13 Professional Ethics

Dianne Prost O'Leary
©1996,1999,2009,2016
Last modified October 12, 2016.

In this section we consider some of the ``rules of the game." Some of these are obvious to most of us, but some might be surprising due to cultural differences or lack of consideration. Further resources can be found in Section 15.12.

The purpose of ethical standards is to provide an implicit foundation upon which human interactions can proceed smoothly. They answer questions such as

• ``How much credit do I need to give previous authors whose words or ideas I have used?"
• ``How much help can I get on a homework assignment without cheating?"
• ``Can I use the computers at school or work to earn extra money?"
• ``Should I ask my student for a date?"
• ``Should I warn a hospital that my company has delivered a shoddy piece of software to them?"

The next five subsections address each of these questions, and related issues, in turn.

13.1 Intellectual Property

In some cultures it has been acceptable to take another person's work and present it as your own. For instance, many Baroque music masterpieces are built upon musical themes ``borrowed" without explicitly giving credit.

In current Western culture, this is unacceptable, whether it involves music, ideas, or words, and we define the taking of someone's words or ideas as plagiarism. (It was particularly disheartening to discover that someone had plagiarized this discussion of ethics!) Since ideas and words represent creative effort and have intellectual value, there is a well-defined system of property rights. Stealing words or ideas is theft, just as surely as stealing automobiles, and sanctions can be quite serious.

• Thus, if you take a paragraph from someone else's written work and include it in your own work, you must enclose it in quotation marks and give a citation. Even if you change some of the words but leave the writing essentially unchanged, you must put the unchanged pieces in quotation marks and list your source.
• If a substantial part of your paper (say, a page or more) consists of a summary of someone else's work using a condensation of their words, or following the same outline as their work, then you must say so: ``This section is taken directly from [...]," or ``This summary closely follows [...]," etc.
• You cannot publish a work that is substantially taken from another; you must have ``added some value" by new ideas or new derivations or new implementations and you must clearly distinguish between your work and that of others.

The consequences of plagiarism might include an F in a course, expulsion from a graduate program, or banning from having any of your works published in a journal.

Patent rights must also be respected. If a device or idea is patented, it should not be used in your work unless you obtain the necessary permission.

People with a reputation for not giving due credit to other researchers generally find it hard to find collaborators and people who will write letters of recommendation for them.

13.2 Academic Integrity

The university system of education is built upon a high level of trust that students and faculty will be honest in their dealings with each other. It breaks down quickly if this honesty is lacking.

Here are some actions that violate the trust, along with the definitions given in the University of Maryland Code of Academic Integrity. Some of the examples are taken from an old University of Maryland Student Guide to Academic Integrity.

• cheating: ``fraud, deceit, or dishonesty in any academic course or exercise in an attempt to gain an unfair adgantage and/or intentionally using or attempting to use unauthorized materials, information, or study aids in any academic exercise." It is cheating to use a solution set obtained by breaking into a professor's computer files, to use an unauthorized ``crib sheet" on an exam, to have a friend do your homework, to look at another student's paper during an exam, etc.
• fabrication: ``intentional and unauthorized falsification or invention of any information or citation in an academic exercise." You fabricate if you enter false data in a log book, add unused references to a bibliography, change your answers before submitting a paper for regrade, etc.
• plagiarism: ``intentionally or knowingly representing the words or ideas of another as one's own in any academic exercise." Examples of plagiarism include copying homework from another studen andt claiming another person's idea as your own in a thesis.

It is also a violation of integrity to help someone else in such actions for example, by lending your homework paper to someone else, letting someone copy your answers in an exam, revealing exam questions to people preparing for an exam, helping someone to break into a colleague's computer files, etc.

Such violations of trust are taken quite seriously at universities and the consequences can include an F in a course or expulsion from the university.

You should make yourself familiar with the code of academic integrity at your university.

13.3 Use of Computer Facilities

Each university has had to think very carefully about the ethics involved in the use of computer facilities, and most now have a formal document defining acceptable and unacceptable use. The issues to balance include free speech, communication of research without unnecessary obstacles, and responsible attention to law.

Here are a few examples of activities that are universally prohibited:

• trying to access private files or unauthorized computers.
• trying to alter computer hardware or software without authorization.
• trying to disrupt other's use of the computer, for example, by sending email in another user's name, by locking other user out of a machine, etc.
• violating copyright or software agreements on software packages.
• running a money-making operation using university computers without permission.
• spamming. This means sending large volumes of email, thereby disrupting communications for an entire set of users. The usual purpose is either harassment of an individual or widespread dissemination of a ``get rich quick" pyramid-scheme mailing.
• using computers for illegal activities, including pyramid schemes, making threats, theft, child pornography, etc.

Again, these are serious matters and are usually dealt with either by suspension of computer privileges, expulsion from the university, or legal charges.

You should make yourself familiar with the code of computer use at your university.

13.4 Human Relations

The United States is not alone in its history of discrimination toward large groups of people based on race, religion, or other factors, but the legacy of these actions continues to be divisive. In an attempt to redress past wrongs and prevent future ones, the United States has built perhaps the most complicated system of laws and regulations in existence, many of them contradictory to some extent.

Rather than try to understand every fine point (e.g., when are distinctions based on mental ability discriminatory?), it is perhaps easier to be guided by two basic principles that motivated the laws:

• It is wrong to use authority to coerce favors. You also cannot appear to be using your authority this way.
  • Thus you cannot ask students or employees to do personal errands for you as a part of their duties. This includes babysitting, shopping, etc.
  • What requests are permissible? You can ask students to do work assigned to the class. You can ask teaching assistants to do those duties associated with their assigned class: grading, office hours, recitation sections, etc. You can ask research assistants to do those duties associated with the research project: library work, programming, running experiments, writing reports, minor clerical work, etc.
  • Any requests outside of these boundaries must have the offer of compensation. For example, a babysitting request or a request to work at a professor's party must be accompanied by market-rate payment and must have the understanding of no penalty for saying ``no." If you are asked to work at a conference that a professor is organizing, the compensation is usually a waiver of registration fee and a chance to network with experts in the field. If you are asked to help a professor referee a paper, then your help should be acknowledged in the professor's letter to the editor.
  • Supervisors cannot ask to be listed as an author of a paper to which they made minimal contribution. The American Mathematical Society statement on authorship is typical of professional standards:

    All the authors listed for a paper, however, must have made a significant contribution to its content, and all who have made such a contribution must be offered the opportunity to be listed as an author. mklinkAMS Policy Statement on Ethical Guidelines http://www.ams.org/about-us/governance/policy-statements/sec-ethics

    See the section on ``The Life of a Graduate Student" 4 for some additional discussion.
  • Inappropriate use of authority is particularly difficult to sort through if the relationship is defined on multiple levels. If you want to have a dating relationship with your student or employee, it is dangerous to do it while you still have authority over that person. It poisons the atmosphere for the class or research group by giving the impression of favoritism. It opens you to charges of sexual harassment if the relationship sours.

• You must treat colleagues, supervisors, and students with respect. Even if you find it difficult to deal with their ethnic background, religion, etc., your actions or attitudes in response to these issues must not interfere with their work. You cannot use such personal issues as a basis for grading or promotion. You cannot harass anyone.

Again, these issues are tied up in a tangle of laws. If you run into trouble, talk to a trusted colleague and check the human relations policy at your university.

13.5 Professional Integrity

Professional integrity encompasses a wide variety of responsibilities. Here are a few of them.

• We must be honest in our professional dealings, giving due credit for other peoples' ideas and not claiming credit for work that we have not done.

• We must treat professional colleagues and students with respect.

• An old labor rallying cry says, ``A full day's work for a full day's pay." Every job has its pleasant and unpleasant aspects. (For me, the worst part of professional life is dealing with academic dishonesty.) But in accepting a job, we agree to perform all of its duties, not just the pleasant ones.

• We cannot use the institution's resources (computers, copying machines, postage, etc.) for nonbusiness purposes without permission.

• The confidentiality of knowledge obtained through professional activities must be respected. For instance, we must safeguard students' grades, the contents of private databases and papers we referee, and trade secrets.

• The physician's motto is, ``First, do no harm." This means that we must assure that any product or idea that we deliver is as correct as we can make it and has no unannounced defects. Our mathematical model may be used to determine load limits on a building or safeguards on a nuclear stockpile. Our computer program may be used as a module in a drug delivery system in a hospital or in a guidance system in a passenger aircraft. We must be sure that if our work is used as we say it can be, that it will perform as intended.

See Section 15.12 for pointers to the ACM Code of Ethics, the AMS Code of Ethics, and others.

13.6 Values

``Some people live to work; others work to live." Whether your job is your greatest joy in life or just a duty, it is worth reflecting on whether what you do at work contributes to making the world better. Maybe your work won't win a Nobel Prize, a Turing Award, or a Fields Medal, but you can use some of your creative energy to see that your efforts have some positive value. When all is said and done, your non-scholarly contributions might far outweigh your scholarly ones if you encouraged an at-risk student, wrote a clear textbook, helped a more junior colleague, organized a conference that catalyzed new research, or made a staff member's life a little easier. Whatever your values, bring them to work.