Let's say that, in a particular year, the climatic conditions in the U.S. produce significant droughts for certain regions in the Midwest. In this scenario, these severe droughts happen in regions that typically expect a significant amount of rainfall every year to support the extensive growth of corn. This lack of rainfall causes a near-complete failure of the corn crops in the region, which grows the most corn per unit area in the world. This failure of crops leads to increased prices in corn products and other foods that use corn as feed (chicken, beef, even fish). But this drought also leads to a sudden jump in price because corn is used as the main feedstock for brewing most of the ethanol that goes into our gas tanks ("up to 10% ethanol per gallon"). Now, let's think about how this impacts prices at the pump and at the grocery store. Prices per gallon or per pound go up for everyone that buys these products. However, if we consider the increase in cost to the consumer is, say, an increase of $1.00 per gallon or pound, that $1.00 per gallon or pound is four times the percentage of someone's income that makes $30,000 per year than it is for someone that makes $120,000 per year. Also, as a result of the drought, the price of the white corn that is used to make tortillas, a main food staple in Mexico, goes up. The white corn crop might not even be impacted by the drought, but because the price of white corn is tied to the price of yellow corn, used to feed livestock and brew biofuels, the price of this common food staple also goes up.
Having considered this scenario, what do you think about it? Is there something here we can describe as a better or worse decision about using corn for ethanol? Is there something good or bad about food prices competing directly with fuel prices? These questions do not have simple answers.
Engaging complex systems, whether they are tied to energy or environment, requires significant investigation and research support. This applies to engagement through politics and economics as well as it does with science and engineering.
The development of sustainability strategies and the technological and scientific research in the support and pursuit of renewable energy require rational and well thought through processes of evaluation. These well thought through processes of evaluation form a basis of research practice that is common to both engineering and science. Complex systems also often require multidisciplinary approaches to addressing a variety of questions and concerns, usually towards a framework of problem-solving. While one might not be engaged specifically in the scientific aspects of a complex system, the need for research and further discovery is needed in engineering, economics, policymaking, intellectual property, ecology, etc. For the purposes of this module series, we consider anyone conducting research into some aspect of complex systems to be engaged in "systems research." Further, whether one is conducting basic research on materials or looking at the global economic implications of sea level rise, one needs to be aware of the ethical dimensions of the systems they are researching. The modules of this series investigate various ethical issues that arise in the research of energy and environment systems.
Complex systems do not always imply environment or human systems, which implicitly require an ethical analysis and treatment. However, all of the modules in this series do involve some aspect of environmental systems and some aspect of energy systems. And energy systems, by their very definition, involve human systems.
All aspects of scientific research relate, in some manner, to social processes and are subject to the constraints of law and civil behavior that we expect from any public or private undertaking. Scientific research comprises more than just studies within a lab, as it can also describe advances in engineering, technical and computational developments, applying science to meet public needs, using technical information to guide policy, and other similar areas where a scientific approach is being used to address needs for new knowledge and insight into problems and curiosities.
The production of scientific research is tied to politics, social needs, public funding, venture capital, human health, environmental security, and economic development, as well as many other concerns of human society. As such, scientific research itself is subject to many forces and constraints working it, constraints which shape research questions, methods, and outcomes. Understanding and determining appropriate responses to many of these constraints requires a broad understanding of research ethics.
All scientific research is subject to social forces, therefore all research necessitates the consideration of ethics.
Research ethics, thus: are a matter of responsible professional conduct fitting to the norms of a research community (procedural ethics); require a consideration of the broader social, political, and economic impacts (extrinsic ethics); and, point to where (social, personal, institutional) values and preferences become embedded in the analytical inputs and outputs of research itself (intrinsic ethics). A comprehensive consideration of research ethics requires a critical analysis of the procedural, extrinsic, and intrinsic aspects of the research or outputs under consideration. Goals for learning ethics include the identification and application of ethical tools for prescribing optimal solutions, the development of moral literacy, awareness of stakeholders, and the minimization of risk.
Understanding how to make good choices as practitioners and leaders in the fields of renewables and sustainability will require both scientific knowledge and an awareness of the various positions along with projected trade-offs. These types of analyses require the consideration of more than technological optimization or basic costs and benefits; as numerous cases demonstrate, they often require the deeper consideration of ethical issues and embedded values. Not understanding these ethical issues and embedded values in the production of research and professional application of training can lead to outcomes that are unjust, increase risk, change economic relationships.
Not paying attention to ethical norms and proper research conduct can impact careers.
Careers can be directly impacted by ethical violations. Tenured jobs are lost over research ethics violations; foreign nationals can be deported over non-compliance when researching on government funds; entire labs have been closed due to ethics violations.
Ethics can be tricky, particularly when a practitioner researcher may be representing both personal interests and organizational interests in the same role (such as a reviewer of grant applications). It is not always obvious what is right and wrong behavior in certain situations, such as in considering conflicts of interest, or whether one can remove bias in reviewing the work of a friend or the work of someone from an opposing viewpoint. The key is to learn about ethics and where to go to learn more–find someone you can talk with about the issues at hand.
The Ethical Dimensions of Scientific/Systems Research (EDSR) approach describes how to recognize and evaluate ethical issues in research procedure and conduct, in the consideration of broader public and environmental impacts, and as values become embedded in research and analysis itself. Because common topics, types, and methods for ethical recognition and analysis are common across many cases of scientific research and technical application, it is efficient and helpful to develop a set of tools for critical reflection on various issues of ethical importance.
As developed in the EDSR approach, three main categorical distinctions for research ethics used here are 1) broader social and political impacts of research (extrinsic ethics), 2) research practice and conduct (procedural ethics), and 3) embedded values within research (intrinsic ethics). By showing where and how to look for these types of ethical issues, the EDSR approach helps practitioners to anticipate where ethical issues may arise in a given research or application context.
Type of Ethics in Research | Description |
---|---|
Ethics Extrinsic to Research - Social/Political | NSF broader impacts criteria, social justice issues, S&T policy, policy implications, improving representation and distribution |
Ethical Research Procedure - RCR/Professional | Responsible conduct of research, professional codes, conflicts of interest, treatment of human & animal subjects, informed consent |
Ethics Intrinsic to Research - Analytical/Technical | Embedded values, parameterizations, theory selection, error analysis, global assumptions, outliers, data cleaning |
Research ethics is not a matter of memorization of rules about proper behavior. Rather, it is important to approach learning research ethics as the skill of being able to derive the ethics of a given situation, by asking similar key questions across multiple situations. While ethical contexts and possibilities are vast for a field like sustainability or renewable energy, we can still maintain a reasonable handle on things by addressing some core principles.
Links
[1] https://www.usda.gov/
[2] https://www.pexels.com/photo/laboratory-test-tubes-2280549/
[3] https://www.pexels.com/@chokniti-khongchum-1197604
[4] https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/
[5] https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=research+ethics+violations&oq=research+ethics+violations
[6] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/