looks like in leadership and teaching.
The author strikes me as having a holistic philosophy, in which opposite ideas need to also be considered as interwoven. This reconciliation shows up in suggestions about how science teaching might be improved by not just going over equations and theories but also about the people who discovered them and their history; how "left-brain" critical and "right brain" creative thinking are two complementary sides of the same coin; and how it is important to innovate and create new ideas while also noting "perhaps it is more important to appreciate and conserve what is valuable."
The author is pretty good at presenting alternative views and then moderating between them. One example is with the creativity paradox, how non-moral scientific creativity can sometimes have moral ends. In defining the paradox, the author cites an H. G. Wells character who says:
The motive that will conquer cancer will not be pity nor horror; it will be curiosity to know how and why.... Desire for service never made a discovery.
But then the author recalls a counterexample with Gertrude Elion, whose desire for service did make a discovery, by developing drugs that help children with leukemia.
Overall the author's views continue this theme of moderation, although sometimes this means a statement that seems extreme is followed by one that is more tempered. The chapter about Forbidden Knowledge explores questions like Can science undermine our values and should we censor it because of that? Ultimately the perspective conveyed is something like "We shouldn't censor science because we don't know the full outcomes or implications of what we haven't yet studied." In discussing this the author says: "The goal should be to seek truth using the best scientific methods, and then adjust our moral, political, and religious views accordingly." If this were the case, to me it doesn't seem like issues like compartmentalization would be problems. However, the author follows up later with the more temperate: "[The] scientific ethos has served us well, both through technology and in understanding the world. It needs to be balanced with other vital ideals, including justice and compassion."
Some other observations from this reading:
Additional duties for scientists. On top of scientific inquiry and discovery, the author lists some other things scientists ought to consider their responsibilities. One is to "lean over backwards to identify alternative explanations for the results and also provide all information that can aid other researchers." (How could my conclusions be mistaken? What other information might be pertinent?) Another is how scientists can help out "democratic control over science," in which "informed participants educate each other and respond respectfully to competing preferences, reaching 'tutored preferences' and rational compromises." Scientists can aid this process by "[educating] other citizens about the promise and perils of their research."
Arbitrariness of human judgment in the sciences. Elsewhere the author dispels the idea that science is completely objective, because scientists are human and have their own agendas and motivations. Here, the author drives home the role of chance in conducting the right experiment, conducting the experiment right, getting the right results, interpreting results correctly, how the science is received by the scientific community and the public at large. And that's when things all go right. Chance also plays a role when recovering from when things go wrong: The results may not have been what you were looking for, but do they still communicate something meaningful though unexpected?
We hold people responsible for their misconduct but also for the actual harm their misconduct causes. More fully, we blame individuals for actual outcomes, which result from a nexus of choice and chance, but because of their conduct which is under their control.
While not something I remember the book for, I think sections like this must have been more influential than I thought because it's something I mulled over a lot around that time. (Slight tangent: It reminds me of a scene from Tolstoy's Resurrection, the trial where a jury wrongfully convicts a person of murder. The judge catches the mistake and asks court officials what they think. Both go along with it: One official is worried about public perception, another hands it over to chance. The judge accepts the verdict because he's in a hurry, and the result is that a person "in the wrong place at the wrong time" is sentenced to Siberia. I figure mistakes like this happen everywhere, even in science.)
Engineering as a model for moral creativity. As something of an engineer myself, I appreciated this description of how coming up with solutions to problems in a scientific domain need not be so different from other domains:
Creativity in engineering provides an even better metaphor and model for moral creativity. As Caroline Whitbeck points out, engineers begin with goals that might be more or less indeterminate. Sometimes their most important task is to define or redefine the problem they face. They must accept and integrate multiple design constraints, including available materials, cost and profit, usefulness to clients, and legal and moral constraints. They take into account general scientific knowledge and previous solutions to similar problems (benchmarking). Sometimes there is one right course of action, and moral creativity consists in discerning it. Other times there are several acceptable results. Because engineers work in groups, they must routinely take into account others' viewpoints and remain open to reasonable compromises with colleagues, employers, and clients. All these features of the engineering model apply to the Warnock committee ["charged with advising British ministers on possible legislation concerning cloning intended for therapeutic purposes, as distinct from reproductive purposes"]. The committee was faced with the task of integrating multiple moral ideals, ranging from respect for individuals' rights to protection of public health, and they proceeded by reaching reasonable compromises and consensus based on input from many participants.
Also liked the idea of different people putting their heads together and coming up with a solution that worked for the whole group.
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