PubMed Health⌕ Search
Home/Archive/PubMed

PubMed · 2013002

Ethical considerations in modern human experimentation.

A Steinberg
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The use of properly controlled clinical trials in medical experimentation has been of vital importance to the progress of medical science. At the same time, the new form of experimentation has also generated some of our most difficult and perplexing moral dilemmas. The solutions to the many complicated ethical problems involved in human experimentation are not straightforward, and despite numerous books, articles, codes, guidelines, and declarations, many specific issues of right and wrong in human experimentation have not yet been definitively resolved. Society today has an obligation greater than ever to control, regulate, and enforce properly balanced codes of human experimentation in order to minimize the unacceptable ethical problems and maximize the desired results of modern human experimentation. These, however, are not sufficient. The patient's greatest safeguard in experimentation is a skillful, intelligent, and conscientious physician and investigator. Thus, the investigator bears great responsibility in balancing between the common good and the individual's rights. In this article the relevant secular and Jewish ethical principles and rules concerning human experimentation are specified and methodologically organized. Particular emphasis is placed on the elucidation and evaluation of the ethical controversies surrounding randomized clinical trials.

Explore related subjects

BeneficenceCodes of EthicsControl GroupsDisclosureEthics, MedicalHuman ExperimentationHumansInternationalityJewsMoral ObligationsNontherapeutic Human ExperimentationPersonal AutonomyRandomized Controlled Trials as TopicResearch SubjectsRisk AssessmentSocial Control, FormalSocial JusticeTheologyTherapeutic Human ExperimentationValue of LifeBiomedical and Behavioral ResearchReligious ApproachJournal Article

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

A Steinberg. 1991. Ethical considerations in modern human experimentation.. https://doi.org/10.3109/07357909109032805

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↗