Collective responsibility and fraud in scientific communities

Huebner, Bryce and Bright, Liam Kofi (2020) Collective responsibility and fraud in scientific communities. In: Bazargan-Forward, Saba and Perron Tollefsen, Deborah, (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility. Routledge handbooks in philosophy. Routledge, Abingdon, UK. ISBN 9781138092242

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Abstract

Given the importance of scientific research in shaping our perception of the world, and our senses of what policies will and won’t succeed in altering that world, it is of great practical, political, and moral importance that we carry out scientific research with integrity. The phenomenon of scientific fraud stands in the way of that, as scientists may knowingly enter claims they take to be false into the scientific literature, often knowingly doing so in defiance of norms they profess allegiance to. In this chapter we take a look at some of the causes of scientific fraud, and how it might be manifested in large-scale research teams and situations of anonymous authorship. We find that such cases make trouble for what might seem like intuitive answers to the question “who should be held responsible for this fraud?”, and we argue that in such cases it would be better to hold the entire community responsible for seeing to it that there is less fraud.

Item Type:	Book Section
Official URL:	https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-o...
Additional Information:	© 2020 Taylor & Francis
Divisions:	Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General) Q Science > Q Science (General)
Date Deposited:	04 Oct 2018 10:44
Last Modified:	10 Apr 2024 00:54
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/90327

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