This blog post is the first (or, really, the zeroth) in a series on "chemical ethics". However, I won't be getting into the weeds of any serious ethical arguments quite yet. Rather, I want to take this blog post to explain why I'm interested in this topic and what I hope to accomplish by writing about ethics.
My reasons for starting this series are simple: 1) I belive that chemical ethics is important; 2) not enough has been written about ethics in chemistry; and 3) I care. Here, I will explore each of these motivations in some detail.
Chemicals and the chemical industries have been partially or wholly responsible for many of the great disasters of modern times. Some historians call World War I "the Chemist's War" because of the widespread use of chemical weapons, which killed nearly 100,000 and injured over 1 million people.[1] Chemical weapons use decreased considerably after the first World War (though never going away completely).[2] Nonetheless, chemistry has remained important in warfare, with the use of synthetic herbicides (e.g., "Agent Orange") in the Vietnam War being perhaps the most salient in the American memory. In Vietnam, herbicides were meant to starve the North Vietnamese Communists and eliminate their forest cover, but tactical herbicides also contributed to an increase in birth defects following parental exposure.[3]
(Chemical) war is Hell, but there's many more examples outside of the battlefield. One of the largest medical disasters of all time was caused by a chemical reaction: the conversion of R(+) thalidomide — a drug that can treat a variety of medical conditions, including morning sickness in pregnant people — into S(-) thalidomide, a teratogen (substance that interferes with the development of fetuses).[4] Chemical accidents like the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India and the 2020 Beirut explosion have the potential to kill hundreds to thousands, while environmental chemical pollution can (less dramatically and perhaps more indirectly) kill by increasing the likelihood and severity of health decline and disease.[5] Important examples of environmental chemical pollutants with severe health impacts include microplastics — which are now ubiquitous in the natural environment[6] and adversely affect human[7] and non-human animal health[8] — as well as tetraethyl lead (a long-time additive in gasoline)[9] and per-/polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).[10]
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the elephant in the room: climate change. While many chemical scientists (including me!) work to eliminate fossil fuel use and minimize the impacts of climate change, the reality is that our field got us into this mess in the first place. Not only are chemical engineers major players in the fossil fuel industry, creating the oil and natural gas products that we use to generate electricity and heat (33% of global greenhouse gas emissions) and power most of our transportation (15% of emissions), but most industrial emissions (24% of emissions) come from the production of chemicals and materials, particularly building materials like metals (e.g., steel) and cement.[11] In other words, the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions can be tied to the chemical sciences and chemical industries. Yikes.
I bring up all of these examples of chemically-induced disasters, intentional and unintentional, to illustrate the outsized impact that chemistry and the chemical sciences have in the world. Our work has the power to destroy lives and (especially if climate change continues unabated) irreparably harm the environment and human society as we know it. Chemistry — and the actions of chemical scientists — has immense moral significance, and thus it is important to determine how such scientists should act. That is to say, chemical ethics are critical for ensuring public and environmental safety.
Ethics in the medical and life sciences have been considered and debated since at least the time of Hippocrates in the 5th century BCE.[12] From the basic principle of "do no harm", bioethics and medical ethics evolved over time as the understanding of medicine and the context in which it was practice changed. In fact, the first modern thinker to develop the idea of bioethics, Fritz Jahr,[13] argued that advancements in science demanded ongoing reflections in moral philosophy.[14] Notably, the field of medical research responded to the Nazi atrocities during World War II by embracing the Nuremburg Code,[15] a set of rules for research with human subjects. The recognition of the importance of ethics in biology and medicine continued long after, as exemplified by the development of the 1978 Belmont Report, which establishes respect for persons, beneficence, and justice as core ethical principles for medical research. But bioethics is more than a static set of general guidelines and core principles; it remains a thriving area of research, and many students of the life sciences are required to take courses in bioethics to obtain their degrees. Some schools even offer degrees in bioethics!
Contrast this history with the situation in the chemical sciences. While individual chemical professional societies have ethical codes, including the American Chemical Society (ACS),[16] American Institute of Chemical Engineers,[17] Royal Society of Chemistry,[18] and German Chemical Society,[19] there are no general ethical codes or principles recognized across the chemical sciences. In 2016, ACS convened a workshop which produced the Global Chemists' Code of Ethics (GCCE), but this is a far cry from the Belmont Report. The GCCE includes statements like
Chemical practitioners should promote a positive perception and public understanding and appreciation of chemistry. This is done through research, innovation, teamwork, collaboration, community outreach, and high ethical standards.
and
Researchers should conduct their work with the highest integrity and transparency
without defining what the "ethical standards" that must be followed are or what it means for a chemist to have "integrity"!
In spite of the moral significance of the chemical sciences, chemical ethics are not taken seriously by many chemical practitioners or organizations. This is evidenced by the lack of academic journals that regularly publish articles on ethics in the chemical sciences[20] (though articles on chemical ethics occasionally appear in other, non-specialized journals) and the few books written on the subject.[21] [22] [23] [24] Perhaps because of this perceived lack of importance, the ethics curriculum available to students in chemical science programs tends to be extremely limited, often focusing (where it exists at all) on generic issues of safety and research integrity without discussing the specific questions and problems that arise in chemical practice.
So, the ethics and moral norms of the chemical sciences are vitally important for the world and its inhabitants, but the philosophy, literature, and related pedagogy are underdeveloped (compared to bioethics, as well as other fields like engineering ethics). This, I would argue, motivates someone to develop a chemical ethic. But why me? Why the CoReACTER?
As a doctoral student, I witnessed and found myself embroiled in a number of ethical conflicts. Some of these were specific to chemistry, and others were more general problems of research ethics or professional ethics. While I will not tell any specific stories here, I am sure that I will return to some of these experiences in later posts in this series. For now, I will merely say that, in each of these scenarios, I found myself stuck. I was able to work out what I believed to be right, and generally I had some chain of reasoning that justified my beliefs. But ultimately, the different opinions that my colleagues held, the different actions that they took, were (in a sense) just as legitimate as my own, because we had not established common norms. That is to say, in the absence of a well-formed ethic, I had to personally struggle to navigate ethical situations, and I in many cases lacked the social structures necessary to challenge and alter what I viewed as others' unethical behavior.
Now, I'm an incoming Assistant Professor. Soon, the CoReACTER will have more students, more collaborations, and more projects. Soon, I'll be teaching undergraduates and graduate students! I don't want to repeat the mistakes of my predecessors. I want to be an ethical scientist, and I want to create an environment for chemical research and teaching that is ethical and just.
So here I am, wandering through a dimly lit labyrinth, trying to find my way forward.
Even preparing to write this zeroth post, I felt daunted. Developing a chemical ethic — that's a big ask! To make this project more manageable (and to set expectations), I find it helpful to establish the bounds of what I'll hope to cover in this series.
Throughout this piece so far, I've used the phrase "chemical science". It would perhaps be simpler to speak only of chemistry, but I can't do that. Chemistry is often called the "central science" in reference to its position between the physical sciences and the life sciences. The tendrils of chemistry reach far, from physics to agriculture. Though I consider myself a chemist, attend chemistry conferences, and typically publish my research in chemistry journals, my own background is highly interdisciplinary. My formal training is in materials science, but I've worked in nanoparticle self-assembly (applied physics), thermal fluids (mechanical engineering), network science (mathematics/computer science), and electrochemistry (chemical engineering).
This series on "chemical ethics" will span the chemical sciences, by which I mainly mean chemistry, chemical engineering, and materials science, as well as their sub-disciplines. However, I will not hold myself to any strict disciplinary boundaries.
What are chemical ethics? This is a question that I intend to explore in more depth in future posts (see "What's Next?" below), but a preliminary definition and scoping cannot be avoided anymore.
Chemical ethics is an area of applied ethics and professional ethics. The study of chemical ethics involves determining appropriate approaches to moral questions related to the practice of chemistry and other chemical sciences. This includes activities related to academic and industrial chemical research, other industrial activities (e.g., managing a chemical plant or managing municipal chemical waste), and the professional interactions between chemical scientists and their broader communities and environments.
While I believe that chemical ethics is an underdeveloped area of study, my exploration will not be beginning from nothing. We can leverage the central position of chemistry as a discipline to gather useful ideas. In addition to bioethics, engineering ethics provides a valuable jumping-off point for analyses of chemical ethics; as the name implies, the ethics of chemical engineering at least partially fall within the domain of engineering ethics.
It's a fair question. While chemistry does have unique ethical dimensions, from synthesizing novel compounds to creating and remediating environmental pollution, much of the ethical questions in the chemical sciences can be more-or-less easily extended to other areas of scientific research or engineering. Couldn't this series just be Foundations of Science Ethics or Foundations of Engineering Ethics?
Sure it could! But that's not what I'm interested in, for a couple of reasons. First, as I've already mentioned, non-chemical areas of research ethics and engineering ethics are already well-researched, robust fields of study. While I'm sure I could make some meaningful contribution to these more general discussions, I see much less of a need for me to step into bioethics or engineering ethics. Second, where possible, I don't want to speak from a place of ignorance. This series will already involve me wading deep into areas outside of my expertise. It'll be much more manageable to think about and discuss ethics when applied to problems that I am already familiar with as a primarily academic chemical scientist with some exposure to industrial chemistry. Finally and most importantly, it doesn't need to be either-or. I can (and probably will!) write about topics that are not exlusive to chemistry. Perhaps these posts could be labeled under "research ethics" or "science ethics" or "engineering ethics", but they will still be relevant to chemical ethics and thus appropriate for this series.
As I just alluded to, I am not a philosopher of science (not yet, at least), and I have little philosophical or ethical training of any kind. While I believe that my interest in chemical ethics is important and worth pursuing, I know that my ideas are not yet mature. The Foundations of Chemical Ethics series is my attempt to learn by doing. Before I write any journal articles or manifestos, I'll be using this space to work through different ethical questions and (hopefully) get some feedback from my community.
My lofty goal is to develop a modern chemical ethic that goes beyond the somewhat vague and empty statements of existing ethical codes of conduct and perhaps even beyond the standards in fields like engineering, to provide a guide for chemical scientists trying to use their work to remedy the mistakes of the past and prevent future disasters. Climate change and sustainability will feature heavily in this ethic, as will various forms of social (in)justice.
More concretely, I hope to contribute some scholarly work on the topic of chemical ethics, either alone or in collaboration within the CoReACTER. I also hope to build up enough interesting and useful ideas to develop an ethics course for undergraduate and graduate chemical engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University.
The next post in this series (the actual first one) will target a big question: "What Is Chemistry For?" I want to unpack the goals of the chemical sciences and chemical scientists. If we find that these goals aren't in line with some basic principles (e.g., justice), then we have a problem: we can't ethically justify chemical science in and of itself, and this whole exercise is moot. Barring that unfortunate situation, once we know the goals of the chemical sciences and what/who is meant to benefit from them, we can then focus our attention on figuring out how one can achieve those goals ethically.
Another important post will cover the idea of "The Pillars of Chemical Research". Analogous to how biomedical research on human subjects has the ethical guiding lights of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice, I want to try and identify core ethical principles for chemical scientific research. Like "What Is Chemistry For?", this post will serve as an important touchstone for future explorations.
Beyond those two posts, I don't know exactly where I'll go in this series. Some questions that I've been thinking about, in no particular order:
What is the ethical distance between "pure" chemists (theoretical or experimental) and "applied" chemists? How is this distance established, and what responsibilities do pure chemists have to prevent their ideas from causing harm?
On a similar note: do industrial chemical scientists have different ethical obligations to their academic counterparts?
Under what conditions is it ethical to labor in a context (e.g., an fossil fuel company) that one knows or believes to be reducing human, non-human animal, or environmental wellbeing?
To what extent should chemical research or other labor in the chemical sciences be automated?
Is it ever ethical to use large language models or other "AI" tools in the chemical sciences? If so, what are the users' obligations?
What ethical responsibilities do chemical scientists today hold for the wrongdoing and mistakes of past chemical scientists?
How should chemical standards and references be designed? What are the dangers of standards?
To what extent and under what conditions is it ethical for a chemical scientist to study problems that do not address significant societal problems?
What role should competition, prestige, and glory have in (chemical) science, particularly in the research setting? Is competition compatible with the goals of (chemical) science?
What are the standards for chemical harm? Can disclosing a molecule, material, or reaction be a form of harm in and of itself? What is "due diligence" in the context of chemical science; that is, when has a chemical scientist done enough to ensure that their work will cause as little harm as possible or will bring about as much benefit as possible? Is it ethical to make a "bad" process or compound (e.g., the extremely energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process) more efficacious/less harmful, or is it only moral to design alternatives that are not harmful?
Chemists often speculate, for instance about mechanisms and spectral interpretation. Does speculation have any role in the chemical literature? If so, how should such speculation be communicated?
| [1] | DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2007.111930 |
| [2] | DOI: 10.1016/j.etap.2008.03.003 |
| [3] | DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyl038 |
| [4] | DOI: 10.1002/bdrc.21096 |
| [5] | DOI: 10.1186/s12940-017-0340-3 |
| [6] | DOI: 10.33263/BRIAC132.126 |
| [7] | DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.134455 |
| [8] | DOI: 10.1002/9781119768432.ch12 |
| [9] | DOI: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2023.138207 |
| [10] | DOI: 10.1038/s41370-018-0094-1 |
| [11] | DOI: 10.1017/9781009157926.004 |
| [12] | Hippocrates is best known for the "Hippocratic Oath", a commitment still sworn in some form by many doctors today, but he wrote extensively about the practice and philosophy of medicine. |
| [13] | Though Jahr was the first to use the term "bioethics", his ideas did not become popular. It was Van Rensselaer Potter, who re-invented the concept during the Cold War, who led to the development and widespread adoptions of bioethical ideas. See, e.g., DOI: 10.1080/11287462.2015.1007616. |
| [14] | DOI: 10.1353/ken.2008.0006 |
| [15] | DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199711133372006 |
| [16] | https://www.acs.org/careers/career-services/ethics/the-chemical-professionals-code-of-conduct.html |
| [17] | https://www.aiche.org/about/governance/policies/code-ethics |
| [18] | https://www.rsc.org/globalassets/03-membership-community/join-us/membership-regulations/rsc-code-of-conduct-final.pdf |
| [19] | https://en.gdch.de/gdch/about-us/statutes-and-code-of-conduct.html |
| [20] | The only journals that I'm aware of that are squarely focused on any philosophy of chemistry are Hyle: International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, which ceased publishing in 2021, and Foundations of Chemistry. |
| [21] | Chemistry: The Impure Science by Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Jonathan Simon (2008) |
| [22] | The Ethical Chemist by Jeffrey Kovac (2018) |
| [23] | Good Chemistry: Methodological, Ethical, and Social Dimensions by Jan Mehlich (2021) |
| [24] | Ethics of Chemistry: From Poison Gas to Climate Engineering, edited by Joachim Schummer and Tom Børsen (2021) |