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Posted 11/13/97
In today's complex world, the climate surrounding research can change daily amid new technologies and discoveries with their varied social implications. In this environment, what is right and wrong can be confusing.
Students, employees, and researchers have to turn to experienced professionals in their fields for examples and creative solutions to difficult ethical situations, say Case Western Reserve University's Caroline Whitbeck. For those in science and engineering, she has made it easier to find those answers.
Whitbeck is the inaugural holder of the Elmer G. Beamer - Hubert H. Schneider Professor of Ethics in the College of Arts and Sciences.
When she joined CWRU from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Whitbeck brought with her the World Wide Web Ethics Center for Engineering and Science (http://www.cwru.edu/affil/wwwethics/index.html).
The WWW Ethics Center is a virtual classroom, resource center, and library of ethical codes of 13 professional engineering and science societies, with Web links to standards for professionals in math and health care.
Three-year funding from the National Science Foundation helped establish the WWW Ethics Center in 1995 at MIT. Use of the site has grown from 50 users a day in June 1996 to more than 300 daily users in June 1997.
With its new home at CWRU, Whitbeck said the Web resource has the potential to have "virtual wings" for other professions in law, the social sciences, and humanities at CWRU. She added that the U.S. medical profession already has well-established ethics sites on the Web.
Whitbeck said she was excited to come to CWRU because ethics is already a part of the campus conversation, with work done through the Center for Biomedical Ethics, the Summer Institute, and the Center for Professional Ethics.
She sees potential to expand ethics education through new teaching initiatives from the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE).
"They are thinking very creatively about the new education environment afforded by technology," noted Whitbeck.
She sees a way of incorporating an ethics component through the ethics center on the Web with links to these other courses. She could design ethical scenarios tailored for individual classes, which also can use the established glossary of terms and other information posted on this site.
"We want students in general to have the experience of designing answers to challenging moral problems," said Whitbeck.
Whitbeck received her B.A. in mathematics from Wellesley College in 1962, an M.A. in philosophy from Boston University, and her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1970 from MIT.
She started out in the philosophy of physics and became interested in the new areas of philosophy of medicine and medical ethics while teaching in Yale's philosophy department. She went on to do research in Yale's psychiatry department.
"Philosophical ethics was largely abstract ... when I was in graduate school," Whitbeck said. The ethical exercises conducted were "mostly armchair reflections -- very general topics, such as justice," she added. "Even when their reflections were interesting, they were not sensitive to their own social and cultural position and tended to generalize from their own limited experience to all of humanity, which was at least short-sighted and at worst arrogant."
In 1978, she joined the faculty of the National Project on Philosophical Ethics and Engineering at the Center for the Human Dimensions of Science and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Participants in the project were engineer-philosopher pairs who developed new projects to further the attention to ethics in the engineering profession.
Over three summers, the pairs worked on national projects such as designing new college courses, writing textbooks, and other special projects carried out in universities, industries, or through local engineering societies.
She has since worked with professional societies, the National Research Council, and the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation to develop education in research ethics.
The 1525 Foundation endowed the Beamer-Schneider Chair in Ethics last year with a $2 million gift to infuse practical ethics across the disciplines and divisions at the University. The foundation also funded two Summer Institutes on Ethics in 1996 and 1997 to expose undergraduate faculty members to the philosophy of ethics and begin conversations about ways to incorporate ethics in the classroom.
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