In “Islam and Science,” an article written for the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Nasr attempts to give a broad overview of the relationship of Islam to modern science and technology.

First, he criticizes the approach of viewing Western science as a continuation of Islamic science, and therefore accepting it uncritically as fitting in well with Islamic thought. Nasr points out, however, that this perspective ignores the “agnostic science of nature” in the Western tradition, along with the “shift of paradigm” during the European Scientific Revolution that sharply distinguishes modern Western science from Islamic science.

Second, in a related manner, he criticizes the acceptance of Western science as “value-free,” as opposed to contemporary perspectives of science — even in the West — of science as based “on a particular value system and a specific world-view.” The implicit value system of Western science, he suggests, needs instead to be criticized “from the Islamic point of view.”

Importantly for Nasr is the question of the values and especially the ethics of science. He believes that “knowledge and its implications cannot evade ethical implications.” Modern science attempts to relegate alternative claims to knowledge, especially ethical claims and most especially knowledge based on religion, to “poetry, myth, or, even worse, superstition.”

He suggests that Islam needs to realize that modern science is but “a science of nature,” not the science of nature. He posits a “positive Islamic critique of modern science” that “maintain[s] the traditional Islamic intellectual space … to which Islamic ethics corresponds, withing denying the legitimacy of modern sciences within their own confines.”

Most importantly for Nasr, Muslims should not look to science to confirm metaphysical beliefs, but rather leave to science claims only about the natural world, not the supernatural one. He asks Muslims to be wary of “the prevalent view … from which God is simply absent, no matter how many modern scientists believe individually in him.” Modern Islamic scholars, he argues, unlike their traditional counterparts in the past, are “particularly bereft of responses” to the question of Transcendent Cause and the role of God. For him, older Islamic though had better answers to such questions, and this is why so many scholars are more interested in older relations between Islam and science than in contemporary ones.

So what should be done? First, he wants Muslims to stop seeing themselves as inferior to Western science and technology, and to instead approach it as at least an equal. Again, he especially suggests that Islam and its ethics has a powerful rejoinder to Western science, which while it may put a man on the Moon still cannot stop teenagers from killing each other.

Second, he recommends there be an in-depth study of traditional Islamic sources, from the Qur’an to the traditional works on the sciences and philosophy. The goal, he argues, is to create an “Islamic world-view and especially [an] Islamic concept of nature and the sciences of nature.” He wants scholars to do this within the framework of Islamic tradition, not through simple readings of decontextualized Qur’anic verses. Third, he suggests that more Muslim students should study “pure” sciences and not technology. He believes the Muslim world already has sufficient numbers of engineers, but that what it really needs are more scientists who can see beyond immediate utility.

Fundamentally, Nasr believes that “[o]nly a science that issues from the source of all knowledge, from the Knower … and cultivated in an intellectual universe in which the spiritual and the ethical are not mere subjectivisms but fundamental features … can save humanity.” He suggests that Islamic science has the potential to not only create a “veritable Islamic science” that would help the Muslim world, but also to create a science for “those all over the globe who seek a science of nature and a technology which could help men and women to live at peace with themselves, with the natural environment, and above all, with that Divine Reality Who is the ontological source of both man and the cosmos.”

A few questions to close up this synopsis of Nasr’s article:

• Which Islam and whose Islamic ethics does Nasr mean? (It’s not like Islam is one thing to all people.) Who decides?
• Does the distinction between “pure” science and technology hold up? Is it a useful distinction?
• Is there a whiff in Nasr’s writing of the “inferiority complex” he wants Islamic science to rid itself of?
• There is a certain resemblance in Nasr’s article to positions of some evangelical Christians — he is, for example, critical of Darwinian evolution (an “hypothesis parading as scientific fact”) and aligns himself with the Pope in regards to “protecting the unborn” — is this resemblance more than simply on the surface?

These are questions I may pursue further in future reading and research, but if anyone has any thoughts, please share them.

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In the world of scientific ethics, though, it isn’t so much who funds research–it’s a given that someone, potentially with some agenda, is doing the funding–but rather whether or not the source of funding is made public in an open and honest manner.

That, I think, is the real message in Greenpeace’s investigate research (yes, Greenpeace has an agenda, too, but it’s pretty clear what it is):

A Greenpeace investigation has identified a little-known, privately owned US oil company as the paymaster of global warming sceptics in the US and Europe.

The environmental campaign group accuses Kansas-based Koch Industries, which owns refineries and operates oil pipelines, of funding 35 conservative and libertarian groups, as well as more than 20 congressmen and senators. Between them, Greenpeace says, these groups and individuals have spread misinformation about climate science and led a sustained assault on climate scientists and green alternatives to fossil fuels.

via US oil company donated millions to climate sceptic groups, says Greenpeace | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

Does this kind of relationship suggest problems with opponents of global climate change? Not necessarily, I think–if their arguments are valid and their research good, it doesn’t matter who funds them. Still, since I can’t easily replicate their research and thus have to take a great deal on trust, a failure to reveal the potential conflict of interest is concerning, I think, and suggests an equally potential for improper bias.

Critics say the lawyers left out important, relevant cases that would have pointed to different conclusions.

For example, in 1983, a Texas sheriff was tried for waterboarding prisoners. Justice Department prosecutors called the practice torture. But a 2002 Justice Department memo analyzing whether waterboarding is torture makes no mention of the case.

…
Maybe lawyers didn’t intentionally skew the law. Maybe they just missed the Texas case.

Wendel says that points to another ethics rule.

“Ethics rules can require good lawyering, so sloppy lawyering can be a violation of the duty of competence,” he says.

via Did Justice Department Lawyers Violate Ethics? : NPR.

The appellate case following up this Texas sheriff case was United States v. Lee, 744 F.2d 1124 (5th Cir. Tex. 1984). It took me some time to find using LexisNexis, partly because it refers to “waterboarding” as “water torture.” In addition, the appellate case cited above deals more with the severability of defenses rather than with torture itself — that was, apparently, dealt with at the trial court level (trial court decisions are much more difficult to find, and generally carry no precedential value anyway).

Certainly, given the limited information on this particular case, I don’t think it’s a slam-dunk ethical violation not to have cited it — although, that said, this was a case argued and won by the Justice Department itself. Every law firm and organization I’ve been in always has searchable records of their own briefs and cases. I doubt the Justice Department is any different. That fact certainly raises the bar for Justice Department lawyers.

Regardless of this specific instance, I think it’s important that these days, minimum ethical standards require online searching, not just looking in a few indices and printed journals. They may also require maintaining and searching a firm’s own briefs and cases (“knowledge management,” in IT terms) in more detail than merely using Lexis or Westlaw.

Certainly I’ll be interested, even outside of the specific investigation of these lawyers, in what the final report will say about attorney ethics and the importance of effective and comprehensive research.

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• The Latest from the APA On Torture (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
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The first ruling came in federal court in the United States as a district court judge ruled against the Administration’s attempt to restrict defense access to information:

Senior U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan has turned down a request by the Obama Administration to restrict lawyers’ access — in virtually all remaining Guantanamo Bay cases — to the files the Administration’s detention task force is assembling on every prisoner remaining at the Navy prison in Cuba.

via SCOTUSblog.

The second ruling is from the U.K., and came down as a unanimous decision by nine law lords restricting the use of secret evidence in so-called “control orders” (a form of preventative house arrest):

The men, who have been held under virtual house arrest under the Government’s control order regime, won the unanimous backing of a panel of nine law lords, on the grounds that the suspects did not know what they were accused of or what evidence was being used against them.

via the Times Online.

The U.K. government argues that they have processes in place to prevent abuse of the system, but that the sensitive nature of the evidence, combined with the seriousness of the terrorist threat, justifies the use of secret evidence.

The law lords disagreed:

Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the senior law lord, said: “A trial procedure can never be considered fair if a party to it is kept in ignorance of the case against him.”

The eight other lords agreed. “The principle that the accused has a right to know what is being alleged against him has a long pedigree. … The fundamental principle is that everyone is entitled to the disclosure of sufficient material to enable him to answer effectively the case that is made against him,” Lord Hope said.

This is exactly my beginning position. As a foundational proposition, a justice system based on the rule of law is incompatible with the use of secret evidence. Such evidence undermines our adversarial legal process, including fundamental rights like due process and the right to confront witnesses. Similar abuses of the English legal system, on which the American system in based, led directly to the Bill of Rights in 1789, and contributed to the desire of American colonists to separate from England.

Nonetheless, despite this, I might be convinced that such evidence could have an application in the investigatory process, or even in short-term preventative detention to prevent imminent threats or to gather evidence that can be used in court. But beyond that limited use, secret evidence provides the executive branch with too much power, a position both liberals and conservatives can, I believe, understand and support — despite the tendency for each side to oppose executive power only when the other side is in power.

I can also envision a potential system that seeks to limit the exposure of such evidence by restricting who can see it and evaluate it. Evidence does not need to be made available openly to the public (although this is the ideal, since it provides the greatest protection against abuse — but then again, the public does not always use such information responsibly). But evidence must be revealed at least to the defense so that a proper case can be mounted and questions can be asked. This is how our adversarial system functions and, while imperfect, the system is better than alternatives.

Perhaps a military commission system is the right way to balance these concerns, since our traditional system is simply not set up to handle the limited release of sensitive information to defense counsel and no one else. Certainly I have grown to have great respect for the ability of military lawyers to act as defense counsel, despite the negative impact on careers that occurred in the last 8 years to those who did so. A lawyer has an ethical duty to the law and to his or her client. And military attorneys have more than lived up to this ethical duty.

Regardless of the approach, I believe that while the use of secret evidence may be acceptable initially (as part of an investigation or short-term detention while more evidence is gathered), the defense needs access to this evidence. Without it, any trial or legal process is simply unfair.

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An interesting new drive for greater ethical behaviour in the business environment:

The ethics of business were on the minds of a group of students who’ve just received their master’s degrees from Harvard Business School. They’ve mounted a campaign to have graduating students take what they call the “MBA Oath.” It’s modeled after the medical profession’s Hippocratic oath.

via MBA ‘Hippocratic’ Oath Aims For Ethical Business : NPR.

The Economist has a more detailed article discussing the oath:

They did not actually say that “greed is not good,” but the oath taken on June 3rd by more than 400 students graduating from Harvard Business School amounted to much the same thing. At an unofficial ceremony the day before they received their MBAs, the students promised they would, among other things, “serve the greater good,” “act with the utmost integrity” and guard against “decisions and behaviour that advance my own narrow ambitions, but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.”

via A Hippocratic oath for managers: Forswearing greed | The Economist.

The medical profession already has such an oath, along with an enforceable code of ethics (unethical behavior will get your medical license pulled). The legal profession, as far as I know, has no oath, but has a very strict set of ethical rules that vary by state — violate the codes of professional responsibility, and you may be disbarred or suspended from practice.

To my mind, it is this enforcement component that gives ethical guidelines their teeth. Will an oath, however well-intentioned, actually result in better behavior absent any enforcement? I suspect not, although I do nevertheless think — in the spirit of evolution vs. revolution — that this is nevertheless a positive step toward more responsible business behavior.

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• Journalism and Ethical Blogging (inpropriapersona.com)

A lawyer’s broad duty to keep clients’ confidences is the bedrock on which the justice system is built, [many legal experts] argue. If clients did not feel free to speak candidly, their lawyers could not represent them effectively. And making exceptions risks eroding the trust between clients and their lawyers in future cases. Experts in legal ethics are quick to point out that the various players in the adversary system have assigned roles and that lawyers generally must tend to a limited one.

“Lawyers are not undercover informants,” said Stephen Gillers, who teaches legal ethics at New York University. Indeed, said Steven Lubet, who teaches legal ethics at Northwestern, few clients would confess to their lawyers if they knew the lawyers might some day choose to disclose that information.

…

Most experts in legal ethics agree that lawyers should be allowed to violate a living client’s confidences to save an innocent man from execution, but not to free someone serving a prison term, however long.

“I prefer to draw the line at the life-and-death situation,” said Monroe Freedman, who teaches legal ethics at Hofstra. “That situation is sufficiently rare that is doesn’t present a systemic threat. If that is extended to incarceration in general, it would end the sense of security clients have in speaking candidly with their lawyers.”

For more, read the discussion at The Volokh Conspiracy.