What if there were no ethics

The question is where! Of course, in taking on the role of public adviser, one needs to have or to develop a thick skin. What is striking to me about these hateful e-mails is the underlying assumption in most of them that ethics is a ridiculous topic, and that only a fool would take ethics seriously. In response to this chorus of naysayers, I propose the following Code of Ethics for the 21st century:.

The most important thing in life is to get exactly what you want, whenever you want, and by any means necessary. Thus, you have the absolute right to do whatever you have to do to satisfy whatever desire, craving, or wish you have. Never take responsibility for anything.

That way, you never have to worry that you may have done the wrong thing. Blame the misfortunes of the world, and in your own life, on the poor judgment of other people.

In that case, all bets are off. Have little or no regard for how your actions affect other people. Do not, under any circumstance, report wrongdoings you observe. For those who criticize the subject of this column, this code might seem like the perfect antidote: Think about yourself, and only about yourself, and you will be fine.

We know that we should be moral and so should others and without some sense of morality it would be very difficult if not impossible for large numbers of humans to be living with one another. Now to the questions that deal with the rules of morality and all the rules which govern human behavior. First, some terms need to be clarified. Mores - customs and rules of conduct.

Etiquette — rules of conduct concerning matters of relatively minor importance but which do contribute to the quality of life. Violations of such rules may bring social censure. Etiquette deals with rules concerning dress and table manners and deal with politeness. Friendships would not likely break up over violations of these rules as they would for violating rules of morality, e.

But they are made up by people to encourage a better life. In each society there are authorities on these matters and there are collections of such rules. Many books are sold each year to prospective brides who want to observe the proper rules of decorum and etiquette. There are newspapers that have regular features with questions and answers concerning these matters.

Etiquette deals with matters such as when do you place the napkin on your lap when you sit at a dining table? How long do you wait on HOLD on a telephone call with someone with call waiting? Should you use a cell phone at the dining table?

Should you have a beeper on or a cell phone on in class? In a movie theatre? Morality - rules of right conduct concerning matters of greater importance.

Violations of such can bring disturbance to individual conscience and social sanctions. Law- rules which are enforced by society. It's a trope in our storytelling that goes back at least to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: However well-intentioned our fictional scientists may be, their disregard for ethical boundaries will produce not a peer-reviewed paper in Science but rather a new race of subhuman killers, a sucking wormhole in space-time, or a profusion of malevolent goo.

In the real world, though, matters aren't so simple. Most scientists will assure you that ethical rules never hinder good research—that there's always a virtuous path to testing any important hypothesis. But ask them in private, perhaps after a drink or three, and they'll confess that the dark side does have its appeal. Bend the rules and some of our deepest scientific conundrums could be elucidated or even resolved: nature versus nurture, the causes of mental illness, even the mystery of how humans evolved from monkeys.

These discoveries are just sitting out there, waiting for us to find them, if only we were willing to lose our souls. What follows are seven creepy experiments—thought experiments, really—that show how contemporary science might advance if it were to toss away the moral compass that guides it.

Don't try these at home—or anywhere, for that matter. But also don't pretend you wouldn't like to learn the secrets that these experiments would reveal. The Experiment: Split up twins after birth—and then control every aspect of their environments.

In the quest to tease out the interplay of nature and nurture, researchers have one obvious resource: identical twins, two people whose genes are nearly percent the same.

But twins almost always grow up together, in essentially the same environment. A few studies have been able to track twins separated at a young age, usually by adoption. But it's impossible to control retroactively for all the ways that the lives of even separated twins are still related.

If scientists could control the siblings from the start, they could construct a rigorously designed study. It would be one of the least ethical studies imaginable, but it might be the only way short of cloning humans for research, which is arguably even less ethical that we'd ever solve some big questions about genetics and upbringing. Expectant mothers of twins would need to be recruited ahead of time so the environments of each sibling could differ from the moment of birth.

After choosing what factors to investigate, researchers could construct test homes for the children, ensuring that every aspect of their upbringing, from diet to climate, was controlled and measured.

Several disciplines would benefit enormously, but none more than psychology, in which the role of upbringing has long been particularly hazy. Developmental psychologists could arrive at some unprecedented insights into personality—finally explaining, for example, why twins raised together can turn out completely different, while those raised apart can wind up very alike. The Experiment: Remove brain cells from a live subject to analyze which genes are switched on and which are off. You might donate blood or hair for scientific research, but how about a tiny slice of your brain—while you're still alive?

Photo: Bartholomew Cooke. Medical ethics wouldn't let you consent to that even if you wanted to, and for good reason: It's an invasive surgery with serious risks. But if enough healthy patients agreed, it could help answer a huge question: How does nurture affect nature, and vice versa?

Although scientists recognize in principle that our environment can alter our DNA, they have few documented examples of how these so-called epigenetic changes happen and with what consequences.

Animal studies suggest the consequences could be profound. A McGill University study of lab rats found that certain maternal behaviors can silence a gene in the hippocampi of their pups, leaving them less able to handle stress hormones.

In , a McGill-led team got a hint of a similar effect in humans: In the brains of dead people who had been abused as children and then committed suicide, the analogous gene was largely inhibited. But what about in living brains? When does the shift happen? With brain sampling, we might come to understand the real neurologic toll of child abuse and potentially a great deal more than that.

Researchers would obtain brain cells just as a surgeon does when conducting a biopsy: After lightly sedating the patient, they would attach a head ring with four pins, using local anesthetic to numb the skin. A surgeon would make an incision a few millimeters wide in the scalp, drill a small hole through the skull, and insert a biopsy needle to grab a tiny bit of tissue.

A thin slice would be sufficient, since you need only a few micrograms of DNA. Assuming no infection or surgical error, damage to the brain would be minimal. Such an experiment might answer some deep questions about how we learn. Does reading turn on genes in the prefrontal cortex, the site of higher-order cognition? Does spending lots of time at a batting cage alter the epigenetic status of genes in the motor cortex?

Does watching Real Housewives alter genes in whatever brain you have left? By correlating experiences with the DNA in our heads, we could better understand how the lives we lead wind up tinkering with the genes we inherited.