The author replies to Sommerer.
The term "scientific ethics" is commonly used to
refer to the ethics of the practice of science, just as medical
ethics refers to ethics of the practice of medicine and legal
ethics refers to the ethics of the practice of law. Neither in
common usage nor in my article is there any implication
that scholarly work in the ethics of other professions is any
less "scientific", whatever is meant by that term. My own
thinking has been strongly influenced by the excellent
scholarship of colleagues writing on the ethics of fields outside
of science, as I have acknowledged in my article. I agree
that there might be confusion because the adjective
"scientific" is sometimes used to suggest that the scholarship is
somehow more rigorous. John Dewey, for example, favored
science education for children in hopes that they would
develop "scientific habits of the mind", which he viewed as
desirable thinking habits.
Perhaps a new term is needed to avoid the
confusion, though I hope that our colleagues outside of science do
not assume that the adjective scientific is being used to
subtly denigrate their work. "Science ethics" is nicely parallel
to business ethics and engineering ethics, so it would
serve. The more cumbersome "ethics for scientists" or "ethics
of scientific practice" are alternate possibilities, but none
of the alternatives comes off the tongue as nicely as
scientific ethics. Names are powerful. If the term scientific ethics
is troubling to ethicists outside of science, it should be
replaced. If not, I prefer to retain the more felicitous phrase.
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