ABSTRACT
In response to the recurrence of well-publicized and highly damaging scandals across the physical and biological sciences, many universities and some entire national research funding agencies now convene "institutional review boards" to deal with breaches of what has come to be known as "research ethics." It may be flippant to regard the recent emergence of "research ethics" as an academic craze. But perhaps "moral panic" is a more apt description. So perhaps there is, after all, a need for national research ethics boards or even an international court of scientific justice. In legal terms, external social epistemology is a legislative matter, internal social epistemology a judicial matter. The idea of positional good also helps to explain the rather schizoid attitudes toward the production and distribution of knowledge that are epitomized in the constitution of universities.
