Abstract
Many states have significantly reduced their support for higher education in the last decade, increasing the importance of securing external funding for research and academic centers at colleges and universities. This paper addresses issues that have been raised by critics of funding from "morally tainted" sources like tobacco companies, pharmaceutical companies, and oil and gas companies and attempts to develop plausible criteria for "morally acceptable" funding in light of criticisms that focus on issues such as transparency, conflicts of interests, academic and scientific integrity, and coercion. A further discussion of whether special or unique criteria are necessary for ethicists and ethics centers is also included.
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Notes
As an anonymous reviewer rightly pointed out, sometimes funding decisions are not within the control of individual researchers or faculty members and are decided at a different administrative level. Our ethics center is fortunate in being able to choose and refuse funding, but for those researchers or centers who cannot, the moral responsibility for careful consideration of funding sources is shifted to those who exercise such control.
The situation may be further complicated by the “unseen” money behind the businesses, as banks and financial institutions underwrite many of the companies and industries discussed herein. Although we will briefly return to this further layer of funding at the end of the third section, space prevents a thorough examination of this underlying level, which may require further consideration in a future article.
This is related to, but distinct from, the problem of underreported negative results as many venues do not publish results from experiments that did not demonstrate a statistically significant result.
By an anonymous reviewer.
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Acknowledgments
The author is grateful for the assistance in referencing and research provided by Alma Luevanos, Isabelina Alvarez, and Jorge Salazar, Research Assistants for the Pan American Collaboration for Ethics in the Professions (PACE) at the University of Texas—Pan American, and for the comments from anonymous reviewers for this journal, although errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the author.
In the spirit of transparency, the author acknowledges current funding for PACE from the following sources, although no funds from the first two sources were used in the preparation of this manuscript: Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women, Grant No. 2011-WA-AZ-0020; Doctors Hospital at Renaissance; Dr. Lawrence and Mrs. Esperanza Gelman; and McAllen Anesthesia Consultants. The research assistants who worked on this project were partially paid through funding from the latter two sources.
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Jones, C. Dirty Money. J Acad Ethics 12, 191–207 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-014-9211-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-014-9211-5