Examining Physicists' Ethical Reasoning: A New Methodology

Abstract

Researchers across all scientific disciplines routinely face ethical decisions in their work, from addressing conflicts of interest to deciding whether and how to make data available for reproducibility. To help strengthen their ethical reasoning skills, they are encouraged to take online training programs like the CITI program. Ethics training is insufficient for improving ethical behavior. Better understanding of how scientists make decisions and reason about ethics is needed. To develop that understanding, we need expanded, asset-based measures of ethical reasoning that can be applied to open-ended responses and discussions. As part of a year-long intervention on a group of fifteen scientists’ value-based reasoning, we conducted pre/post interviews that included open-ended questions about ethical scenarios. For this paper, we explore an application of three theories of ethical and stakeholder reasoning to those answers, and determine that we can use them to examine quality, principles, and subjects of their reasoning in open responses.