Impressions and Information from the 13th November conference

by Yves Grasland

I will present here two events from the conference, based on the impressions and notes of
two mates, Gabriel and Alban, who attended respectively the speeches of Etienne Verges and
General Baudoin Albanel.

The conference of Etienne Verges handled the themes of science an ethics from a legal point
of view. Mr Verges was indeed a jurist, if I understood well. He began his speech with the examples of three scientists, MM. Hwang, Milhaud and Rylander, who failed to respect ethics in their works. Besides, Mr Rylander was not a stranger to me as I saw once a documentary on TV on the subject of the tobacco industry. It was called Thanks for Smoking and explained how the tobacco industry has lied to people for years about the poison it sells. Rylander was a huge help to them, as he used heavily his respectability as a scientist to make people believe that tobacco was harmless. This is an example of the importance of ethics in science and the need to prevent the existence of such malicious people in science.

Legal measures may not be the panacea but could be an important tool to achieve this goal according to Mr Verges. He said that such rules are too often weak, since they are difficult to enforce and people do not care enough about them, especially politicians. He thinks that rules should be harmonized to make scientists credibility higher. He also points out that the existing rules should be better enforced, as they are not strongly enough applied.

Personally, I'm not sure this is true, since people like Rylander are characterized by their
disregard for law and morality and will find ways to bypass them. Maybe law and rules should rather be used to force transparency and help exposing people like Rylander making their duplicity public.

Gabriel didn't tell me much about the form of that intervention or his feelings about it, but
he mentioned the following. He found that Mr Verges' slides were overloaded, and his English rather poor. This surprised him for a jurist.

The second intervention I will present here is the one of General Albanel. He was presenting
the way ethics and war co-exist together nowadays. The first point was about the behavior of soldiers, who are supposed to kill people in an ethical way. This presentation was mainly focused on the type of weapons that are ethically acceptable and the way they should be used.
Ethical weapons are basically weapons that only reach their intended goal, provided this
goal is ethical itself. For example, it's not acceptable to destroy an entire village to kill one sniper, or to kill civilians in general. Therefore weapons such as fragmentation bombs or phosphorous
incendiary bombs are not ethical. All the same, modern weapons that are more accurate than
before are then more ethical, as they deal less collateral damage.

Yves Grasland is a third year student at ENSIMAG