In rare cases, a questionable, published paper may acquire“orphan” status (Rennie & Flanagin, 1994, p. 469), as allconcerned try to wash their hands of it, invoking hyperlaborspecialization as grounds for exoneration. Such a scenario isinconceivable under the standard model, where authorshipand accountability are isomorphic. But when authorship/ownership of a study is distributed across multiple contrib-utors, many of whom may have zero or weak relation-ships—whether personal or institutional—with their myriadcoworkers (Katz & Martin, 1997), the practical (i.e., en-forceable) allocation of accountability may pose intractableproblems

eceiving credit under false pretenses,are cause for grave concern (Anderson, 1991).

ow, for instance, should a promotion andtenure committee view the contribution of the 99th listedauthor on a particle physics paper or the 36th author on agenome sequencing study? What may seem to constitute aminiscule portion of a single journal article may, in fact,have consumed a significant amount of that individual’sprofessional time and energy. T

owever, multipleauthorship and hyperauthorship are not problematized byphysicists as they are by the biomedical community.

ennieand Yank (1998, p. 829), when “the number of collaboratorsgrows arithmetically, it becomes exponentially harder toaffix responsibility.”

he practice of promiscuous coauthor-ship puts considerable stress on this tried and tested model.

e need toconsider how multiple authorship, in extremis—what I havechosen to term ‘hyperauthorship’— undermines commonlyheld assumptions about the nature and ethical entailments ofauthorship, and how, in exceptional cases, it can lead tofundamental questions about the integrity of the researchcommunity as a whole. Unfortunately, little effort is madein the biomedical literature to distinguish systematicallybetween what might be termed acceptable levels of multipleauthorship and unacceptable levels of hyperauthorship.Studies of coauthorship trends, as will become clear,

scaleofthephenomenonandassociatedethicalabuseshaveprovedtobesingularlyproblematicinthebiomedicaldo-main(e.g.,Houston&Moher,1996

any respect unethical.

We strived to make our work as participant-researchers transparent and dialogic by sharing tentative findings and engaging in dialogue about our inquiries into learning in CLMOOC online, as well as offline in conferences with CLMOOC participants in attendance.

“moderate disguise”

Responding participants either requested to have their online identities remain connected to their professional learning artifacts by affirming the use of their first names, or indicated they would like a pseudonym used.

The idea was to pinpoint the doctors prescribing the most pain medication and target them for the company’s marketing onslaught. That the databases couldn’t distinguish between doctors who were prescribing more pain meds because they were seeing more patients with chronic pain or were simply looser with their signatures didn’t matter to Purdue.

The universal voice of mankind is always declaring that justice and virtue are honourable, but grievous and toilsome; and that the pleasures of vice and injustice are easy of attainment, and are only censured by law and opinion.

This predicament, which is entirely unavoidable, refigures ethics as something beyond individual choice. Yes, I make decisions about who or what might enter my home, who or what has access to my Twitter feed, but this only happens in the face of an ever-present exposedness to others. Prior to the large-scale availability of networked computational devices, Levinas described the relation that defines networked life. Levinas likens this predicament to that of the hostage, and he suggests that if “we” as humans share anything at all, it is this experience of being held hostage by another that resists representation, that arrives over and beyond our attempts to make sense of that other.

. Psychologists have thought about morality primarily as a system of rules that prevents people from hurting each other and taking their possessions. But I believe that morality is much richer and more balanced. Most people don’t want to rape, steal, and kill. What they really want is to live in a moral community where people treat each other well, and in which they can satisfy their needs for love, productive work, and a sense of belonging to groups of which they are proud. We get a visceral sense that we do not live in such a moral world when we see people behave in petty, cruel, or selfish ways. But when we see a stranger perform a simple act of kindness for another stranger, it gives us a thrilling sense that maybe we do live in such a world.

We rely more on what we feel than what we think when solving moral dilemmas. It’s not that religion and culture don’t have a role to play, but the building blocks of morality clearly predate humanity. We recognize them in our primate relatives, with empathy being most conspicuous in the bonobo ape and reciprocity in the chimpanzee. Moral rules tell us when and how to apply our empathic tendencies, but the tendencies themselves have been in existence since time immemorial.

As an aside, do you believe in “self-sufficiency”?

After all, don’t we tend to examine our motivations for doing something only when we have reason to doubt that we are doing the right thing?

It also doesn’t lessen the value and the potential power of the example one sets for others.

aspect of

take be

possible actions and outcomes

It migh

Hence rhetoric may be regarded as an offshoot of dialectic, and also of ethical (or political) studies.

It is not right to pervert the judge by moving him to anger or envy or pity -- one might as well warp a carpenter's rule before using it.

Much as it is not the criminal defense lawyer's place to judge their client regardless of how guilty they are, it is not the doctor's place to force experimental treatment upon a patient regardless of how badly the research is needed, and it is not the priest's place to pass worldly judgement on their flock, it is not the programmer's place to try and decide whether the user is using the software in a "good" way or not.

neglected all the good things which this study affords, and became nothing more than professors of meddlesomeness and greed

For they taught their art for a good purpose, to be used against enemies and evil-doers, in self-defence not in aggression, and others have perverted their instructions, and turned to a bad use their own strength and skill. But not on this account are the teachers bad, neither is the art in fault, or bad in itself; I should rather say that those who make a bad use of the art are to blame. And the same argument holds good of rhetoric; for the rhetorician can speak against all men and upon any subject,—in short, he can persuade the multitude better than any other man of anything which he pleases, but he should not therefore seek to defraud the physician or any other artist of his reputation merely because he has the power; he ought to use rhetoric fairly, as he would also use his athletic powers.