Risk, prudence and moral formation in the laboratory

Abstract

Sociologists of science have noted that the institutional cultures and practices of research tend to de-emphasize the risks produced in the lab, resulting in injuries and deaths in recent lab accidents and increased dangers for surrounding communities. In response to these accidents, science ethics and policy increasingly focus on risk management. One strategy to confront these problems is to implement more procedural safeguards, but ethnographies of science suggest that procedural forms can have the unintended effect of contributing to complacency. What is also needed is a focus on the character of the individual researcher who acts under conditions of risk, such as that provided in virtue ethics. This article shows how prudence can help to meet the problem of risk and how contemporary ideas of risk can reshape understandings of prudence. By so doing, it also suggests ways to encourage sensitivity to risk in the moral education of contemporary scientists.

Keywords:

• Bioethics
• prudence
• risk
• virtue ethics
• research ethics

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the organizers of the 2016 ‘Virtue in Science’ Colloquium at the University of Notre Dame for inspiring this piece and organizing this special issue, especially Thomas Stapleford, Celia Deane-Drummond, and Timothy Reilly. The participants at the colloquium gave very helpful feedback on the article, as did China Scherz and Mariele Courtois. Beth Lofgren provided valuable assistance in my research on risk in moral theology. The Institute for Human Ecology at CUA and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA have also supported this research.

Notes

1. The problem of risk could also be examined in relation to the virtues of courage or hope, as it deals with difficulties in attaining a good, but this analysis focuses more on cognitive considerations than affective responses, which makes prudence a more helpful virtue to study. Ultimately of course, all the virtues are interconnected for Aquinas, so a full account would examine every virtue in relation to risk, which is beyond the scope of this article.

2. While virtue ethics has not dealt with risk particularly well, neither have the two most prominent alternative ethical theories. Deontology largely ignores it, while consequentialism, which one might think would handle risk well, has difficulties with the uncertainties and discount rate of future risks, tending to underestimate long-term risks and overstate the benefits of action. The problems of determining discount rates appear in historical accounts of consequentialist analyses of genetic engineering (Evans, 2002, p. 20) and economic analyses of climate change (Oreskes & Conway, 2010, pp. 174–183).

3. Similarly, people are more likely to drive dangerously on a road that looks safe because such roads provide a sense of security and thus dull alertness to risk. ‘When roads look dangerous, people slow down and become more heedful’ (Crawford, 2015, p. 81). This has led some road planners to make roads seem more dangerous.

4. Phase II trials look for efficacy, proper dose and rare side effects. Phase III trials expand these studies to a larger population of patients. If these studies are successful, then the FDA approves the drug. Companies are supposed to monitor adverse events post-approval, which is termed Phase IV, but such monitoring frequently does not occur.

5. This approach overlaps with the encouragement of a safety culture, but the turn to safety culture frequently involves merely new bureaucratic procedures like a safety audit or the appointment of a safety officer in the lab. The turn to safety culture has also failed to adequately engage anthropological understandings of culture or philosophical understandings of moral formation in community (Sims, 2005, p. 335). Addressing risks requires that the turn to safety arise more organically in the scientific community and focus on the formation of trainees.