And journalism is all about getting eyeballs, even if that compromises accuracy in the process. What we have here is an abridgment Current.TV 'reprint' of a London Times article that doesn't cite any specific papers, and which contains a great deal more hand-waving than specifics. It's so poorly edited that the Current.TV version never identifies who this 'Marino' person is (the Times does: Lori Marino, a zoologist from Emory U., GA). So already you're forming conclusions based on significantly incomplete information.

Moving onto the Times article, it too fails to differentiate clearly between the findings of two scientists (Marino & Reiss), specializing in the study of dolphins, and a professor of ethics (White) offering a view on the implications of the scientific findings. Agree or disagree with his conclusion, offering opinions on ethical matters is the sort of thing ethicists are employed to do. What's not clear is the degree of advocacy taking place, or who is doing it.

If Marino and Reiss simply offer their findings about the neurology and observable behavior of dolphins, and observe that this allows us to make some inferences about how intelligent they are in human terms using rigorous methods, that's not advocacy of the kind you object to: that'd just good old empiricism. To the extent that there's an agenda in the choice of subject, it's one of increasing scientific knowledge. No scientists needs permission for the curiosity. How about White? Perhaps his abridged quote about delphine moral qualifications is advocacy, or perhaps it's the conclusion he's drawn after evaluating the accuracy of the scientific findings and placing them in a formal ethical framework of the kind we use to explore other ethical questions and inform policy. One doesn't have to agree with an ethicist's conclusion, but we must at least admit that someone whose job it is to teach moral reasoning is entitled to apply their skills and form an opinion.

It seems to me that you've decided to take the headline literally and attribute the apparent conclusion of the ethics professor to the psychologist and zoologist, and then condemn them for unscientific irresponsibility.

There are two flaws with this approach. The obvious one is the inaccuracy of judging someone by the actions or statements of another. The less obvious one - even if the advocacy is expressed by the scientists themselves - is the assumption that they are claiming scientific authority for something they might advocate. It is not wrong for scientists to have opinions on non-scientific topics like ethics, or to express those opinions in public. It's only wrong for a scientist to assert a scientific basis for an unscientific opinion by leveraging their academic authority.

For example, a biologist can observe that a human breathing x amount of carbon monoxide is likely to be fatal; this we are willing to treat as a fact based on academic credibility. The same biologist might also opine that killing people by suffocating them with carbon monoxide is immoral; here, academic standing confers no more moral authority than you or I enjoy, but nor does it imply any less. Moral hazard is when the biologist says 'my expertise on the biological effects of carbon monoxide gives me superior powers of moral judgment.' That's flat-out dishonest, and if a scientist employs a technical journal as a platform for their moral beliefs, I quite agree that it's unscientific. But if they want to present their moral beliefs in the Journal of Moral Philosophy, that doesn't bother me at all because I can judge their argument from its proper perspective, and evaluate whether the moral reasoning they employ justifies the conclusions they draw. Nor would I have a problem with an ethicist submitting a paper to the Journal of Morally Neutral Psychology if it were presenting rigorous empirical observations and statistical methods that were strictly limited to describing people's behavior. In short, it is the context in which activism takes place that matters when judging its professionalism - if any activism has taken place at all.

So, I did some research into the background. It turns out that the context in which these academics talked about dolphins was (drumroll, please) at a symposium on titled 'Intelligence in Dolphins: Ethical and Policy Implications' during the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Marino presented anatomical findings about the anatomical evidence used to evaluate the intelligence and wellbeing of dolphins, and whether measurable declines in wellbeing could result from conditions of captivity. Reiss reviewed her work on the cognitive and social psychology of dolphins, and asked whether scientists can or should seek to export existing ethical practices governing scientific research and treatment of livestock in the US to other nations who are indifferent to such ethical standards. White examined the ethical implications of these and other questions, seemingly concluding that despite fundamental differences, the basis on which we accord moral standing to humans also seems to apply to dolphins.

I don't know the details of what they said; I'm going by the abstracts for the symposium listed on the conference schedule, which seems to be the entire basis for the Times article as well. These are available at http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2010/webprogram/Session1526.html

But what I do know, now, is that these three individuals were not attempting to persuade or even address the public, but were discussing the ethical quandaries encountered within their profession, in front of an audience of other scientists at a professional conference.

Is this OK, or you still have a problem with it? If so, could you explain how it differs from discussions of medical or legal ethics among members of those professions?