The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Bio-medical and Behavioral Research ended its work by substantially endorsing the status quo which places primary reliance on local Institutional Review Boards for subject protection. This was predictable because of the commission's researcher-dominated composition which permitted it to assume that(1) research is good;(2) experimentation is almost never harmful to subjects; and (3) researcher-dominated IRBs can adequately protect the interests of human subjects. The successor Presidential Commission can learn much by reexamining (...) these premises. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that it is wrong to conduct any experiment on a nonhuman which we would regard as immoral were it to be conducted on a human, because such experimentation violates the basic moral rights of sentient beings. After distinguishing the rights approach from the utilitarian approach, I delineate basic concepts. I then raise the classic “argument from marginal cases” against those who support experimentation on nonhumans but not on humans. After next replying to six important objections (...) against that argument, I contend that moral agents are logically required to accord basic moral rights to every sentient being. I conclude by providing criteria for distinguishing ethical from unethical experimentation. (shrink)

As biomedical research with volunteers was expanded in the United States, the rule of subject selection, constituting scientific and ethical criteria, was generated in 1981 to resolve selection bias in research. Few historical studies, however, have investigated the role of this new hybrid rule in institutional review systems. This paper describes how bioethics commissions and federal agencies have created the subject selection rule based on the concept of justice. I argue that the standardization of this rule as temporal measures, linked (...) with risk-benefit assessment, has reformed the review mechanism, specifically investigators’ modification of research plans, thereby developing justice as balancing. (shrink)

The relationship between sociology and bioethics has been an uneasy one. It has been described as contentious and adversarial, and at least some of the sociologists who have ventured into the territory of medical ethics report back on unfriendly natives. This bioethical ill will toward sociology is not without cause. Sociologists have been quite critical of what they call (with not-so-subtle pejorative overtones) the bioethical project.Two decades ago - when bioethics was just getting up on its organizational feet - Renée (...) Fox and Judith Swazey leveled the charge of cultural myopia against bioethics, noting that this myopia generally manifests itself in the form of systematic inattention to the social and cultural sources and implications of its own thought. They go on to sayifbioethics is an indicator of the general state of American ideas, values, and beliefs, of our collective self knowledge, and our understanding of other societies and cultures - then there is every reason to be worried about who we are, what we have become, and where we are going. (shrink)