تحقیق در عملیات و اصول اخلاقی: مسئولیت، اشتراک و همکاری

After a discussion on the relevance of ethics in operations research, two approaches to the ethical discourse, one based on rules and the other based on principles and values, are analyzed. Then, two ethical principles, which can help OR researchers and practitioners in their activity are discussed in some detail. The first is the “responsibility principle”, proposed in a more general context by the philosopher Jonas, which in our case suggests to take into account in our work not only the point of view of the “client”, but also the point of view of all the “stakeholders”, i.e. the ones who can directly or indirectly be affected by the results of our activity. The second, which can be called the “sharing and cooperation principle”, calls for a more open distribution of the results of our research activity, whether they are ideas, algorithms or software.

Science and technology are more and more intertwined: the latter motivates the former and, at the same time, new methodological developments make new applications possible and hence lead to new technological advancements. Technology has a pervasive and every day stronger impact on society and on human life. That has led to a growing awareness that science cannot be considered above or beyond the realm of value judgments and hence of ethics. As Robert Oppenheimer put it after Hiroshima: “scientists have now experienced sin”. These considerations apply in a special way to operations research which, has as its objects methodologies and techniques for providing support in decision making processes. Hardly any area in OR can be considered far enough from the real world to escape from ethical considerations. The awareness of the relevance of ethics in operations research has been growing in the last years. The rôle of operations research in addressing social issues has been advocated among others by Rosenhead [15] and [16] and, more recently, by Koch [11]. Schneeweiss [18] analyzes the relations between ethics and decision processes and therefore operations research: “via the analyst or consultant, OR, as an applied science, is part of the decision process and thus is, at least partially, responsible for keeping moral norms”. A more systematic analysis of the relations between ethics and operations research has been performed by Brans [1] and [2], who outlines what can be considered the first ethical code for operations research. Note that scientific associations in fields which are contiguous to or overlap with the OR area, such as ACM and IEEE, already have their ethical codes [14] and [7]. In this paper two ethical principle are discussed, which can help OR researchers and practitioners in their activities. The first is the responsibility principle, along the lines developed in a more general context by the philosopher Jonas [9] and [10]. Applied to our field this principle suggests, for example, taking into account in our work not only the point of view of the “client”, i.e. the person who pays for our research or for our professional advice, but also the point of view of all the “stakeholders”, i.e. the ones who can directly or indirectly be affected by the results of our activity. The second principle, which can be called the sharing and cooperation principle, calls for a more open distribution of the results of our research activity, whether they are ideas, algorithms or software. The rationale behind this principle is twofold. First, our results are not only ‘ours’; in fact, they are only the tip of an iceberg consisting of a pre-existing large body of knowledge. We will have used in our work the results of the work of the scientific and professional community, and it is our duty to enable the whole community to benefit from our work. Second, we should contrast the trend to an ever increasing privatization of ideas, which is something relatively new in science, and which rather often turns public investments into private gains.

To conclude, I would like to stress that an ethical discourse about operations research should be developed around two main concepts, distinct but related: responsibility on the one side and sharing and cooperation on the other. In this paper the meaning and the implications of these concepts in the field of operations research have been discussed. Jonas’ responsibility principle has shown to be relevant for understanding the ethical dimension of OR activities and the economic implications of a production model based on sharing and cooperation may deserve further development.