Ethical issues in graduate research  (Page 8/9)

Exercise 2: enron--a puzzle or mystery?

• Reread the summary of Malcolm Gladwell's distinction between a mystery and a puzzle.
• Was Enron a puzzle? Explain your answer. Was Enron a mystery? Explain why or why not.
• If Enron is a puzzle, then who do we blame? What do we blame them for? (How does moral responsibility function under a puzzle versus a mystery?)
• Pretend you are Jeffry Skilling, and you are testifying before the U.S. Congress on your role in the Enron disaster. How would you try to present Enron? As a puzzle or mystery? In other words, which framing of the case does the most to mitigate your blame?
• Now, think about this further question. Enron financial tools such as energy futures, mark-to-market accounting, and Special Purpose Entities function differently in the context of a puzzle than in the context of a mystery. Were these tools (say mark-to-market accounting) used to cover up crucial information and prevent experts and the public from solving the Enron puzzle?
• Or were these tools elements in a mystery where, properly interpreted by financial experts, could lead to the telling of the story of Enron's collapse.
• To re-frame the question slightly, are financial tools like mark-to-market accounting, energy futures, and SPEs value-neutral in that they become good or bad only the context of the use to which we put them? Or are these tools, themselves, value-laden so that they channel us in certain directions to realize some values and not realize others?
• Try thinking of financial tools as technologies. (John Dewey starts this process by thinking of operations of logic as tools for conducting inquiry. See Hickman's book cited below.)

Exercise 3: baltimore case role-play

• Rashamon is a Japanese movie about a killing and a sexual encounter. These events are inserted into three different narratives by the three different participants. The killing may be a murder or a suicide, depending on the story-teller. The sexual encounter may be a tryst or a rape, depending, again, on the narrative point of view.
• In this assignment, the class will recreate the Baltimore case from the standpoint of the different perspectives of the case's participants. Margaret O'Toole is the heroine-whistle-blower, false accuser, incompetent researcher, or trouble maker depending on who is telling the story. David Baltimore is a Nobel Prize winning biologist who is either exemplary of scientific virtue or an arrogant insider. John Dingell is a Congressional representative holding hearings into scientific integrity; he is either a McCarthy-type figure engaged in a witch hunt or a genuine crusader placing the public spotlight on an internally corrupt scientific community. Theresa Imanishi-Kari is either a ruthless investigator playing the publish or perish game or the innocent victim of the accusations of a disgruntled former subordinate.
• Your job is to argue sympathetically from within each of these participant perspective. Then as a class, we will see if we can construct an overarching narrative or story that reconciles these conflicting perspectives.