PROFESSIONAL ETHICS AND PRACTICES - COLUMN 179
stranger is communicating. Talking to Strangers: what we should know about the people we don’t know is something we all should read. The approach AIPG will take regarding mask wearing at this fall’s annual meeting is an example of a default to the truth that we expect people to be honest. Usually, but not always, our expectation of honesty works out.
Recognizing deception requires being open to the possibility that someone is trying to deceive us.3 As Stephen J. Gould observed, “One often needs a proper theory to set a context for the exposure of fraud. Piltdown Man [dis- covered in 1912-1913] fooled some of the world’s best scientists for generations, and I will never forget what W.E. Le Gros Clark, one of the three scientists who exposed the fraud in the early 1950s said to me when I asked him why this resolution had not occurred earlier. Even an amateur, like myself, has no trouble for seeing the Piltdown bones for what they are—the staining is so crude; the file marks applied to the orangutan teeth in the lower jaw are so obvious, yet so necessary to make the teeth seem human in the forger’s plan, for the cusps of ape and human teeth differ so greatly. Le Gros Clark said to me: “One needed to approach the bones with the hypothesis of fraud already in mind. In
3. Fraud involves theft by lying.
4. Gould, Stephen J., 1998 and 2011, The lying stones of Würzberg and Marrakech in This View of Life column: Natural History, April 1998, and in The Lying Stones of Marrakech, penultimate reflections in natural history: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press..
Answers: (cont.) 5.
It is important to remember that the Young’s modulus (E), bulk elastic materials have positive values.
Given:
quantity.
Rock Type Basalt
Diabase/Gabbro/ Granite
Syenite
Dolomite/Limestone Sandstone Shale
Gneiss Marble
Quartzite Schist
www.aipg.org
Average Poisson’s Ratio
0.14-2.00
0.125-0.250 0.250
0.080-0.200 0.066-0.125 0.110-0.430 0.091-0.250 0.250-0.380 0.230
0.010-0.200
Oct.Nov.Dec 2021 • TPG 31
such a context, the fakery immediately became obvious.”4
I found that approaching claims of ore-rich veins with the hypothesis of fraud was frequently true in my 21 years investigating natural resource frauds as a geologist for the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The most “suc- cessful” con men I encountered were incredibly and convincingly sincere. They passionately believed the “truths” used to describe their schemes. I have no doubt they could have passed polygraph tests with flying colors. Because I had already identified the red flags of their frauds before meeting them, I could not be convinced. But a good many highly intelligent people were taken, invested their money, and lost it all. Even senior mining professionals who had no experi- ence with mining frauds were sometimes convinced of the veracity of the pro- moter’s claims, at least initially.
Can an individual’s freedom be limited?
At the end of his Editor’s Corner, “Are Rules Just Meant to be Broken?” in the Jul-Aug-Sep 2021 TPG, Adam Heft (CPG-10265) describes observing numerous individuals (some with small children) who had climbed over a fence intended to keep people from clambering
over the Whitefish Falls in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Heft asked, “Are there ethical issues in connection with the situation?” My answer is “yes.” The situ- ation described by Heft strikes me as an example of the “personal freedom to do whatever I want” versus “protection of the public’s safety” conflict that has char- acterized debates over mandatory mask wearing during the Covid-19 pandemic. At their most basic level, all moral and ethical rules (and laws) place limits on an individual’s right to do whatever he/ she/they wants or stipulate that we do something like requiring possession of a driver’s license if we wish to legally drive or, in some cases, require geoscientists to participate in mandatory Continuing Professional Development programs. So, who has the right to make rules, ethical or otherwise, and are people obliged to follow them? Certainly, these debatable questions come down to, “Can an indi- vidual’s freedom be limited?” The exis- tence of rules answers this question as “yes.” Whether a particular rule applies to everyone can be debated.
In his 2004 Common Morality: decid- ing what to do Bernard Gert describes morally justi- fied exceptions to common moral rules. For example, self-defense is recognized as an exception to the “do not murder” rule. Surgeons are allowed to violate
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