imbursement without a receipt. Should you increase some other category by an equivalent amount? Should you claim full per diem when your actual daily expenses were substantially less?
• You are writing the budget for a proposal. Knowing that the funding agency routinely cuts budgets by 10-30%, should you pad the proposal budget by 20%?
• A funding agency has announced that it seeks proposals on some subject. You are doing work on a quite similar subject. Should you submit a proposal, recasting your work in terms of the desired research? If funded, is it OK to continue in the original research area rather than focusing entirely on the area desired by the funding agency?
• In submitting a proposal, you know that including one subproject will substantially increase the chances of proposal funding but that the subproject is not really viable. Should you include it anyway? Should you say that you will accomplish more than you realistically expect to achieve?
Applied vs. basic research:
• Is it selfish or even ethical to carry out a government-funded basic research career, if you think that your research has absolutely no practical value?
• If your research has potential practical applications that you approve of, should you suggest that your employer get a patent or should you start an independent company that gets a patent?
• If your research has potential practical applications that you disapprove of, should you reveal them?
Every ethical decision must be weighed personally and subjectively. Before making a final decision on any ethical issue, it is worthwhile to consider the issue from the standpoint of Kohlberg’s [1981, 1984] criterion for mature moral judgment: does the judgment hold regardless of which position one occupies in the conflict? It may be worth reviewing your decisions on the ethical questions above, this time pretending that you were a person affected by the decision rather than the one making the decision. Kohlberg’s criterion sounds almost like a generalization of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The habit of applying Kohlberg’s criterion is analogous to the habit (or skill) of objectively evaluating the effect of data on various hypotheses, without regard for which hypothesis one favors [Kuhn et al., 1988].
Verbal, if not always behavioral, unanimity prevails on three ethical issues: fraud, intellectual honesty and theft of ideas.
Fraud and falsification of data are so inimical to scientific method that almost never do scientists succumb to their lure of quick rewards. Even a single case of scientific fraud, when publicized, does unimaginable damage to the credibility of scientists in general, for the public cannot confirm our findings; they must trust them. Fraud also slows the advance of a scientific field, for experiments seldom are exactly replicated, and fraud is not suspected until all alternative explanations have been eliminated.
“The scientific mind is usually helpless against a trained trickster. Because a man has mastered the intricacies of chemistry or physics is no qualification for him to deduce how the Chinese linking rings, for instance, seem to melt into each other, passing metal through solid metal. Only a knowledge of the rings themselves can reveal the
secret. The scientific mind is trained to search for truth which is hidden in the mys -
