We hope not, but as you will see, it is hard to avoid an inadvertent misuse and we are as fallible as any other statistician. Some statisticians argue for a separation of ethics and competence. Well, honest disagreement about methods is ethical, of course, but we sometimes see abuses which exceed reasonable tolerance. Because of the full complexity of ethical issues in a large, diverse universe of contrasting environments, applications, and collaborative structures, some feel that the only tractable problem is deciding how to teach statistical ethics to students. After all, this cannot be expected to deal with all possible issues.
Some new issues arise in teaching, as opposed to defining, statistical ethics.
First, some insist that no student can truly understand ethics, as opposed to memorizing enough words to pass a test, without a grounding in some philosophical theory of ethics. This leads to discussions of whether some philosophy course should be a prerequisite to an ethics course or whether a philosophy professor might be a guest lecturer in a statistical ethics course. There are others who feel a separate course in ethics is futile. Others claim success with separate ethics courses. The problem is that experience has shown that students get the expected results and look good even when essential laboratory equipment, unbeknownst to them, has become miscalibrated or reagents are defective.