PubMed Health⌕ Search
Home/Archive/PubMed

PubMed · 16036651

Rethinking research ethics.

Rosamond Rhodes
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Contemporary research ethics policies started with reflection on the atrocities perpetrated upon concentration camp inmates by Nazi doctors. Apparently, as a consequence of that experience, the policies that now guide human subject research focus on the protection of human subjects by making informed consent the centerpiece of regulatory attention. I take the choice of context for policy design, the initial prioritization of informed consent, and several associated conceptual missteps, to have set research ethics off in the wrong direction. The aim of this paper is to sort out these confusions and their implications and to offer instead a straightforward framework for considering the ethical conduct of human subject research. In the course of this discussion I clarify different senses of autonomy that have been confounded and present more intelligible justifications for informed consent. I also take issue with several of the now accepted dogmas that govern research ethics. These include: the primacy of informed consent, the protection of the vulnerable, the substitution of beneficence for research's social purpose, and the introduction of an untenable distinction between innovation and research.

Explore related subjects

BeneficenceCodes of EthicsCoercionDeceptionDisclosureEthical AnalysisEthical TheoryEthics Committees, ResearchEthics, ResearchGovernment RegulationHelsinki DeclarationHuman ExperimentationHumansInformed ConsentMandatory ProgramsMental CompetencyMoral ObligationsNational SocialismPatient SelectionPersonal AutonomyRefusal to ParticipateResearch DesignResearch SubjectsResearcher-Subject RelationsTherapies, InvestigationalUnited StatesVulnerable PopulationsAnalytical ApproachBelmont ReportBiomedical and Behavioral ResearchOffice for Human Research ProtectionJournal Article

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Rosamond Rhodes. 2005. Rethinking research ethics.. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265160590900678

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related citations

PubMed2006

Towards a Confucian virtue bioethics: reframing Chinese medical ethics in a market economy.

This essay addresses a moral and cultural challenge facing health care in the People's Republic of China: the need to create an understanding of medical professionalism that recognizes the new economic realities of China and that can maintain the integrity of the medical profession. It examines the rich Confucian resources for bioethics and health care policy by focusing on the Confucian tradition's account of how virtue and human flourishing are compatible with the pursuit of profit. It offers the Confucian account of the division of labor and the financial inequalities this produces with special attention to China's socialist project of creating the profession of barefoot doctors as egalitarian peasant physicians and why this project failed. It then further develops the Confucian acknowledgement of the unequal value of different services and products and how this conflicts with the current system of payment to physicians which has led to the corruption of medical professionalism through illegal supplementary payments. It further gives an account the oblique intentionality of Confucian moral psychology that shows how virtuous persons can pursue benevolent actions while both foreseeing profit and avoiding defining their character by greed. This account of Confucian virtue offers the basis for a medical professionalism that can function morally within a robustly profit-oriented market economy. The paper concludes with a summary of the characteristics of Confucian medical professionalism and of how it places the profit motive within its account of virtue ethics.

Beneficence↗
PubMed2006

Using empirical research to formulate normative ethical principles in biomedicine.

Bioethical research has tended to focus on theoretical discussion of the principles on which the analysis of ethical issues in biomedicine should be based. But this discussion often seems remote from biomedical practice where researchers and physicians confront ethical problems. On the other hand, published empirical research on the ethical reasoning of health care professionals offer only descriptions of how physicians and nurses actually reason ethically. The question remains whether these descriptions have any normative implications for nurses and physicians? In this article, we illustrate an approach that integrates empirical research into the formulation of normative ethical principles using the moral-philosophical method of Wide Reflective Equilibrium (WRE). The research method discussed in this article was developed in connection with the project 'Bioethics in Theory and Practice'. The purpose of this project is to investigate ethical reasoning in biomedical practice in Denmark empirically. In this article, we take the research method as our point of departure, but we exclusively discuss the theoretical framework of the method, not its empirical results. We argue that the descriptive phenomenological hermeneutical method developed by Lindseth and Norberg (2004) and Pedersen (1999) can be combined with the theory of WRE to arrive at a decision procedure and thus a foundation for the formulation of normative ethical principles. This could provide health care professionals and biomedical researchers with normative principles about how to analyse, reason and act in ethically difficult situations in their practice. We also show how to use existing bioethical principles as inspiration for interpreting the empirical findings of qualitative studies. This may help researchers design their own empirical studies in the field of ethics.

Beneficence↗