Some international researchers assume that there is a lack of ethical review of research in many countries of the Global South. However, numerous African countries have recently introduced local and national research ethics guidelines. This article unpacks how ethical reviews of research in education are negotiated in a higher education institution in Ethiopia. It employs a critical analytical lens to challenge some of the assumptions of Beaty’s (2010) Institutional Review Board (IRB) stakeholder model. The article begins with (...) a discussion of the limitations inherent in the IRB model. Critical analyses of institutional documents and non-confidential, off-the-shelf IRB minutes are also conducted. The analysis shows that researchers within the medical and health sciences disciplines have well established organisational engagement when it comes to handling issues related to research ethics. However, limited representation of the educational and social and behavioural science disciplines remains a challenge. Furthermore, ethical issues in conducting educational research are hardly addressed in the national guidelines for granting research ethics approval. This results in further marginalisation of the contributions of educational research to knowledge production. (shrink)

Ethics committees like Institutional Review Boards and Research Ethics Committees are typically empowered to approve or reject proposed studies, typically conditional on certain conditions or revisions being met. While some have argued this power should be primarily a function of applying clear, codified requirements, most institutions and legal regimes allow discretion for IRBs to ethically evaluate studies, such as to ensure a favourable risk-benefit ratio, fair subject selection, adequate informed consent, and so forth. As a result, (...) ethics committees typically make moral demands on researchers: require them to act in a way the committee considers ethically right or appropriate. This paper argues that moral demands are legitimate only if publicly justifiable; and as a result, committee decisions are subject to a public justification requirement. Ethics committees can permissibly request for more information, changes to the research protocol or that the research is delayed or even stopped only if these demands are publicly justifiable. This latter claim is in turn justified on the basis that moral demands to φ are permissible only if we are in a position to know that the addressee ought to φ and that we are in a position to know a proposition only if it is publicly justifiable. This argument suggests that ethics committees must consciously and explicitly appeal to public reasons in their decision-making. In cases where public reasons cannot be offered, committees would not be permitted to reject a given study or make approval conditional on an amendment. (shrink)

Research on research ethics—regarding both the governance and practice of the ethical review of human subjects research—has a tumultuous history in North America and Europe. Much of the academic literature focuses on issues to do with regulating the conduct and quality of ethics review of research protocols by ethics committees (research ethics boards (REBs) in Canada and institutional review boards (IRBs) in the United States). In addition, some of the literature attends (...) to issues particular to the review of qualitative research, and still other literature addresses the challenges posed by and the need for research on REBs/IRBs. It is this third group of literature within which our article is situated. (shrink)

Social Science relies heavily on the use of ethnography and other forms of qualitative study, research that may place the researcher as well as their subjects at significant ethical risk. In Canada, Research Ethics Boards are responsible for protecting research participants during these studies. But how much ethical oversight ought the Research Ethics Boards be entitled to? Are they repressing valuable qualitative studies or are the Social Science simply rebelling against new but appropriate control mechanisms not (...) formerly applied to them? This paper evaluates how well the changes made in the TCPS 2 respond to the concerns of Social Scientists as presented in the literature. (shrink)

It is generally unquestioned that human subjects research review boards should assess the ethical acceptability of protocols. It says so right on the tin, after all: they are explicitly called research ethics committees in the UK. But it is precisely those sorts of unchallenged assumptions that should, from time to time, be assessed and critiqued, in case they are in fact unfounded. John Stuart Mill's objection to suppressers of dissent is instructive here: “If the opinion is right, (...) they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error”.1 Andrew Moore and Andrew Donnelly's compelling article, “The job of ‘ethics committees’”, is just this sort of challenge to conventional wisdom, a rejection of the notion that review boards should be considering ethical matters at all.2 If true, we should be substantially reforming our research ethics policies. And if false, rebuttals would help strengthen and ground the otherwise unquestioned assumption of the role of ethics committees. As it happens, I will argue that their critiques fall into the second category. While mistaken, they present a valuable opportunity to clarify the role of ethics committees and their relationship to relevant codes. In particular, I will defend a hybrid account where codes have strict primacy, but leave significant room for review boards …. (shrink)

In the United States, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has proposed deliberative democracy as an approach for dealing with ethical issues surrounding synthetic biology. Deliberative democracy might similarly help us as we update the regulation of human subjects research. This paper considers how the values that deliberative democratic engagement aims to realize can be realized in a human subjects research context. Deliberative democracy is characterized by an ongoing exchange of ideas between participants, and an effort to (...) justify decisions that bind participants by appeal to reasons that the participants can understand and share. Even when unanimous agreement is not reached, the active participation of everyone along with the requirement that reasons be made accessible enhances the legitimacy of the ultimate outcome. Importantly, deliberative democratic structures avoid strict hierarchies and place participants, as much as possible, in the position of equals. Human subjects research has some features that may make deliberative democratic principles seem initially unappealing. For one, there are asymmetries in knowledge between expert researchers conducting the research and participants in the research process. For another, statistical validity is made easiest by research paradigms that produce standardized, quantitative data, which can be difficult to achieve if research participants are given the power to deliberatively reshape the research design as it progresses. These and other problems have tended to produce a human subjects research process where subjects do not actively participate in shaping research, but rather consent to a predefined set of interventions designed by expert researchers and vetted by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). In this paper, I suggest some ways in which human subjects research could do more to realize deliberative democratic values, and, in particular, how a revised Common Rule might help to realize these values. First, research participants could be treated not as passive subjects but instead involved in research design, ethical review, and the ongoing conduct and dissemination of research. Such participation might involve, for instance, including people who have served as research subjects on IRBs, or replacing IRB oversight for certain forms of research exempted from IRB oversight under a revised Common Rule with oversight by a body of community members or research subjects. It might also involve having the oversight of research that uses more participatory models be more participatory and less hierarchical in nature. I also raise questions about the exemption of research on public benefit programs from any research-level oversight and from consent requirements. While IRBs are likely not the correct overseers, there may be good reason to view such research with a critical eye, because of its potential for long-range impacts on the lives of participants. By giving research subjects a greater voice in research that aims at fine-tuning public benefit programs on which subjects rely, a deliberative oversight process has the potential to recast research participation as a form of active democratic participation and to address a “democratic deficit” in public health. Numerous proposals regarding health care have called for greater participation by laypeople and a more nonhierarchical approach to setting health priorities. Involving lay research subjects in the conduct of public benefits research and other forms of public health research may help to further these goals. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, there was an upsurge of research and innovation in biotechnology and related fields, leading to exciting new discoveries in areas such as the engineering of biological processes, gene editing, stem cell research, CRISPR-Cas9 technology, Synthetic Biology, recombinant DNA, LMOs and GMOs, to mention only a few. At the same time, these advances generated concerns about biosafety, biosecurity and adverse impacts on biodiversity and the environment, leading to the establishment of Research Ethics Committees (RECs) at (...) Higher Education and Research Institutions dedicated to reviewing research with implications for biosafety and the environment. -/- These Biosafety and Environment Research Ethics Committees, referred to as EBRECs, are in the early stages of their establishment and formalisation, and there is much uncertainty about their composition, scope, procedures of decision-making and the principles that should guide their deliberations and assessments. In many respects, EBRECs are venturing into uncharted territory, facing a very wide range of complex research fields, far-reaching research practices and deep concerns new to Review Boards, raising the question to what extent EBRECs can fall back on the fairly well-established principles and procedures of RECs focusing on Human, Health or Animal research, and to what extent they need new or adapted principles and procedures. -/- Against this background, I set out to answer the following three main research questions in this thesis: 1. What is the current state of ethical principles for ethics reviews in the field of environmental and biosafety research ethics? Which principles are currently used in this context, and how? 2. What are the shortcomings of the current principles used by EBRECs and how can they be overcome? 3. What ethical principles must be adopted by environmental and biosafety research ethics committees and guide them in their decision-making? -/- In order to prepare the ground and set the scene for my discussion of these questions, I also formulated four supporting research questions: i. What is environmental research ethics in action? ii. What is biosafety research ethics in action? iii. How are environmental and biosafety ethics related to one another? iv. How should the guidelines and ethical principles related to these two overlapping fields be implemented in the ethics review process? Following my introduction and problem statement in Chapter 1, I devoted Chapters 2 and 3 to an overview of my supporting questions to set the scene for Environmental and Biosafety Research Ethics. In Chapter 4, I turned to my main research question with a discussion of national and international declarations, frameworks and legislation and an investigation of principles in the different research areas to get a picture of applicable principles that can guide EBRECs. -/- The main finding of my thesis is that due to the complexity of EBR, different categories of principles could be the solution for EBRECs. I elaborate on this in Chapter 5, my concluding chapter, in which I also propose a list of core principles that can serve as an accessible and easy-to-use guide for EBRECs in their decision-making. In this proposal, I cluster different kinds of principles in terms of four categories: 1. Principles as a Moral Concept 2. Principles as a Social Concept 3. Principles as a Legal Concept 4. Principles as a Safety Concept . (shrink)

Ethics dumping is an ongoing practice in collaborative research. Despite the existence of ethical review boards, some notable discrepancy in governance and integration persists. This paper is a chronological book review of a 15-chapter book titled, "Ethics Dumping: Case Studies from North-South Research Collaborations," compiled from individual authors and edited by Schroeder, Cook, Hirch, Fenet, and Muthuswami in 2018. This book review aims to ensure ever-increasing attention to the numerous ways of ethics dumping (...) and incite further research into the matter. The book is a must-read for researchers, ethicists, policymakers in research institutions, and students (especially graduate students). (shrink)

The predominant view is that a study using health data is observational research and should require individual consent unless it can be shown that gaining consent is impractical. But recent arguments have been made that citizens have an ethical obligation to share their health information for research purposes. In our view, this obligation is sufficient ground to expand the circumstances where secondary use research with identifiable health information is permitted without explicit subject consent. As such, for some studies the Institutional (...) Review Board/Research Ethics Committee review process should not assess the practicality of gaining consent for data use. Instead the review process should focus on assessing the public good of the research, public engagement and transparency. (shrink)

In a recent commentary, Kim and colleagues argued that minimal-risk research should be deregulated so that such studies do not require review by an institutional review board. They claim that regulation of minimal-risk studies provides no adequate counterbalancing good and instead leads to a costly human subjects oversight system. We argue that the counterbalancing good of regulating minimal-risk studies is that oversight exists to ensure that respect for persons and justice requirements are satisfied when they otherwise might not (...) be. (shrink)

Ontologies describe reality in specific domains in ways that can bridge various disciplines and languages. They allow easier access and integration of information that is collected by different groups. Ontologies are currently used in the biomedical sciences, geography, and law. A Biomedical Ethics Ontology would benefit members of ethics committees who deal with protocols and consent forms spanning numerous fields of inquiry. There already exists the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI); the proposed BMEO would interoperate with OBI, creating (...) a powerful information tool. We define a domain ontology and begin to construct a BMEO, focused on the process of evaluating human research protocols. Finally, we show how our BMEO can have practical applications for ethics committees. This paper describes ongoing research and a strategy for its broader continuation and cooperation. (shrink)

Research ethics committees and institutional review boards spend considerable time developing, scrutinising, and revising specific consent processes and materials for survey-based studies conducted on crowdsourcing and online recruitment platforms such as MTurk and Prolific. However, there is evidence to suggest that many users of ICT services do not read the information provided as part of the consent process and they habitually provide or refuse their consent without adequate reflection. In principle, these practices call into question the validity (...) of their consent. In this paper we argue that although the ‘no read problem’ and the routinisation of consent may apply to research participants’ consent practices for studies on crowdsourcing platforms, this is not a serious problem. Furthermore, given that the informational requirements for informed consent in these contexts are minimal, we argue that these participants are, nevertheless, sufficiently informed to give valid consent. We conclude that research ethics committees and institutional review boards should only agonise over the precise details of the informed consent process and materials in those rare cases where appreciable risks to research participants need to be managed. (shrink)

Introduction In 2013, Dr. J. Muizelaar and Dr. R. Schrot, two neurosurgeons at the University of California Davis Medical Center (UCDMC), were found guilty of research misconduct due to failure to comply with institutional policies as well as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations governing human subjects research. At issue here, however, is the difference between research and innovative therapy in the clinical setting of patient care where clinical judgment is reasonably to be privileged. Methods The UCDMC investigative document is (...) reviewed along with standard literature on clinical ethics and clinical data about glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cancer. Results In this paper I argue that, by tendentiously focusing on policies, regulations, and procedures governing human subjects research, the UCDMC investigation failed to account for the centrality of clinical judgment and clinical ethics pertinent to judicious review of this matter, especially given the unique clinical context of terminally ill patients having exhausted standard care treatment options for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cancer. Conclusions The UCDMC investigation raises serious problems for clinicians who are engaged in innovative therapy in the clinical setting, requiring a regulatory framework separate from the normal Institutional Review Board (IRB) process. (shrink)

Background Several jurisdictions, including Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and most recently Ireland, have a public interest or public good criterion for granting waivers of consent in biomedical research using secondary health data or tissue. However, the concept of the public interest is not well defined in this context, which creates difficulties for institutions, institutional review boards and regulators trying to implement the criterion. Main text This paper clarifies how the public interest criterion can be defensibly deployed. We first (...) explain the ethical basis for requiring waivers to only be granted to studies meeting the public interest criterion, then explore how further criteria may be set to determine the extent to which a given study can legitimately claim to be in the public interest. We propose an approach that does not attempt to measure magnitude of benefit directly, but rather takes into account metrics that are more straightforward to apply. To ensure consistent and justifiable interpretation, research institutions and IRBs should also incorporate procedural features such as transparency and public engagement in determining which studies satisfy the public interest requirement. Conclusion The requirement of public interest for consent waivers in secondary biomedical research should be guided by well-defined criteria for systematic evaluation. Such a criteria and its application need to be periodically subject to intra-committee and intra-institution review, reflection, deliberation and amendment. (shrink)

Dear Colleagues, -/- In this editorial, we would like to share with you important developments in the European Journal of Therapeutics (Eur J Ther). -/- First of all, as the editorial team, we would like you to know that we hold frequent meetings to benefit our esteemed colleagues and continue to work with great devotion in line with our goal of taking the journal further. We have previously shared with you that we have applied to many indexes. It is with (...) great pleasure that we would like to inform you that in the last few months, more of our index applications have been approved. -/- Index Copernicus, as a result of this application, the ICV 2022 value of our journal was determined to be 100 (approved 2023-10-31) [1] BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) (approved 2023-11-30) [2] Sherpa Romeo (approved 2023-09-27) [3] MIAR (approved 2023-10-16) [4] -/- All indexes in our journal are currently included on the journal web page [5]. -/- As the editorial team, we would like to inform you that we have determined a policy on this issue for our journal [6], taking into account the recommendations of important international ethics committees such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) [7] and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) [8], which have recently become a trendy topic of discussion about AI chatbots and academic studies prepared with the support of such tools. -/- As you know, when our journal was founded in 1990 [9], it was published in two yearly issues. It is an essential responsibility for us to carry our journal, which continued its publication life with three issues a year in 2009 [10] and four issues a year in 2014 [11]. With your valuable support, we would like to announce that we will increase our journal to 6 issues a year as of 2024 (February, April, June, August, October and December) with the rapidly growing progress of our journal. -/- Unfortunately, we cannot share the names of the referees who made significant contributions to our journal in 2023 due to the changes in the article submission interface during the year and the inaccessibility of some data in the previous interface. However, we would like to emphasize again that we are grateful to all of them for their valuable contributions. Moreover, to expand our journal's referee list, we would like to remind you that competent academics who volunteer in this regard can fill out the “Become a Reviewer for the European Journal of Therapeutics” form [12]. -/- Finally, we would like to point out that we have strengthened our editorial team with an academician competent in dentistry, Fatih Sari, DDS, PhD. -/- Fatih Sari, DDS, PhD, is a new Editorial Board Member of the Eur J Ther. Dr. Sari is an Associate Professor in the Department of Prosthodontics at the Gaziantep University Faculty of Dentistry. He is a Vice Dean of the Faculty of Dentistry and Head of Clinical Departments. Dr. Sari is a prosthodontist and a member of the Turkish Dental Association. He has experience in implant-supported fixed prostheses, Cad/Cam applications and dental materials. -/- We look forward to being able to offer you a large number of high-quality and valuable articles over the coming year. In addition, we would like to thank the readers, authors and reviewers of the Eur J Ther for their continuous support. -/- Sincerely yours,. (shrink)

In recent years, exposome research has been put forward as the next frontier for the study of human health and disease. Exposome research entails the analysis of the totality of environmental exposures and their corresponding biological responses within the human body. Increasingly, this is operationalized by big-data approaches to map the effects of internal as well as external exposures using smart sensors and multiomics technologies. However, the ethical implications of exposome research are still only rarely discussed in the literature. Therefore, (...) we conducted a systematic review of the academic literature regarding both the exposome and underlying research fields and approaches, to map the ethical aspects that are relevant to exposome research. We identify five ethical themes that are prominent in ethics discussions: the goals of exposome research, its standards, its tools, how it relates to study participants, and the consequences of its products. Furthermore, we provide a number of general principles for how future ethics research can best make use of our comprehensive overview of the ethical aspects of exposome research. Lastly, we highlight three aspects of exposome research that are most in need of ethical reflection: the actionability of its findings, the epidemiological or clinical norms applicable to exposome research, and the meaning and action–implications of bias. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly making use of field experiments to evaluate policy interventions in the spheres of education, public health and welfare. However, the research ethics literature is largely focused on the clinical context, leaving investigators, institutional review boards and government agencies with few resources to draw on to address the ethical questions they face regarding such experiments. In this article, we aim to help address this problem, investigating the conditions under which informed consent is required for ethical (...) policy research conducted or authorized by government. We argue that investigators need not secure participants' informed consent when conducting government policy experiments if: the government institution conducting or authorizing the experiment possesses a right to rule over the spheres of policy targeted by the research; and data collection does not involve the violation of participants' autonomy rights. (shrink)

In this review, we present some ethical imperatives observed in this pandemic from a data ethics perspective. Our exposition connects recurrent ethical problems in the discipline, such as, privacy, surveillance, transparency, accountability, and trust, to broader societal concerns about equality, discrimination, and justice. We acknowledge data ethics role as significant to develop technological, inclusive, and pluralist societies. - - - Resumen: En esta revisión, exponemos algunos de los imperativos éticos observados desde la ética de datos en esta (...) pandemia. Nuestra exposición busca conectar problemas éticos típicos dentro de esta disciplina, a saber, privacidad, vigilancia, transparencia, responsabilidad y confianza, con preocupaciones a nivel social relacionadas con la igualdad, discrimi nación y justicia. Consideramos que la ética de datos tiene un rol significativo para desarrollar sociedades tecnificadas, inclusivas y pluralistas. (shrink)

Background Genomic research on neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), particularly involving minors, combines and amplifies existing research ethics issues for biomedical research. We performed a review of the literature on the ethical issues associated with genomic research involving children affected by NDDs as an aid to researchers to better anticipate and address ethical concerns. Results Qualitative thematic analysis of the included articles revealed themes in three main areas: research design and ethics review, inclusion of research participants, and communication (...) of research results. Ethical issues known to be associated with genomic research in general, such as privacy risks and informed consent/assent, seem especially pressing for NDD participants because of their potentially decreased cognitive abilities, increased vulnerability, and stigma associated with mental health problems. Additionally, there are informational risks: learning genetic information about NDD may have psychological and social impact, not only for the research participant but also for family members. However, there are potential benefits associated with research participation, too: by enrolling in research, the participants may access genetic testing and thus increase their chances of receiving a (genetic) diagnosis for their neurodevelopmental symptoms, prognostic or predictive information about disease progression or the risk of concurrent future disorders. Based on the results of our review, we developed an ethics checklist for genomic research involving children affected by NDDs. Conclusions In setting up and designing genomic research efforts in NDD, researchers should partner with communities of persons with NDDs. Particular attention should be paid to preventing disproportional burdens of research participation of children with NDDs and their siblings, parents and other family members. Researchers should carefully tailor the information and informed consent procedures to avoid therapeutic and diagnostic misconception in NDD research. To better anticipate and address ethical issues in specific NDD studies, we suggest researchers to use the ethics checklist for genomic research involving children affected by NDDs presented in this paper. (shrink)

Membership of a layperson is mandatory in the research ethics committee. According to World Health Organization (WHO), still there is a quorum of the ethics committee meeting (EC), however, the EC meeting should be adjourned if the absentee of a lay person. So layperson is a very important position in the EC. A layperson is a person whose primary area of interest is not scientific, however, they share their insight into the research to protect the research participants. Actually (...) who and what lay members represent on ethics committees remains unclear, and the question of what laypersons mean what is their educational status, and what is their role in the research ethics committee is also not clear. In some Institution Review Boards (IRB)s, use the term public representatives instead of lay persons. Moreover, the education qualification of the layperson is as high as Ph.D. This paper argues why not the nomenclature should change to a public representative instead of a layperson in the IRBs. If the nomenclature is changed to establish their positive image in the IRB and also increases their self of security, respect, and self-esteem. (shrink)

This article presents the first thematic review of the literature on the ethical issues concerning digital well-being. The term ‘digital well-being’ is used to refer to the impact of digital technologies on what it means to live a life that isgood fora human being. The review explores the existing literature on the ethics of digital well-being, with the goal of mapping the current debate and identifying open questions for future research. The review identifies major issues related (...) to several key social domains: healthcare, education, governance and social development, and media and entertainment. It also highlights three broader themes: positive computing, personalised human–computer interaction, and autonomy and self-determination. The review argues that three themes will be central to ongoing discussions and research by showing how they can be used to identify open questions related to the ethics of digital well-being. (shrink)

Background The worldwide increase in older persons demands technological solutions to combat the shortage of caregiving and to enable aging in place. Smart home health technologies (SHHTs) are promoted and implemented as a possible solution from an economic and practical perspective. However, ethical considerations are equally important and need to be investigated. Methods We conducted a systematic review according to the PRISMA guidelines to investigate if and how ethical questions are discussed in the field of SHHTs in caregiving for (...) older persons. Results 156 peer-reviewed articles published in English, German and French were retrieved and analyzed across 10 electronic databases. Using narrative analysis, 7 ethical categories were mapped: privacy, autonomy, responsibility, human vs. artificial interactions, trust, ageism and stigma, and other concerns. Conclusion The findings of our systematic review show the (lack of) ethical consideration when it comes to the development and implementation of SHHTs for older persons. Our analysis is useful to promote careful ethical consideration when carrying out technology development, research and deployment to care for older persons. Registration We registered our systematic review in the PROSPERO network under CRD42021248543. (shrink)

[Purposes] This paper aims to summarize the research outcome on publishing ethics of scientific journals abroad, which is expected to serve as a reference for the research on related topics in China. [Methods] Literature review method and content coding method were adopted to systematically sum up related research abroad. Then, the status quo and development trend were analyzed. [Findings] There are five main research topics: anomy of publishing ethics, elements of publishing ethics norms, status quo of (...) publishing ethics implementation, knowledge of authors and editors on publishing ethics and their attitudes, and management of publishing ethics. [Conclusions] Foreign research on publishing ethics of scientific journals has achieved fruitful results with obvious characteristics, but there is a lack of research scope definition and systematic analysis of ethical norms. Chinese scientific journals should take international research outcome as a reference and strengthen the research on ethical norms to enhance the development of publishing ethics. (shrink)

The internet of things is increasingly spreading into the domain of medical and social care. Internet-enabled devices for monitoring and managing the health and well-being of users outside of traditional medical institutions have rapidly become common tools to support healthcare. Health-related internet of things (H-IoT) technologies increasingly play a key role in health management, for purposes including disease prevention, real-time tele-monitoring of patient’s functions, testing of treatments, fitness and well-being monitoring, medication dispensation, and health research data collection. H-IoT promises many (...) benefits for health and healthcare. However, it also raises a host of ethical problems stemming from the inherent risks of Internet enabled devices, the sensitivity of health-related data, and their impact on the delivery of healthcare. This paper maps the main ethical problems that have been identified by the relevant literature and identifies key themes in the on-going debate on ethical problems concerning H-IoT. (shrink)

The gig economy is a phenomenon that is rapidly expanding, redefining the nature of work and contributing to a significant change in how contemporary economies are organised. Its expansion is not unproblematic. This article provides a clear and systematic analysis of the main ethical challenges caused by the gig economy. Following a brief overview of the gig economy, its scope and scale, we map the key ethical problems that it gives rise to, as they are discussed in the relevant literature. (...) We map them onto three categories: the new organisation of work (what is done), the new nature of work (how it is done), and the new status of workers (who does it). We then evaluate a recent initiative from the EU that seeks to address the challenges of the gig economy. The 2019 report of the European High-Level Expert Group on the Impact of the Digital Transformation on EU Labour Markets is a positive step in the right direction. However, we argue that ethical concerns relating to algorithmic systems as mechanisms of control, and the discrimination, exclusion and disconnectedness faced by gig workers require further deliberation and policy response. A brief conclusion completes the analysis. The appendix presents the methodology underpinning our literature review. (shrink)

Recension of the 2023 book "Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History" an interesting book on metaphysics, moral philosophy, existentialism, and speculative philosophy of history.

This paper reviews The Ethics of Undercover Policing by Christopher Nathan.

‘Greek Ethics’, an undergraduate class taught by the British moral philosopher N. J. H. Dent, introduced this reviewer to the ethical philosophy of ancient Greece. The class had a modest purview—a sequence of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—but it proved no less effective, in retrospect, than more synoptic classes for having taken this apparently limited and (for its students and academic level) appropriate focus. This excellent Companion will now serve any such class extremely well, allowing students a broader exposure than (...) that traditional sequence, without sacrificing the class’s circumscribed focus. The eighteen chapters encompass some of what went before, and surprisingly much of what came after, those three central philosophers—including, for instance, a discussion of Plotinus and his successors, as well as a discussion of Horace. The book will therefore be useful in many different types of class on ethical philosophy in the ancient world. This Companion will be useful not only to students, but also to at least three further groups: specialists in ancient Greek philosophy (since some contributors advance significant new positions, e.g. R. Kamtekar on Plato’s ethical psychology and D. Charles on Aristotle’s ‘ergon argument’ as already implicitly invoking ‘to kalon’); scholars working in academic subjects adjacent to ancient Greek philosophy; and contemporary moral philosophers. (shrink)

The U.S. review system for human subjects research has been widely criticized in recent years for requirements that delay research without improving human subjects protections. Any major reformulation of regulations may take some time to implement. In the meantime, current regulations often allow for streamlined ethics review without jeopardizing—and possibly improving—protections for research participants. We discuss underutilized options, including research that need not be classified as “human subjects research,” categories of studies that can be exempt from ethical (...) review, and studies that need only undergo expedited review by one IRB member. In addition, we consider ways to simplify review of multi-center research using one institution’s IRB. We speculate on multiple reasons for the underuse of these mechanisms, and exhort IRBs and researchers to take advantage of these important opportunities to improve the review process. (shrink)

A review of Hugh LaFolette's Practical Ethics.

The principal goal of Alex John London's For the Common Good is to "articulate a new vision for the philosophical foundations of research ethics" which "moves issues of justice from the periphery of the field to the very center." At the core of this new vision is an understanding of research as a "collaborative social activity between free and equal persons," which aims to develop the knowledge public institutions require to establish and maintain a social order in which people (...) may set and pursue their plans of life. Clinical and social scientific research are not therefore morally optional activities, in London's view, but rather the way public institutions acquire the knowledge they... (shrink)

For the last four decades, David Keyt has devoted substantial scholarly energy to the reconstruction of political and ethical arguments in Aristotle’s <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i> and <i>Politics</i>, and to a lesser degree the same in Plato’s <i>Republic</i>. Although Keyt’s translation of and commentary on <i>Politics</i> Books V and VI in the Aristotle Clarendon series (1999), to my mind, is his most substantial contribution to ancient philosophy scholarship, close competitors are his scholarly articles which seek to reconstruct the philosophical positions of (...) Aristotle (and to a lesser extent Plato) with pain-staking logical and philological care. <i>Nature and Justice</i> contains eleven such articles, eight previously published and three appearing for the first time. (Titles are listed at the end of the review.) Several of the articles are landmark works of Aristotle scholarship both for the scholarly controversies which they have sparked and for the methodological approach they exhibit. (shrink)

The nature of the edited scholarly collection has undergone a sea change. Whereas once upon a time edited collections brought together conference papers or previously published landmark studies—whose mark of excellence is scholarly rigor—more recently libraries have been inundated by Guides, Companions, and Handbooks. The Guide/Companion/Handbook model has its uses, perhaps especially for introductory essays or overviews of topics in which clarity, rather than cutting-edge scholarship, is the mark of excellence. Between these two models falls a new and somewhat unprecedented (...) (at least in Aristotle scholarship) genre of collection, what Cambridge University Press is characterizing as a Critical Guide. The volume’s self-description claims that it is a “collection of newly commissioned essays…present[ing] a thorough and close examination of the work” which will “challenge and advance the scholarship on the Ethics</i>, establishing new ways of viewing and appreciating the work for all scholars of Aristotle.” Clearly, one is no longer looking at introductory essays. (shrink)

Book review of Hallie Liberto's Green Light Ethics.

This is a review of two books from Southampton, Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way's Getting Things Right (OUP 2023) and Daniel Whiting's The Range of Reasons in Ethics and Epistemology (OUP 2022).

Daniel R. DeNicola’s Moral Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction begins (pg. ix) with an anonymous reviewer’s quote, paraphrased here: ‘The author of an introductory ethics textbook has an impossible task, creating a work both accessible to undergraduates and rigorous enough for philosophers.’ DeNicola can of course be forgiven for not achieving this impossible task. Still, some attempts are better than others. After surveying the text content, I explain why I discourage instructors from using this textbook in introductory ethics courses.

Concerns of moral distress in health care have never been more relevant. In her book, Health Care Ethics Through the Lens of Moral Distress, Kristen Jones-Bonofiglio provides a comprehensive review of the effects of moral distress on providers and health care delivery, while highlighting the complexities of making ethical decisions in practice. Jones-Bonofiglio’s thoroughness and use of interdisciplinary, historical, and cultural scholarship makes this book an excellent introductory resource on moral distress for health care providers and researchers alike.

COVID-19 vaccination of children has begun in various high-income countries with regulatory approval and general public support, but largely without careful ethical consideration. This trend is expected to extend to other COVID-19 vaccines and lower ages as clinical trials progress. This paper provides an ethical analysis of COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children. Specifically, we argue that it is currently unclear whether routine COVID-19 vaccination of healthy children is ethically justified in most contexts, given the minimal direct benefit that COVID-19 vaccination (...) provides to children, the potential for rare risks to outweigh these benefits and undermine vaccine confidence, and substantial evidence that COVID-19 vaccination confers adequate protection to risk groups, such as older adults, without the need to vaccinate healthy children. We conclude that child COVID-19 vaccination in wealthy communities before adults in poor communities worldwide is ethically unacceptable and consider how policy deliberations might evolve in light of future developments. (shrink)

Martin Peterson’s The Ethics of Technology: A Geometric Analysis of Five Moral Principles offers a welcome contribution to the ethics of technology, understood by Peterson as a branch of applied ethics that attempts ‘to identify the morally right courses of action when we develop, use, or modify technological artifacts’ (3). He argues that problems within this field are best treated by the use of five domain-specific principles: the Cost-Benefit Principle, the Precautionary Principle, the Sustainability Principle, the Autonomy (...) Principle, and the Fairness Principle. These principles are, in turn, to be understood and applied with reference to the geometric method. This method is perhaps the most interesting and novel part of Peterson’s book, and I’ll devote the bulk of my review to it. (shrink)

c.4,000 word critical discussion of Fabre's book. Provides an overview of the book plus comments on the themes of (i) loyalty and treason and (ii) the ethics of spying and sex.

A review of Anthony Appiah's Experiments in Ethics.

Review of Paul Katsafanas, Agency and the Foundations of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism.

Consistent and well-designed frameworks for ethical oversight enable socially valuable research while forestalling harmful or poorly designed studies. I suggest some alterations that might strengthen the valuable checklist Rattani & Hyder propose for the ethical review of health policy and systems research (HPSR), or prompt future work in the area.

A review of 'The aesthetics and ethics of copying'. Hick, Darren Hudson and Reinhold Schmücker, eds.

This is a review of David Phillips, Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics: A Guide.