Ethics and environmental conservation

Abstract

After addressing a conference on ‘Ethics and the Practising Scientist’ some four years back, I remember the conferees struggling to formulate a code of ethics for those engaged in the so-called ‘hard’ sciences. They could not arrive at a satisfactory formulation, and at one point the chairman, in utter exasperation, confessed that, he didn't care for details about principles or quibbles over which slant the statements took, for ‘frankly any code should do!’ During the decade before and after that 1993 meeting, attempts to enunciate moral principles for researchers and manifestos for responsibility in science have come and gone, and the notes of discord have not abated.