Jason Z. Morris and Marilyn C. Morris
David Carpenter argues in favour of Internal Review Boards taking a virtue ethics approach to their reviews of research proposals. Carpenter views principle- and code-based…
Abstract
David Carpenter argues in favour of Internal Review Boards taking a virtue ethics approach to their reviews of research proposals. Carpenter views principle- and code-based approaches as in competition with virtue ethics, and he describes reliance on principles and codes as neither necessary nor sufficient. We agree with Carpenter’s thesis that a virtue ethics approach would be beneficial and even necessary for exemplary review of research proposals. We disagree with Carpenter, however, about the weight that should be given to principles and codes. We defend here our view that principles and regulations are indispensible to ethical review of research, in spite of the fact that principles often conflict with each other. In those situations, the reviewer’s virtue of practical wisdom is necessary to adjudicate between competing ethical claims.
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The chapter reflects on the strengths and limitations of David Carpenter’s proposal to support the work of research ethics committees through consideration of the virtues required…
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The chapter reflects on the strengths and limitations of David Carpenter’s proposal to support the work of research ethics committees through consideration of the virtues required by their members. Carpenter’s approach has many strengths, responsibilising researchers and ethics committees, and increasing the scope for robust and active theoretical engagement with ethical issues. I bring two alternative perspectives on research ethics to bear on this discussion. First, I discuss work in care ethics and relational ethics, approaches to ethics that have some similarities with virtue ethics but also distinct differences. Bruce Macfarlane’s text, on which Carpenter draws, notes care ethics briefly. I offer a more detailed consideration of what this perspective can offer, both for research ethics and for the virtuous research ethics committee. This helps to identify the relationships that are missing from a virtue ethics focus. Further, a context sensitive relational approach suggests ways in which we can strengthen Carpenter’s proposals to help research ethics committees select between competing principles or virtues. Second, my research ethics expertise is in undergraduate teaching for a multidisciplinary course, and an enquiry-based learning programme, which allows students in mixed discipline groups to plan, conduct, report and present their own original social research. The research skills training provided includes an interactive introduction to research ethics, what they are for and why they matter. Since we aim to offer practical guidance to research ethics committees when they consider what they should do and how this should be done, such a first principles approach may be useful.
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This chapter is written in response to ‘The Quest for Generic Ethics Principles in Social Science Research’ by David Carpenter. I address his communitarian arguments for…
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This chapter is written in response to ‘The Quest for Generic Ethics Principles in Social Science Research’ by David Carpenter. I address his communitarian arguments for additional principles to inform a virtue theory approach to research ethics. These require that social researchers ensure that their research is both socially and scientifically valuable, and that they ‘involve members of the public in the designing, planning, delivery, ongoing monitoring and dissemination of research’. Carpenter underpins these principles with an appeal to the common good as a balance to the more individualistic principles characteristic of principlism. I argue that enforcement of these new communitarian principles via ethical regulation would further undermine the quality of research, and especially of academic social science.
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This chapter is written in response to ‘The Quest for Generic Ethics Principles in Social Science Research’ by David Carpenter. It is also based on a response given at a workshop…
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This chapter is written in response to ‘The Quest for Generic Ethics Principles in Social Science Research’ by David Carpenter. It is also based on a response given at a workshop organised by the Academy of Social Sciences in March 2013 to help to formulate some generic ethics principles for social sciences. From an anthropologist’s perspective I argue that there is no way that ethics principles or procedures can ‘solve’ all dilemmas of conducting ethically sound research and that we need to acknowledge the difficulties and talk about them, and to build this into a reflexive research process, rather than try to protect ourselves from them through bureaucratic procedures.
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This article is a response to Carpenter’s ‘Virtue Ethics in the Practice and Review of Social Science Research: The Virtuous Ethics Committee’. While applauding his attempt to…
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This article is a response to Carpenter’s ‘Virtue Ethics in the Practice and Review of Social Science Research: The Virtuous Ethics Committee’. While applauding his attempt to introduce the concept of ‘virtue ethics’ into the contemporary discourse about the practice and review of social science research, I suggest that his thinking is overly dependent on the work of Macfarlane (2009 & 2010); particularly with respect to drawing a sharp contrast between this concept and the use of principles to construct an ethical framework for research and its review. I argue that Carpenter’s article would have benefited from a critique of the conceptual limitations of Macfarlane’s work, particularly in a context where social science research is increasingly participatory. Following O’Neill (1996), I argue that ethical principles can be understood as universal values that orientate practical reasoning or deliberative inquiry into what constitutes virtuous action in particular cases. Such deliberative inquiry may also be guided by what Nussbaum (1990) depicts as ‘rules of thumb’; summaries of good concrete judgements and decisions that are the cumulative outcomes of past deliberations about how to realise ethical principles in action. I argue that these ‘rules’ do not prescribe action since they cannot be considered as ethically prior to concrete descriptions of cases. Rather, they evolve out of the deliberative process of case study itself. As Nussbaum (1990) points out, Aristotle argued for the ethical priority of concrete description over any general rule that might be applied to it. This does not, however, deny the practical significance of summaries of judgements based on a constant comparison of cases. Instead, such rules can be understood as practical hypotheses to be tested by participants in a social practice within each new concrete situation. I argue that one limitation of the dispositional frameworks that Carpenter cites as providing a basis for the practice and review of social research is their highly generic character. Much research aimed at achieving social ends is shaped by more specifically orientated professional and social practices governed by particular ends-in-view that can be conceptually linked to them. In conclusion, I suggest that, since much social research explicitly aspires to be a participatory and democratic process of knowledge construction, it should provide a starting point for ethical review, where engagement between ‘the committee’ and ‘researchers’ transcends the bureaucratic exercise of reviewing documents.
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In this chapter I build upon the case I argued in Volume 1 of this series (Carpenter, D. (2016). The quest for generic ethical principles in social science research. In R. Iphofen…
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In this chapter I build upon the case I argued in Volume 1 of this series (Carpenter, D. (2016). The quest for generic ethical principles in social science research. In R. Iphofen (Ed.), Advances in research ethics and integrity (Vol. 1, pp. 3–18). Bingley: Emerald). There I established arguments for eschewing principlism and other well-established theories of practical ethics, such as deontology and consequentialism, in favour of virtue ethics. I drew on the work of Macfarlane (2009, 2010) in making a case for virtuous researcher and virtuous research. In this chapter, I draw attention to the role and conduct of ethics committees in reviewing research. If we are to consider the ethics of research and researchers, then we might also consider the ethics of reviewing and reviewers. Whilst there is an abundance of codes and similar documents aimed at guiding research conduct, there is relatively little to guide ethics committees and their members. Given the argument that a virtue ethics approach might help committees evaluate the ethics of proposed research and researchers, it could equally be the case that virtue ethics could be useful when thinking about the work of committees and ethics review. In this chapter I attempt to relocate and develop Macfarlane’s work by examining its application to the work of ethics committees and the virtues of their members. In particular, I will consider the virtues that reviewers should exhibit or demonstrate when reviewing research, and what we might take as the telos of ethics committees.