Violence and the Politics of Research SERIES IN ETHICS

ETHICS TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION EdIted by Daniel Callahan and 5155elll Bok MENTAL RETARDATION AND STERILIZATION A Problem of Competency and Paternalism Edited by Ruth Macklm lind WIllard Gllylm THE ROOTS OF ETHICS: Science, Religion, and Values EdIted by Damel Call1lhan and H. TrIStram Engelhllrdt, Jr. ETHICS IN HARD TIMES Edited by Arthur L. Caplan and Damel Callahan VIOLENCE AND THE POLITICS OF RESEARCH EdIted by Wlllllrd Gaylm, Ruth Mackhn, and Tabltlm M. Powledge WHO SPEAKS FOR THE CHILD: The Problems of Proxy Consent EdIted by Wdlard Gllylm and Ruth Mllcklm

A Continuahon Order Plan IS available for thIS senes A conhnuahon order will bnng delIvery of each new volume ImmedIately upon publication Volumes are billed only upon actual shIpment For further mformahon please contact the publisher Violence and the Politics of Research

Edited by Willard Gaylln The Hastings Center Hastings-an-Hudson, New York Ruth Macklin Albert Einstein College of Medicine Bronx, New York and Tabitha M. Powledge Center for Science and Technology Policy New York University New York, New York

PLENUM PRESS • NEW YORK AND LONDON Library of Congress CatalogIng in Publication Data

MaIn entry under title' Violence and the politics of research (The Hastings Center series In ethics) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1 VlOlence-Research-Umted States-Addresses. essays, lectures 2 Aggres· siveness (Psychology)-Addresses, essays, lectures 3. VIOlence-• Case studies-Addresses, essays, lectures I CaylIn, Willard II MacklIn, Ruth, 1938· . III. Powledge, Tabitha M IV Series. HN90 V5V535 303.6'2 81·15900 ISBN 978-1-4684-4021-8 ISBN 978-1-4684-4019-5 (eBook) AACR2 DOl 10.1007/978-1-4684-4019-5

© 1981 The Hastings Center Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1981 Institute of Society, EthICS and the Life SCiences 360 Broadway Hastings·on·Hudson, New York 10706 1981 Plenum Press, New York A Division of Plenum Publishing Corporation 233 Spring Street, New York, N Y 10013

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored In a retrIeval system, or transmitted in any form or any means, electronic, mechamcal. photocopYIng, mICrofilmIng, recordIng, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher Contributors

EDITORS

Willard Gaylin, M.D., is clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, as well as cofounder and president since its inception of The Hastings Center, Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sci• ences. He has been involved in questions of jurisprudence over the past twenty years, and has written several books, including In the Service of Their Country: War Resisters in Prison (Viking, 1970), Partial Justice: A Study of Bias in Sentencing (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), and (with J. Meister and R. Neville) Operating on the Mind: The Psychosurgery Conflict (Basic Books, 1975).

Ruth Macklin, Ph.D., is a philosopher in the Department of Community Health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. At the time the project from which this book emerged was carried out she was codirector, with Willard Caylin, of the Behavioral Studies Research Croup at The Hastings Center. She has contributed articles to professional journals in phi• losophy, psychiatry, law, and medical ethics. Her book, Mart,

v vi CONTRIBUTORS

Mind, and Morality: The Ethics of Behavior Control, was pub• lished by Prentice-Hall in 1981. She is one of the editors of Moral Problems in Medicine (Prentice-Hall, 1976), a widely used text in medical ethics.

Tabitha M. Powledge is a writer who is interested in the relationship between biology and politics. She has specialized in genetics and genetic policy, and her book on that subject, The Last Taboo, will be published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1982. She currently directs the project on the ethics of genetic en• gineering at the Center of Science and Technology Policy, New York, New York. At the time this volume was in prep• aration she was Associate for Biosocial Studies at The Hastings Center and a member of the center's Behavioral Studies Re• search Group. The author of scores of articles in lay and professional publications, she has taught at Yale, lectured widely to professional and general audiences, and has served as consultant to private groups and government agencies, among them the International Society for Research on Aggres• sion.

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS

Ronald Bayer, Ph.D., is a political scientist and Associate for Policy Studies at The Hastings Center. He has published a number of articles on social policy and heroin use and is the author of Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (Basic Books, 1981).

John P. Conrad is a career criminologist, most of whose career was spent in various capacities in the California Department of Corrections, in which he served for twenty years. Since leaving that agency in 1967, Conrad has served in the United States Bureau of Prisons as chief of research, in the Law En• forcement Assistance Administration, and as senior fellow in criminal justice at the Academy for Contemporary Problems. CONTRIBUTORS vii

He is now a senior staff member of the American Justice Institute of Sacramento.

Dorothy Nelkin is a professor in the Program of Science, Technology and Society and the Department of Sociology at . She is also a fellow of The Hastings Cen• ter. She is the author of several books on controversies over science and technology including Science Textbook Controversies and the Politics of Equal Time (MIT Press, 1970), Controversy: Politics of Technical Decisions (Sage, 1979), and (with M. Pollak) The Atom Besieged (MIT Press, 1980).

T. M. Scanlon, professor of philosophy at Princeton Univer• sity, is the author of articles on political philosophy, ethical theory, and applied ethics. He is also an associate editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs.

Judith P. Swazey, Ph.D., is executive director of Medicine in the Public Interest, Inc. and an adjunct professor of sociomed• ical sciences at Boston University Schools of Medicine and Public Health. She has been a fellow of The Hastings Center since 1969, and served as its vice-president in 1980. Her major areas of research and writing deal with the history of neu• roscience, medical ethics, and social and biomedical aspects of research and therapeutic innovation.

Robin M. Williams, Jr., is Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Science at Cornell University. He has served as presi• dent and as secretary of the American Sociological Associa• tion. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of The Hastings Center and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among his several books are American Society: A Sociological Interpretation (3rd ed., Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), Strangers Next Door (Prentice-Hall, 1964), and Mutual Accommodation: Ethnic Conflict and Cooperation (University of Minnesota Press, 1977). Preface

This volume is one outcome of a two-year study conducted by the Behavioral Studies Research Group of The Hastings Center. 1 It is divided into three parts to reflect the several facets of the interdisciplinary project from which it stems. In the opening chapter Willard Gaylin and Ruth Macklin, who di• rected the study, describe its basic conception and structure, which centered around three programs to conduct research into aspects of violence and aggressive behavior, programs aborted in the early 1970s because they were politically and

IThis project was supported by the EVIST Program of the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 05577-17072, and by a joint award by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any opinions, findings, conclu• sions, or recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities. Other published outcomes are the edited transcripts of two of the case-study workshops conducted under this project: "Researching Violence: Science, Politics, and Public Contro• versy," Special Supplement, The Hastings Center Report 9 (April 1979); and "The XYY Controversy: Researching Violence and Genetics," Special Sup• plement, The Hastings Center Report 10 (August 1980). Copies of these tran• scripts are available for purchase from The Hastings Center, 360 Broadway, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706.

ix x PREFACE socially controversial. The chapter includes an account of ear• lier work of the Behavioral Studies Research Group that led to the idea for this inquiry into the ethical, social, and political dimensions of scientific research on aggression. Chapter 1 also contains some reflections by the authors on the difficulties of conducting scientific research on violence and aggression in particular, and on socially sensitive topics more generally. Chapter 2, "Legitimate and Illegitimate Uses of Violence: A Review of Ideas and Evidence," provides historical and sociological background to enhance our understanding of three controversies that erupted in the early 1970s over sci• entific attempts to study the causes and possible "cures" of violent behavior. This chapter is based on Robin M. Williams, Jr.'s oral presentation to the project group at its first meeting, a presentation designed to acquaint members of the group with social perspectives on violence. Professor Williams fo• cuses on the ways in which direct physical violence is legi• timated, justified, or otherwise rendered socially acceptable or tolerable. Initially he argues that most violence is not deviant behavior or disapproved conduct, "but virtuous action in the service of applauded values." After a brief summary of con• temporary and historical data regarding the incidence, prev• alence, and cost of violence, Williams isolates four primary types of cross-cultural social definitions that allow for the"do• mestication" or legitimation of violence. The chapter con• cludes with a discussion of particular American attitudes to• ward violence, and how those attitudes contribute to the acceptance of the legitimating definitions described earlier in the chapter. The second section begins with a detailed account of the three abandoned research projects: an attempt at UCLA to organize a center to study violence, programs to study and expand techniques of behavior modification in federal prisons, and a prospective study of boys with sex chromosome ab• normalities in Boston. In her conclusion, Tabitha M. Powledge reflects on some similarities and differences in the sources of controversy over the three cases, and assesses the legitimacy PREFACE xi of the critics' complaints. Chapter 3 is based on extensive research Powledge conducted as background to the case stud• ies. She taped interviews with key actors in the controversial episodes, a few by telephone but the majority in person. She also examined newspaper accounts as well as files and corre• spondence to which she was granted access. Before each of the case-study workshops that were held as part of the project activities, Powledge prepared a detailed chronology of events surrounding each controversy, along with descriptions of the aborted projects and the major parties to the dispute. These were distibuted to the protagonists and also to all participants in the Hastings Center project. It is a comment on her efforts that no participant at any of the workshops questioned the accuracy of a single item. For this volume, Powledge recast those materials into narrative form, adding concluding re• flections of her own. The four chapters that comprise the third part of this book are scholarly reflections on the events and circumstances described in Part II. Written by project participants, each chapter addresses the key issues raised by the project from a somewhat different perspective. In "Science and Social Control: Controversies over Re• search on Violence," social scientists Dorothy Nelkin and Ju• dith P. Swazey examine the forces and issues that converge in the social assessment of science through a discussion of the three case studies. According to the authors, the research programs studying violence elicited public controversy be• cause the research and demonstration work in each project raised sensitive questions about some or all of the following: the role of genetically mediated characteristics of human be• havior; the morality of modifying behavior by medical or psy• chological means; the power of social control offered by new biomedical and behavioral technologies; and the power re• lationships inherent in situations and settings where freedom of choice to participate in research cannot be taken for granted. Underlying each of these projects was a different ideological perspective on the definition of violence and its xii PREFACE sources, and on the consequences of the emerging techniques for predicting and manipulating behavior. Nelkin and Swazey claim that none of the actors in any of the contro• versies-either antagonists or protagonists-could be de• scribed as a hero or a villain, but that the researchers' lack of understanding of the ideological underpinnings of their in• vestigations contributed significantly to the controversy. Picking up on the theme of ideological underpinnings, Ronald Bayer, a political scientist, traces the history of political and social forces that led to the controversies over research on violence. Chapter 5 begins by noting that in the United States, for the greater part of this century, those identified with the reformist political traditions are the ones who most no• tably aligned themselves with the effort to enhance the role of behavioral scientists in understanding crime, and of psy• chiatrists in the treatment of offenders. Drawing on scholarly materials in law and the social sciences, Bayer discusses the strong interest in America and Western Europe in merging the law enforcement process with a psychiatric-therapeutic orientation. He explains the affinity between psychiatry and American liberals as deriving not only from the explanatory force of psychodynamic formulations but also from the prom• ise of achieving correctional ends without recourse to pun• ishment. Bayer identifies several factors that contributed to a change in liberal attitudes toward correctional psychiatry by the early 1970s, and concludes by delineating the ways in which those factors led to the political responses to each of the three controversial research projects. In Chapter 6, John P. Conrad, formerly director of re• search for the Bureau of Prisons, outlines an ideal, compre• hensive program for conducting research into the causes of and possible preventive mechanisms for violent and aggres• sive behavior. He begins with a sketch of the boundaries of present scientific knowledge about violent behavior. There is little real understanding of the phenomenon of recidivism, the plausibility of current deterrence mechanisms, or the ef• fectiveness of rehabilitation programs. With these and other PREFACE xiii limitations of present knowledge in mind, Conrad delineates the major research that is called for in this domain, describing those areas of research under the categories "basic" and "ap• plied." He holds that much of the political controversy and ethical objection that emerged with earlier attempts to study the phenomena he cites could have been avoided by estab• lishing a few qualified centers, under government auspices and with federal funding, for research on violence. Conrad concludes by exhorting the public to remember that the fun• damental causes of violence, rooted in human nature and social organizations, are beyond the reach of criminal justice. Because the most important questions about violent crime all arise within the context of intrapsychic dysfunction and social disorganization, it should not be expected or advertised that the research program he proposes-although important-will yield the key to any significant alteration in the phenomenon of violent crime. In the final chapter Thomas M. Scanlon, a philosopher, analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of the claims made by the researchers whose projects were halted. Their central claim was that as scientific researchers they had a special en• titlement to protection from interference and criticism of the kinds they had experienced. Scanlon argues that a discussion of the justification of claims regarding this sort of academic freedom requires an analysis of the kinds of harms that might result from research. The question is one of distinguishing when control of research is justified by harms that might occur, and when control of research should not be allowed because it will be dominated by partisan interests. After identifying two different sorts of harms that might result from re• search-direct consequences of the research process, and in• direct harms stemming from the dissemination of the knowl• edge yielded by research-Scanlon notes that the justifiable control of research is much more problematic in the second sort of case. He concludes with a positive argument contend• ing that at least in some cases, researchers should be held responsible for the harmful applications of their research. xiv PREFACE

Although we make no claims to have covered all the issues raised by the controversies that erupted over these three research projects, we hope this volume will prompt further reflection-both by scientists and by the concerned public-on those issues we have addressed and others as well.

WILLARD GAYLIN RUTH MACKLIN TABITHA M. POWLEDGE Contents

PART I: Introduction to the Problems

Chapter 1: Pitfalls in the Pursuit of Knowledge by Willard Gaylin and Ruth Macklin 3

Chapter 2: Legitimate and Illegitimate Uses of Violence: A Review of Ideas and Evidence by Robin M. Williams, Jr. 23

PART II: Three Case Studies

Chapter 3: How Not to Study Violence by Tabitha M. Powledge 49

PART III: Implications

Chapter 4: Science and Social Control: Controversies over Research on Violence by Dorothy Nelkin and Judith P. Swazey 143

xv xvi CONTENTS

Chapter 5: Embattled Research: Psychiatry, Politics, and the Study of Violent Behavior by Ronald Bayer 163

Chapter 6: Fragile Knowledge and Stubborn Ignorance: Agenda for the Study of Violence by John P. Conrad 185

Chapter 7: Ethics and the Control of Research by T. M. Scanlon 225

Index 247