Finally, ethics education can enable scientists to place their positions into a logical framework from
which they can look for consistent approaches to related problems. In this sense it was the perspective
of the Dartmouth team that the involvement of philosophers in both course design and teaching of
research ethics is central to development of a course in this discipline. In contrast to the dismissive
approach taken by some scientists, we believe that philosophers are essential in assisting scientists to
define a realistic, rational ethical framework from which to view ethical problems. Just as a scientist
would not try to develop a project in a related but different scientific field without collaboration with an
expert in that scientific field, so developing a course is ethics without the benefit of ethicists is a naive
endeavor.
Moral problems are not isolated from one another, and solutions to ethical problems in science cannot
run counter to solutions to ethical problems outside of science. It cannot be moral for a scientist to
deceive or to break a promise without justification any more than it is moral for a physician, an auto
mechanic, or a secretary to do so. Because morality is a public system, our solutions to one problem
have implications for others. Morality is a public system in that it is, at its fundamental level, a series of
generally understood but rarely spoken rules about how we act in relation to one another. When
Professor R in scenario 2 decided to give first authorship to his student, this decision had implications
for all first authors. First authorship cannot mean both that an individual has had primary responsibility
for conceiving of, developing, and performing a set of experiments and that this individual has not had
this responsibility. Exceptions to the rule must themselves be publicly explicit to be moral.