This article explores two key facets of institutionalized ethical review processes in Germany: (1) their importance in shaping ethical research and (2) their associated challenges, with a specific focus on their implications within the social sciences. Ethical considerations play a pivotal role in (social science) research, safeguarding, amongst others, the rights and well-being of participants and ensuring research integrity. Despite notable progress in promoting research ethics, German research institutions still need to significantly improve their ethics (...) review processes. To address these challenges, this article emphasizes the need for expanding the current management of research ethics and implementing what we call “Institutionalized Research Ethics Practices’’ (IREPs), which include but go beyond the scope of common Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Drawing on two workshops with researchers and IRB members, and a systematic review of existing IRBs in the German social sciences, we propose concrete recommendations for developing and enhancing IREPs, including a conducive environment, accessibility, fairness, and fostering expertise (CAFE). These enhancements aim to strengthen Germany’s research ethics infrastructure and promote responsible and ethical research practices in the social sciences. (shrink)

This article uses bibliometric analysis to empirically examine research on business ethics published in a broad set of journals, focused over the period 1988-2007. We consider those journals with an emphasis on accounting. First, we determine the citation frequencies of documents to identify the core articles in accounting research with an ethics focus as well as the contributions of influential fields included in the research sphere of these journals. We also employ document co-citation analysis to analyze the (...) scholarly communication patterns that exist within the realm of the specified articles. Second, we utilize social network analysis tools to profile the centrality features of the co-citation network of these documents. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 2, Page 474-494, April 2022.

The main object of criticism of present-day medical ethics is the standard view of the relationship between theory and practice. Medical ethics is more than the application of moral theories and principles, and health care is more than the domain of application of moral theories. Moral theories and principles are necessarily abstract, and therefore fail to take account of the sometimes idiosyncratic reality of clinical work and the actual experiences of practitioners. Suggestions to remedy the illnesses of contemporary medical ethics (...) focus on re-establishing the connection between the internal and external morality of medicine. This article discusses the question how to develop a theoretical perspective on medical ethical issues that connects philosophical reflection with the everyday realities of medical practice. Four steps in a comprehensive approach of medical ethics research are distinguished: (1) examine health care contexts in order to obtain a better understanding of the internal morality of these practices; this requires empirical research; (2) analyze and interpret the external morality governing health care practices; sociological study of prevalent values, norms, and attitudes concerning medical-ethical issues is required; (3) creation of new theoretical perspectives on health care practices; Jensen's theory of healthcare practices will be useful here; (4) develop a new conception of bioethics that illuminates and clarifies the complex interaction between the internal and external morality of health care practices. Hermeneutical ethics can be helpful for integrating the experiences disclosed in the empirical ethical studies, as well as utilizing the insights gained from describing the value-contexts of health care practices. For a critical and normative perspective, hermeneutical ethics has to examine and explain the moral experiences uncovered, in order to understand what they tell us. (shrink)

Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council offered criteria for excellence in research which appear to express a shared basic idea of research–as–dialogue. This approach does not appear to be met very well by business ethics research in the USA or the UK, but it was seen to be impressively present in some of the German contributions to the European Business Ethics Network conference held in Frankfurt last year. Dr Collier analyses the conditions which may underlie this (...) difference of approach and considers the contribution of modern “discourse ethics to the process of dialogue, concluding that dialogue “is an essential characteristic of research excellence”, and that without it we therefore fail to meet both our own standards and the needs of the business community”. Dr Collier is Lecturer in Management Studies the Judge Institute of Management Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College. (shrink)

This book present research in ethics with topics including a step-by-step guide to students; wellbeing and disadvantage; ethical disposition of accounting and business management students; collegiality of journals and self-citation on annual bibliometric scorings; trends of tainted publications and their authors' publication profiles; from bioethics to biopolitics and the limits of liberalism.

BackgroundResearch Ethics Boards, or Institutional Review Boards, protect the safety and welfare of human research participants. These bodies are responsible for providing an independent evaluation of proposed research studies, ultimately ensuring that the research does not proceed unless standards and regulations are met.Main bodyConcurrent with the growing volume of human participant research, the workload and responsibilities of Research Ethics Boards (REBs) have continued to increase. Dissatisfaction with the review process, particularly the time interval from submission (...) to decision, is common within the research community, but there has been little systematic effort to examine REB processes that may contribute to inefficiencies. We offer a model illustrating REB workflow, stakeholders, and accountabilities.ConclusionBetter understanding of the components of the research ethics review will allow performance targets to be set, problems identified, and solutions developed, ultimately improving the process. (shrink)

This manuscript reviews and synthesizes most of the major research studies in the area of consumer ethics that have appeared since 1990. It examines both conceptual and empirical works with an objective of encouraging researchers to pursue research in the consumer ethics area. Toward this end, the paper also suggests directions for future research.

There is too much that we do not know about COVID-19. The longer we take to find it out, the more lives will be lost. In this paper, we will defend a principle of risk parity: if it is permissible to expose some members of society (e.g. health workers or the economically vulnerable) to a certain level of ex ante risk in order to minimize overall harm from the virus, then it is permissible to expose fully informed volunteers to a (...) comparable level of risk in the context of promising research into the virus. We apply this principle to three examples of risky research: skipping animal trials for promising treatments, human challenge trials to speed up vaccine development, and low-dose controlled infection or “variolation.” We conclude that if volunteers, fully informed about the risks, are willing to help fight the pandemic by aiding promising research, there are strong moral reasons to gratefully accept their help. To refuse it would implicitly subject others to still graver risks. (shrink)

Ethical research behaviour plays an essential role in ensuring the integrity of knowledge. Consequently, ethical transgressions during the research process negatively influence the knowledge produced, and have wider social consequences for various stakeholders in society. To honour the value and role of ethical research for individuals and society, researchers are required to display ethical judgement and ethically responsible research behaviour. Doctoral students, who are considered to be significant contributors to knowledge creation, can improve the quality of (...) their research through their ethical research behaviour. Owing to the implicit and explicit ethical practices and conflicts that can arise during the research process, the supervision process is an opportune moment for developing ethical research behaviour and ethical capabilities in doctoral students. This article focuses on developing ethical research behaviour in doctoral students, and offers pragmatic guidelines for ways in which this behaviour can be developed during the supervision process. (shrink)

Ethics are of interest to business scholars because they influence decisions, behaviors, and outcomes. While scholars have increasingly shown interest in business ethics as a research topic, there are a mounting number of studies that examine ethical issues at the organizational level of analysis. This manuscript reports the results of a systematic review of empirical research on organizational ethics published in a broad sample of business journals over a 33-year period. A total of 184 articles are analyzed to (...) reveal gaps in the literature and, subsequently, lead to suggestions for future research; this is done in an effort to stimulate and perpetuate high quality research that more broadly impacts business scholars and practitioners. (shrink)

Why devote an issue of an ethics journal to prison medicine? Why conduct ethics research in prisons in the first place? In this editorial, we explain why prison ethics research is vitally important and illustrate our argument by introducing and briefly discussing the fascinating papers in this special issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry.Ethics is often regarded as a theoretical discipline. This is in large part due to ethics’ origin as a type of moral philosophy, which is (...) frequently associated with armchair theorising about principles and virtues and seems to have little connection with the “real world.” However, medical ethics and bioethics are increasingly becoming empirical disciplines. The “empirical turn” in ethics has led to an explosion in field research in ethics that uses the empirical methods of sociology, anthropology, and the health sciences to investigate a variety of ethical issues. The results of such research are often of much more value than purely theoret. (shrink)

Conducting or overseeing research in correctional settings requires knowledge of specific federal rules and regulations designed to protect the rights of individuals in incarceration. To investigate the extent to which relevant groups possess this knowledge, using a 10-item questionnaire, we surveyed 885 IRB prisoner representatives, IRB members and chairs with and without experience reviewing HIV/AIDS correctional protocols, and researchers with and without correctional HIV/AIDS research experience. Across all groups, respondents answered 4.5 of the items correctly. Individuals who have (...) overseen or conducted correctional research had the highest scores; however, even these groups responded correctly only to slightly more than half of the items. These findings emphasize the need for ongoing training in federal guidelines governing correctional research, particularly for those individuals who are embarking on this type of research. (shrink)

Empirical-ethical research constitutes a relatively new field which integrates socio-empirical research and normative analysis. As direct inferences from descriptive data to normative conclusions are problematic, an ethical framework is needed to determine the relevance of the empirical data for normative argument. While issues of normative-empirical collaboration and questions of empirical methodology have been widely discussed in the literature, the normative methodology of empirical-ethical research has seldom been addressed. Based on our own research experience, we discuss one (...) aspect of this normative methodology, namely the selection of an ethical theory serving as a background for empirical-ethical research. (shrink)

Ethical research in war zones is crucial yet underexplored, especially when analysed as a practice of freedom. Existing scholarship primarily focuses on safety challenges, the implications of researchers' outsider position, and the politicisation of research in war zones. This paper addresses the gap in understanding the emancipatory potential of ethical research, using the case of Ukrainian universities. It employs a statistical analysis of survey data and a thematic analysis of interviews, both conducted with members of the Ukrainian (...) higher education community. This paper demonstrates that ethical research in war contexts not only supports higher education communities but also symbolises resistance against war-induced destruction. This study underscores the importance of developing ethical research practices in war zones, aligning with international standards despite severe domestic challenges. It informs research policies at both institutional and national levels in war zones, and contributes to international policy aimed at supporting higher education communities in these contexts. (shrink)

This case study article draws upon experiences of a doctoral student and supervisor to reflect on the way in which we construct ethical narratives around our research. We seek to draw attention to the manner in which strict adherence to ERB guidelines can be problematic and risks causing more harm than it seeks to mitigate. We aim to show that we as researchers should focus on the potential harm caused to particularly vulnerable participants and draw attention to the need (...) to refocus conceptions of ethics away from a narrow, bureaucratic framework and towards moral concerns so as to avoid causing undue harm. (shrink)

Data Stewardship is a novel governance mechanism in the context of artificial intelligence (AI) development in healthcare. This paper examines whether the conceptual tool of stewardship can remedy inadequacies of ‘AI ethics’ which has fundamental problems of accountability, legitimacy and trustworthiness. A modern secular conceptual explanation of stewardship involves taking a balanced account of the interests of society, and the core element of answerability. This conception of stewardship lends itself to legal mechanisms involving fiduciary duties, which introduces accountability mechanisms into (...) AI development. The separation of AI development from the permanent enclosure of health data presents a useful lever to counter unethical behaviour and ensure societal engagement. Stewardship offers some promise to remedy the inadequacies of AI ethics, but there are risks that a narrow technical conception of data stewardship, without fiduciary duties and decoupled from beneficiaries, will be insufficient to drive the required fundamental change. (shrink)

A broad critical review of national policies on biomedical research - human, epidemiologic, clinical trials, genetic, reproductive, etc.

BackgroundEthics review is the process of assessing the ethics of research involving humans. The Ethics Review Committee (ERC) is the key oversight mechanism designated to ensure ethics review. Whether or not this governance mechanism is still fit for purpose in the data-driven research context remains a debated issue among research ethics experts.Main textIn this article, we seek to address this issue in a twofold manner. First, we review the strengths and weaknesses of ERCs in ensuring ethical oversight. (...) Second, we map these strengths and weaknesses onto specific challenges raised by big data research. We distinguish two categories of potential weakness. The first category concerns persistent weaknesses, i.e., those which are not specific to big data research, but may be exacerbated by it. The second category concerns novel weaknesses, i.e., those which are created by and inherent to big data projects. Within this second category, we further distinguish between purview weaknesses related to the ERC’s scope (e.g., how big data projects may evade ERC review) and functional weaknesses, related to the ERC’s way of operating. Based on this analysis, we propose reforms aimed at improving the oversight capacity of ERCs in the era of big data science.ConclusionsWe believe the oversight mechanism could benefit from these reforms because they will help to overcome data-intensive research challenges and consequently benefit research at large. (shrink)

Thus far, little work in bioethics has specifically focused on global health research priority-setting. Yet features of global health research priority-setting raise ethical considerations and concerns related to health justice. For example, such processes are often exclusively disease-driven, meaning they rely heavily on burden of disease considerations. They, therefore, tend to undervalue non-biomedical research topics, which have been identified as essential to helping reduce health disparities. In recognition of these ethical concerns and the limited scholarship and dialogue (...) addressing them, we convened an international workshop in September 2015. The workshop aimed to initiate discussion on the appropriate relationship between global and national levels of health research priority-setting and to begin exploring what might be ethically required for priority-setting at each of those levels. This paper comprises our reflections following the workshop. Its main objective is to launch a research agenda for the ethics of global health research priority-setting. We identify three domains of global health research priority-setting—scope, underlying values and substantive requirements, and procedural considerations. For each domain, specific research questions are highlighted and why they need to be explored is explained. Some preliminary thoughts and normative arguments as to how the research questions might be answered are also offered. For example, we provide initial ideas about the appropriate relationship between different priority-setting levels and what values and substantive considerations should guide or underpin global health research priority-setting as a matter of justice. We anticipate that framing a new research agenda for the ethics of global health research priority-setting will spur ethicists, researchers, and policymakers to refocus their efforts on developing more rigorous and ethically sound approaches to priority-setting. (shrink)

Ethics and integrity should be intertwined within the concept of Responsible Research. Integrity Officers should also be Ethics Officers, enforcing compliance with rules and norms, but also raising awareness on the meaning of ethics in researchers’ daily work. Paul Ricoeur’s definition of Ethics – “the aim of living a good life with and for others in just institutions” (Ricoeur in Oneself as Another. University of Chicago Press, 1994 ) –, points out the relational dimension of Ethics that matters to (...) all the stakeholders in scientific research. The dialogical interaction between Ethics and Integrity can help to prevent researchers from assuming self-regulation as the only possible path to be followed. In this paper, the challenges and the opportunities posed by this approach will be outlined and discussed, mainly, the challenges of building trust bottom up, while setting up restrictions to comply with rules and norms top down. Concerning the opportunities, the focus will be on making better science and building a solid network among the various stakeholders of the research system. (shrink)

There is a long history of women being underrepresented in biomedical and health research. Specific women’s health needs have been, and in some cases still are, comparatively neglected areas of study. Concerns about the health and social impacts of such bias and exclusion have resulted in inclusion policies from governments, research funders, and the scientific establishment since the 1990s. Contemporary understandings of foregrounding sex and gender issues within biomedical research range from women’s rights to inclusion, to links (...) between human rights, women’s health and sustainable development, and the increasing scientific and funding expectation for studies to consider the sex and gender implications of research design, results and impact. However, there are also exploitation issues to consider when foregrounding the inclusion of women as research participants, especially for research ethics committees and institutional review boards. A hidden risk is that exploitative research designs and practices may be missed, particularly by reviewers who may not have a nuanced understanding of gender-based harm. Utilizing contemporary case studies of ethics dumping, this paper highlights some of the concerns, and makes recommendations for IRBs/research ethics reviewers to help ensure that essential research is undertaken to the highest ethical standards. (shrink)

Engineers encounter difficult ethical problems in their practice and in research. In many ways, these problems are like design problems: they are complex, often ill-defined; resolving them involves an iterative process of analysis and synthesis; and there can be more than one acceptable solution. This book offers a real-world, problem-centered approach to engineering ethics, using a rich collection of open-ended scenarios and case studies to develop skill in recognizing and addressing ethical issues.

As the artificial intelligence (AI) ethics field is currently working towards its operationalisation, ethics review as carried out by research ethics committees (RECs) constitutes a powerful, but so far underdeveloped, framework to make AI ethics effective in practice at the research level. This article contributes to the elaboration of research ethics frameworks for research projects developing and/or using AI. It highlights that these frameworks are still in their infancy and in need of a structure and criteria (...) to ensure AI research projects advance in a way that respects norms and principles. This article proposes to draw from the European Union’s AI Act currently in development to shape these frameworks. Although, in the current form of the draft (as of August 2023), the obligations of the AI Act do not apply to scientific research, it is most likely that they will still have a strong impact on AI research considering the need to anticipate market placement or to test new tools in real world conditions. This article investigates what the risk-based approach in the AI Act implies for research ethics and highlights some AI Act obligations of particular value to implement for ethics review processes. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the question of whether there is such a thing as ‘expertise in research ethics’. I discuss first the issue of expertise in ethics more generally. There is quite a lot of resistance to the idea that there are ethics experts, for reasons which I will raise and respond to. I outline two different views of what might be counted as expertise in ethics, and argue that only one of these is defensible. But the defensible (...) view is also a useful view. Ethics expertise in this sense does exist. It is a set of generic analytic skills and knowledge of ideas and logical processes. Expertise in research ethics is a particular type of ethics expertise, and I give a brief account of what it includes, and how it differs from ethics expertise in general. I end with the suggestion that people with such expertise would be useful members of Human Research Ethics Committees, and steps ought to be taken to increase the likelihood that they become members. This may or may involve adding the category of ‘ethicist’ to the list of HREC membership categories. (shrink)

Background: The offer of aggregate study results to research participants following study completion is increasingly accepted as a means of demonstrating greater respect for participants. The attitudes of research ethics board chairs towards this practice, although integral to policy development, are unknown.Objectives: To determine the attitudes of REB chairs and the practices of REBs with respect to disclosure of results to research participants.Design: A postal questionnaire was distributed to the chairs of English-language university-based REBs in Canada. In (...) total, 88 REB chairs were eligible. The questionnaire examined respondents’ attitudes towards offering participants completed study results, methods for delivering this information, and barriers to disclosing results.Findings: The response rate was 89.8%. Chairs were highly supportive of offering results to research participants. Only 19.5% of chairs responded that a policy or guideline that governed the return of research results to participants existed at their institution. Most chairs supported the idea of their REB instituting a set of guidelines recommending that researchers offer results to participants in a lay format. Chairs identified the major impediments to the implementation of programmes offering to return results to participants as being financial cost and retaining contact with research participants .Conclusions: University-based REB chairs overwhelmingly support the offer of research results to participants. This is incongruent with the frequent lack of existing REB guidelines recommending this practice. REBs should support guidelines that diminish identified barriers and promote consistency in offering to return results. (shrink)

Cet article fait valoir que la recherche sur le développement international devrait être soumise à la surveillance des comités d’éthique de la recherche dans les pays où les données seront collectées. Cela inclut les personnes ayant un statut qui leur permet de se soustraire des lignes directrices ou des politiques d’éthique, telles que les personnes engagées par des organisations non gouvernementales. L’argument repose sur une compréhension de la justice sociale qui reconnaît que ne pas rechercher l’approbation éthique au niveau local (...) peut être un affront au mouvement de décolonisation et peut entraîner des dommages directs importants pour les participants. La supervision éthique au niveau local favorise une meilleure prise en compte des législations locales, des règlements, des priorités et du contexte. Par exemple, un comité d’éthique de la recherche local est souvent mieux placé qu’un comité étranger pour évaluer si un projet proposé comporte des risques spécifiques au contexte donné. En outre, le fait de soumettre un projet à un comité d’éthique de la recherche local permet de reconnaître la légitimité des autorités locales, prenant ainsi position contre l’histoire de la perte de pouvoir en lien avec la colonisation. La supervision locale permet d’accroître la responsabilité des chercheurs travaillant à l’étranger : si l’autorité locale et l’adaptation au contexte spécifique doivent être respectées, il doit y avoir des mécanismes pour s’assurer que la recherche qui ne satisfait pas à ces exigences ne peut avoir lieu. Les objections fondées sur la capacité limitée de supervision dans certains pays et sur les préoccupations liées à la politisation du processus d’évaluation sont abordées. Enfin, les rôles et les responsabilités des différentes parties prenantes dans la mise en œuvre d’une plus grande supervision éthique au niveau local sont définis. (shrink)

This research focuses on how research ethics committee and integrity board members discuss and decide on solutions to case scenarios that involve a dimension of research ethics or integrity in collaborative settings. The cases involved issues around authorship, conflict of interest, disregard of good scientific practice and ethics review, and research with vulnerable populations (children and neonates). The cases were set in a university, a hospital, or a research institute. In the research, we used (...) a deductive qualitative approach with thematic analysis. Twenty-seven research ethics committee and research integrity board members from 16 European countries and one country outside Europe participated. Participants represented natural and life sciences, social sciences, and humanities. They worked on cases involving ethical/integrity issues in six different constellations. Results show that experts apply key elements of ethical decision making, namely identification of ethical issues, stakeholders, guidelines, solutions, and own positionality, in dealing collaboratively with ethics/ integrity problems, and the nature of the application depends on the complexity of the case. Understanding how individuals knowledgeable in research ethics and integrity, in this case, individuals serving on research ethics committees and integrity boards, approach ethical/ moral issues can help to identify strategies that may be useful in the development of research ethics and integrity training for junior researchers who may benefit from learning professional strategies. (shrink)

Evaluation of clinical ethical case consultations has been discussed as an important research task in recent decades. A rigid framework of evaluation is essential to improve quality of consultations and, thus, quality of patient care. Different approaches to evaluate those services appropriately and to determine adequate empirical endpoints have been proposed. A key challenge is to provide an answer to the question as to which empirical endpoints—and for what reasons—should be considered when evaluating the quality of a service. In (...) this paper, we argue for an approach that adopts the role of ethics consultants as its point of departure. In a first step, we describe empirical and ethical characteristics of evaluating clinical ethical case. We show that the mode of action and the explicit normative character of the interventions constitute two characteristics which pose challenges to the selection of appropriate quality criteria and require special attention. In a second step, we outline the way in which an analysis of the role of ethics consultants in the context of a clinical ethical case consultation services can account for the existing challenges by linking empirically measurable endpoints with normative theory. Finally, we discuss practical implications of our model for evaluation research. (shrink)

An ethics reflection group is one of a range of ethics support services developed to better handle ethical challenges in healthcare. The aim of this article is to evaluate the implementation process of interdisciplinary ERGs in psychiatric and general hospital departments in Denmark. To our knowledge, this is the first study of ERG implementation to include both psychiatric and general hospital departments. The implementation and evaluation strategies are inspired by action research, using a qualitative approach and systematic text condensation (...) of 28 individual interviews and 4 focus groups with clinicians, ethics facilitators and ward managers. The implementation process was influenced by both structural factors and factors related to clinicians having different values, interests and experiences. Structural barriers and promotors in the process to implement ERG included the following sub-categories: Organizational factors, recruitment and training of ethics facilitators, the deliberation model, planning and recruitment of participants to the ERGs, the support of the ward managers and the project group. Barriers and promotors found among clinicians included the following sub-categories: Expectations and pre-understandings of ERGs, understandings of a physician’s job, challenges experienced by ethics facilitators. At the end of the study, when it was decided that the ERGs should be continued, the implementation strategies were remodeled by the participants to meet new challenges. The study of ERG implementation identified important structural and professional barriers and promotors that are likely to be relevant to anyone wanting to implement ethics support services across various types of healthcare services. (shrink)

Despite significant scholarly debate about knowledge production in the management discipline through the peer-review journal processes, there is minimal discussion about the ethical treatment of the research subject in these publication processes. In contrast, the ethical scrutiny of management research processes within research institutions is often highly formalized and very focused on the protection of research participants. Hence, the question arises of how management publication processes should best account for the interests of the research subject, (...) both in the narrow sense of specific research participants and in the broader understanding of the subject of the research. This question is particularly pertinent in light of significant codification of research ethics within academic institutions, and increasing self-reflection within the management discipline about the “good” of management research and education. Findings from a survey and interviews with management journal editors reveal a complex scenario; many editors believe that a formalized requirement within the journal publication process may have detrimental outcomes and, in fact, diminish the ethical integrity of management scholarship. Building on these findings, this paper argues that ethical concern for the research subject merely in terms of institutional rule compliance and avoidance of harm to individual participants is insufficient, and calls for explicitly positive engagement with both the individual and the collective subject of management research should receive due ethical consideration. An alternative model involving reflexive ethical consideration of research subjects across the publication process—with implications for role of authors, reviewers, editors, and research subjects—is outlined. (shrink)

This study explored the challenges of informed consent and understanding of the research process among Black and Latino men under community supervision. Between February and October 2012, we conducted cognitive face-to-face interviews using open-ended questions on the significant areas of research participation among 259 men aged 35 to 67 under community supervision in Bronx, New York. Content analysis of the open-ended questions revealed limited knowledge concerning the understanding of research participation. The study participants appeared to generally understand (...) concepts such as compensation after research participation and confidentiality. Participants demonstrated a lack of understanding of certain aspects of the research process—informed consent, human subject, Institutional Review Board, and clinical trials. These findings are informative to researchers conducting studies with criminal justice populations and Institutional Review Boards reviewing research studies. (shrink)