Symposium on Critical Thinking and Consumer Chemistry
Robelt Silberman S.U.N.Y. at Cortland, Cortland, NY 13045 Even though consumer chemistry is the most directly relevant topic in our chemistry course, it is usually relegated to passing remarks in odd moments of a lecture, or it may appear in the guise of the ubiquitous lab experiment involving the titration of antacids. In fact, the interface between our students as consumers and the chemicals they buy is one we can exploit to interest our students in chemistry and to increase their awareness of its importance in their lives. We can also use the decision-making process implicit in each transaction our students make as consumers to foster critical thinking in chemistry. HIPAaspects of consumer chemisrry relate to and foster critical thinkine is the central theme of this symposium.
The papers cover a wide range of topics from ethics and values (Kooser) to laboratory experiments for analytical chemistry (Lien and Kalbus). The papers by Hill and Miller discuss examples of consumer chemistry suitable for general chemistry courses. Bodner presents a thoughtful discussion of the need for a consumer chemistry course and the thinking and assimilation processes of students. The more unusual topic, reporting on chemical topics directly to the consumer, is discussed in Martin's paper. An unusual approach to teaching about consumer chemistry is described in Anderson's paper. Finally McKone and Banville discuss a course in consumer chemistry for adult learners.
Value Issues in Consumer Chemistry Robert G. Kooser Knox College, Galesburg, IL 61401 Any discussion of value, especially in an educational context, must be preceded by a definition of the term "value". I will take the word to mean "anything of interest to any individual". This is the use of the term in its broadest context and allows me to address not only issues of value that are "ethical" (i.e.. concerned with moralitv) hut also those judgments that a;e made concerning suchvthingsas educational content and methods of teaching in a consumer chemistry course. Although seldom thought of as value judgments, these pedagodical decisions are as laden with values as the more familiar judgments concerned with product integrity. First of all I would like to discuss the role of ethics in co&nmer chemistry and then move to the pedagodical value concerns. Ethlcs in Consumer Chemistry All of chemistrv contains value issues. hut nowhere do these issues become so clear and important to society as in applied chemistry. For the person on the street, these issues are most immediate in the area of consumer chemistry. What are the important ethical dimensions of consumer chemistry, and what are their roles in a consumer chemistry course? First of all, I maintain that there is no distinction between the general issues of morality in the marketplace and the role of moralvalues in consumer chemistry; there are no unique ethical concepts to consumer chemist6 Now in a so-called free-market economy, the central ethical question is whether all business strategy ought to be made solely on the basis of what maximizes profit. T o put the onestion in another wav. oueht a manaeer's .. personal . ethical beliefs supersede those de&ions that will maximize profit? l'nuextrrmeanwers furm the battleline for debate.' 204
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On one hand, there are the economic libertarians (the modern day Adam Smiths) who hold that maximizing profit is the only way to promote the general welfare. They argue that the marketnlace orovides the morals:. .~ e .o ~will l e demand only those products and services that satisfy their needs and protect their interests. Therefore businesses that cater to Lublic demand will he pn~firahleand in rhecourseofsntisfyinr this demand will operate in the public zood. Businesses that deceive the cons&ner or provide shoddy or hazardous merchandise will not be patronized and will fail. Furthermore, husiness managers who allow decisions to be made on moral grounds instead of profit maximization will deny the stockholders their fair share and fail to provide the public what it demands. Those on the other side in this debate might be called the marketplace moralists (the Nadarites) who insist that there exist explicit moral rules to which business should be held and that business managers must make their decisions in light of these rules. According to the moralist argument, there could well be occasions when a management decision would have to be made on moral grounds that would lower profits. All questions that arise in regard to ethics in the market place spring from the essential tension between maximizing profit and exercising moral restraint. Certainly if you asked a class of students what moral
Presented at the American Chemical Society National Meeting. Anaheim, CA, Sept. 7-1 1, 1986. Many of the points in this discussion have come from Goldman. A. H. The Moral Foundations of ProfessionalEthics; Rowman and Littlefield: Totowa. NJ, 1980
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issues mieht dominate consumer chemistrv. vou would eet questions-like: Is the label on a product trkhful? Does ;he product work correctly? Are the hazards and risks clearly indicated? The issue behind these questions is whether deception. or in a more mild sense, lack of full disclosure, is proper in the name of maximizing profit. The answer may not be as clear-cut as i t first appears. The marketplace moralist would, of course, answer that full disclosure is a moral requirement. The libertarian would argue that in a truly free market profitable companies would not withhold known hazards from the buying public because consumers would avoid such faultv ~ r o d u c tand s nurchase safe ones. However. completely full disclosure might not be necessary or desirable because full disclosure might confuse or even frighten consumers and prove to he counterproductive to everyone. The consumer would be denied the product and the maker the profit. Other questions might center around risk-benefit analysis; at what point do the risks of a product outweigh its benefits? Is this the same point a t which the product is taken off the market? This is a managerial decision that could be made in a quantitative calculation of profit maximization or could entail moral considerations. Certainly, the drug industry has ample room to ponder this dilemma. Should a drug he marketed which could cure 99 people hut would kill the 100th? Or to put it in a homey context, should hypochlorite bleach be removed from the market because consumers can mixit with ammonia and kill themselves? Most would say no hecause, as long as there is a clear warninp, the benefits of bleach outweigh the risk ofgrois misuse. other cases, rhe borderline between risk and henefit is nut so clcar. and here there is ample room for debate. There is another facet to this aspect of the risk-benefit issue, and that is product liability. In a hiehlv litieious societv such as ours. a companv . -mavwithhofd aprod;ct from thk market simpiy because an estimate of potential liabilitv indicates an unacceptable risk. This fear of litigation m& even overrule what dome would say is a moral obligation to market a product as is the case with drug companies who have withdrawn vaccines and contraceptive products from the market to avoid potential lawsuits. Beyond the manacerial decision whether to market is anothe; aspect of the kk-benefit dilemma-the problem of the unforeseen. Who could have known that capsules would be tampered with? Were the drug companies immoral in marketing capsules? The unforeseen is not limited to unknown defects but also includes user ignorance. Gasoline is highly volatile and flammable, but people continue to misuse it in basements where pilot lights exist. Is the seller morally wrong to market such a pot&tially hazardous product? On the risk-benefit spectrum at what point is the consumer on hisher own and the manufacturer no longer liable either legally or morally? (This is another form of the same dilemma faced by scientists-at what point are you no longer responsible for the use to which your invention is put (For example, was Einstein responsihl~forthe atomic bomb?)) Another point to be made is that certain concepts that might be called moral have been relegated to the legal arena. For example, we have truth-in-packaging, truth-in-contents, and truth-in-lending laws that will punish those businesses that violate them. Thus, what might have been a moral decision is now a question of law, and the response of a manager to a possible illegal action will be made on the basis of whether the punishment is worth the potential profit. There are certainly many cases of gross violation of moral responsibility in the name of profit such as the Ford Motor Company and its coverup of gas tank defects in the Pinto. Because of cases like this, you could argue that laws are necessarv to protect the public because businesses. motivated only by profit taking,'do not exercise morul reslraint. On the other hand, regulation is not without its social and eco-
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nomic costs, and it is possible that the medicine is worse than the illness. For example, any regulation must be enforced, and that means adding to the government bureaucracy. Also, the existence of laws does not necessarily mean compliance, and prosecution can he delayed and expensive. Lastly, it could be argued that substituting law for morality actually impedes ethical behavior by replacing a narrower, rigid standard for a elobal ethical one.' The ethical issues facing consumer chemistry are then just those of the business world in general. The question we now face is whether one ought even to discuss these ethical issues in a consumer chemistry course; it is after all a Chemistry course, not a study of professional ethics. I would, however, argue that i t is proper and even necessary to do this. First, chemistry doesnot exist in a vacuum separate from social and economic concerns-this is certainly true of consumer chemistry-and our students must know this. Second, consumer chemistry courses are often for the nonmajor and the constraint of teaching lots of chemistry-with-a-capital-cbecause-the-students-will-need-it-at-the-next-level does not exist so that time can he taken to discuss topics like business ethics.
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Pedagodical Values and Consumer Chemistry
We as teachers make value iudements all the time. The most explicit and central valie judgment we make is in terms of course content. There are more skills and information to be taught than there is time to teach, so we must discriminate based on what we perceive to he the goals of the course. In examining various an~roachesto consumer chemistry, I have deveioped tbr& categories for traditional courses. The first cateeorv- is the how-thinzs-work aouroach. .. Here you are expected to master chemical principles so you can understand how consumer products work. Thus you learn redox chemistry to understand that chlorine hleach contains an oxidizing agent or that a water softener is explained in terms of shifting equilihria. The idea is that chemistry is made palatable by seeing its relevance, that is, the chemistry of common things is a sugar coat to lure the fearful and reluctant. Another approach is called where-to-find-it, which emohasizes how to out vour hands on information about chekcals in the ma;ket&ace. Here you might learn about the Merck Index and what it contains or how to look up a drug in the Physician's Desk Reference. You would learn the importance of label reading and how to evaluate advertising claims. The major goals in this case have to do with information and where to find it. As such, certain kinds of chemical nomenclature and principles must he mastered in order to process the information intelligently. The last general approach to consumer chemistry I &I1 pitfalls-andhazards. This method also seeks to beguile the student with the relevance of chemical principles. In this case, though, you learn why, in chemical terms, diet pills do not work. I do not claim that any given course or section of a course devoted to consumer chemistry follows just one of the above a~nroaches.Indeed. tbev mav a m e a r in various mixes. Now ti& the traditional approa&es Lave been identified, what ought a consumer chemistry course to do? It is my impression that most consumer chemistry courses are targeted at the nonmaior, so for the sake of discussion let us assume that we are examining such a course. The audience for the course will certainly affect the goals and content, and I would argue that we must take a realistic look at the students who are taking these courses, and then we must have goals that are consonant with the character of the audience. There are, I believe, only three realistic goals for a consumer chemistry course for nonmajors. First and foremost, we as chemistry teachers must disabuse ourselves of the notion that consumer chemistry is a shoe-horned version of general chemistry. Orbitals, balanced equations, and freeenergy tables are not relevant, important, or proper; these Volume 65
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are facts that will soon he forgotten. Nor is i t reasonable to expect that we can, in a week or a semester, turn a group of individuals who do not understand science a t all into sophisticated chemists who can make intelligent judgments about complicated chemical prohlems. Hence the rationale that we must teach them chemistry to make them "intelligent lay people" is certainly misplaced and inappropriate. Therefore, a comprehensive course in traditional chemical facts and skills with an overlay of examples from the area of consumer chemistry will not work. What I propose instead is that we communicate a general appreciation of the relevance of chemistry in peoples' lives and in the study of nature. The model here might well come from the artsy-craftsy side of campus where music or visual arts appreciation courses are common and successful. For this goal to succeed real world examples need to be used (and what better field could one ask for than consumer chemistry!), stories about chemists and chemistry become important, and discussions about such issues as business ethics in consumer chemistry or current events about chemical matters are integral. I do not mean to imply that chemical facts are irrelevant; indeed, to understand the prohlems of the Union Carbide's industry plant you must know something ahout how chemicals are made and maybe even what MIC is and why it is hazardous. Rather I do mean to say that, if it is relevance we are seeking to teach, then which facts we choose are not terribly important and we do not need to he comprehensive. In this case then, both the how-does-it-work and the pitfalls-and-hazards approaches have something to offer as a component of teaching chemical relevance, hut they cannot be the totality. Another reasonable goal is toteach amastery of consumer skills that are related to consumer chemistry. What does it take to read a label and understand it? You have to know some nomenclature. You have to understand mass concepts, percent composition, and concentration units. You may have to know how to use information sources like Sax's Dangerow Properties of Industrial Materials. How do you know how to evaluate advertising claims? Answers to this question have to deal with how to put your hands on reliable and unbiased information. Is Bayer aspirin better than the generic variety next to it on the shelf? Here you have to have an understanding of the notion of a chemical and universality of that concept. The where-to-find-it approach is clearly important to this kind of goal. The last reasonable goal for a nonmajor course in consumer chemistry is to teach the students how to discriminate between the scientific and the pseudoscientific. This is a major problem for all the sciences and takes on a massive cultural dimension. Witness the success of the creation "scientists" in convincing people that their view of evolution has scientific merit. Witness the success of advertisers in using pseudoscientific claims to sell products. How often do you see a gentleman in a white lab coat discussing claims of some item complete with charts and a pointer? The basis of this prohlem is in how we as science educators project the image of our discipline to our students. We have not reflectedvery carefully on the true natureof science, and as a result our students have a very poor idea about what chemistry really is. What are the misconceptions? There are several common ones: science is just a collection of facts, and these
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facts reflect nature as she really is (naive realism); scientific knowledge is progressive (excessive rationalism); scientists are completely disinterested (blind idealism); and experiment yields complete verification (credulous empirici~m)~. T o correct these misunderstandings about science and to give our students a more realistic view will be difficult since we as science educators are often victims of these same misconceptions. How can we teach our students to tell the difference between the scientific and ~seudoscientific?It will require a two-stage process; first science educators will have to take seriously the idea that we must understand the nature of our discipline. T o do that we can read contemporary views about science written by philosophers and other analysts. For instance, every science educator should have read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Reuolutions. Also we can he aware of work being done in this area of science education. For example, an excellent discussion of these nrohlems and some sueeested solutions are contained u ~ ~ ~ e s a u t e l s .second ~ b ~ hstage e in a paper by R. ~ a d e a and will require the introduction of science demythologizing techniques into our curriculum. Minimally, it will entail a different mode of teaching from the current dominant method of lecturing on chemical facts. The recent literature has begun to address these prohlems. For example, Bent3 has discussed the prohlems of chemistry courses in general that are excessively theoretical in content and has offered some suggestions f i r redress. Morrison4 has suggested a discussion-style format for class conduct. Conclusion In conclusion. I have made a olea for the inclusion of the discussion of business ethics in a course on consumer chemistrv. Also I have advocated that we must seriously reevaluatebur pedagogical goals in courses of consumer chemistry. I contend that current approaches are inadequate and do not take a realistic account of the nature of the student audience. An approach is needed that is first of all less wed to chemical facts and skills and more weighted toward a broad appreciation of chemistry and secondly cultivates certain skills useful in making judgments in the market place. Acknowledgment The author would like to thank Lance Factor and James Peterson of Knox College for stimulating discussions on values in consumer chemistry and Pat Kooser for her helpful suggestions and proofreading.
These views have been discussed previously in the two following works. The catchy titles are taken from Nadeau and Desautels. (a) Factor. L.; Kooser. R. G. "Value Presuppositions in Science Textbooks"; KnoxCollege:Galesburg. IL. 1981. (b) Nadeau. R.: Desauteis, J. Epistemology and the Teaching of Science: Science Council of Canada: Ottawa. 1984. Bent, H. A. J. Chem. Educ. 1986, 63.878. 'Morrison. R. T. In Proceedings of the Chicago Conference on Liberal Education. Number I. Undergraduate Education in Chemistry andphysics;Rice. M. R., Ed.; University of Chicago: Chicago, 1986;p 50.
