There is considerable controversy about the mandatory ethics review of research. This paper engages with the arguments offered by Murray Dyck and Gary Allen against mandatory review, namely, that this regulation fails to reach the standards that research ethics committees apply to research since it is harmful to the ethics of researchers, has little positive evidence base, leads to significant harms (through delaying valuable research) and distorts the nature of research. As these are commonplace arguments offered by researchers against regulation (...) it is useful to assess their strength and the conclusion that they are taken to support, namely, that we ought to move back to a system of trust in researchers without compulsory regulation. Unfortunately, these arguments are at best weak and to some degree come into conflict in terms of supporting the desired conclusion. (shrink)

This paper investigates four questions related to ethical issues associated with the involvement of engineers and scientists in 'military work', including the influence of ethical values and beliefs, the role of gendered perspectives and moves beyond the purely technical. It fits strongly into a human (and planet)-centred systems perspective and extends my previous AI and Society papers on othering and narrative ethics, and ethics and social responsibility. It has two main contributions. The first involves an analysis of the literature through (...) the application of different ethical theories and the application of gendered analysis to discussion of masculinities in engineering and the military. The second is a survey of scientists and engineers to investigate their opinions and experiences. The conclusions draw together the results of these two contributions to provide preliminary responses to the four questions and include a series of recommendations covering education and training, ethical approval of work not involving human participants or animals, the need for organisational support, approaches covering wider perspectives and the encouragement of individual ethical commitment. (shrink)

Ethics regulation for human-subject research has been established for about 20 years in Brazil. However, compliance with this regulation is controversial for non-biomedical sciences, particularly for human and social sciences, the source of a recent debate at the National Commission for Research Ethics. We hypothesized that for these fields, formal requirements for compliance with HSR regulation in graduate programs, responsible for the greatest share of Brazilian science, would be small in number. We analyzed institutional documents from 171 graduate programs at (...) six prestigious Brazilian universities in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the states that fund most of the science conducted in Brazil. Among these programs, 149 were in HSS. The results suggest that non-compliance with standard regulation seems to be the rule in most of these programs. The data may reflect not only a resistance from scientists in these fields to comply with standard regulations for ethics in HSR but also a disciplinary tradition that seems prevalent when it comes to research ethics in HSR. However, recent encounters between Brazilian biomedical and non-biomedical scientists for debates over ethics in HSR point to a changing culture in the approach to research ethics in the country. (shrink)

Dyck and Allen claim that the current model for mandatory ethical review of research involving human participants is unethical once the harms that accrue from the review process are identified. However, the assumptions upon which the authors assert that this model of research ethics governance is justified are false. In this commentary, I aim to correct these assumptions, and provide the right justificatory account of the requirement for research ethics review. This account clarifies why the subsequent arguments that Dyck and (...) Allen make in the paper lack force, and why the ‘governance problem’ in research ethics that they allude to ought to be explained differently. (shrink)

The realities of human agency and decision making pose serious challenges for research ethics. This article explores six major challenges that require more attention in the ethics education of students and scientists and in the research on ethical conduct in science. The first of them is the routinization of action, which makes the detection of ethical issues difficult. The social governance of action creates ethical problems related to power. The heuristic nature of human decision making implies the risk of ethical (...) bias. The moral disengagement mechanisms represent a human tendency to evade personal responsibility. The greatest challenge of all might be the situational variation in people’s ethical behaviour. Even minor situational factors have a surprisingly strong influence on our actions. Furthermore, finally, the nature of ethics itself also causes problems: instead of clear answers, we receive a multitude of theories and intuitions that may sometimes be contradictory. All these features of action and ethics represent significant risks for ethical conduct in science. I claim that they have to be managed within the everyday practices of science and addressed explicitly in research ethics education. I analyse them and suggest some ways in which their risks can be alleviated. (shrink)

The ethics of research projects has become a central aspect in the discussion of how research is conceived and planned in social work and the broader social sciences. Ethics committees play an impo...

Academics from diverse disciplines are recognizing not only the procedural ethical issues involved in research, but also the complexity of everyday “micro” ethical issues that arise. While ethical guidelines are being developed for research in aboriginal populations and low-and-middle-income countries, multi-partnered research initiatives examining arts-based interventions to promote social change pose a unique set of ethical dilemmas not yet fully explored. Our research team, comprising health, education, and social scientists, critical theorists, artists and community-activists launched a five-year research partnership on (...) arts-for-social change. Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council in Canada and based in six universities, including over 40 community-based collaborators, and informed by five main field projects, we set out to synthesize existing knowledge and lessons we learned. We summarized these learnings into 12 key points for reflection, grouped into three categories: community-university partnership concerns, dilemmas related to the arts, and team issues. In addition to addressing previous concerns outlined in the literature, we identified power dynamics hindering meaningful participation of community partners and university-based teams that need to be addressed within a reflective critical framework of ethical practice. We present how our team has been addressing these issues, as examples of how such concerns could be approached in community-university partnerships in arts for social change. (shrink)

There is a growing body of literature that has sought to undermine systems of ethical regulation, and governance more generally, within the social sciences. In this paper, we argue that any general claim for a system of research ethics governance in social research depends on clarifying the nature of the stake that society has in research. We show that certain accounts of this stake—protecting researchers’ freedoms; ensuring accountability for resources; safeguarding welfare; and supporting democracy—raise relevant ethical considerations that are reasonably (...) contested. However, these accounts cannot underpin a general claim in favour of, or against, a system of research ethics governance. Instead, we defend governance in social research on the grounds that research, as an institutionalised form of enquiry, is a constitutive element of human flourishing, and that society ought to be concerned with the flourishing of its members. We conclude by considering the governance arrangements that follow from, and are justified by, our arguments. (shrink)