RSS 1.0Research Ethics Philosophical
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The Research Ethics Philosophical collection focuses on the relations and differences between ethics and research, between on one side an instrumental rationality, which rules sciences and technical innovation, and the ethical dimension of the human action. It gathers documents on research understood philosophically as, on one side, a possible way to renew life, thus on research as an ethics of utopias. Utopias offer a glimpse of an alternative to dominant system dissatisfaction, open the image of a world not yet in existence that is different from and better than the world we inhabit now.Research norms and values mean on the other hand concrete applications, in various fields, on ethics in research involving human beings. Setting research standards in empirical sciences and publication related research, finding rules and common praxis to reaffirm the anthropological ground of knowledge formation and erudition is a long path, a field in development, coextensive with that of ethics in higher education, and permeable to technological evolutions inside our societies.
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Attitudes and Knowledge of Adolescents in Jordan Regarding the Ethics of Social Media Data Use for Research PurposesThis study assessed the awareness and attitudes of adolescents in Jordan concerning the ethics of using their social media data for scientific studies. Using an online survey, 393 adolescents were recruited (mean age: 17.2 years ± 1.8). The results showed that 88% of participants were using their real personal information on social media sites, with males more likely to provide their information than females. More than two thirds of participants (72.5%) were aware that researchers may use their data for research purposes, with the majority believing that informed consent must be obtained from both the adolescents and their parents. However, more than three quarters of those surveyed (76%) did not trust the results of research that depended on collecting data from social media. These findings suggest that adolescents in Jordan understood most of the ethical aspects related to the utilization of their data from social media websites for research studies.
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Addressing ethical challenges in HIV prevention research with people who inject drugsDespite recent advances in HIV prevention and treatment, high HIV incidence persists among people who inject drugs (PWID). Difficult legal and political environments and lack of services for PWID likely contribute to high HIV incidence. Some advocates question whether any HIV prevention research is ethically justified in settings where healthcare system fails to provide basic services to PWID and where implementation of research findings is fraught with political barriers. Ethical challenges in research with PWID include concern about whether research evidence will be translated into practice; concerns that research might exacerbate background risks; and ethical challenges regarding the standard of HIV prevention in research. While these questions arise in other research settings, for research with PWID, these questions are especially controversial. This paper analyses four ethical questions in determining whether research could be ethically acceptable: (1) Can researchers ensure that research does not add to the burden of social harms and poor health experienced by PWID? (2) Should research be conducted in settings where it is uncertain whether research findings will be translated into practice? (3) When best practices in prevention and care are not locally available, what standard of care and prevention is ethically appropriate? (4) Does the conduct of research in settings with oppressive policies constitute complicity? We outline specific criteria to address these four ethical challenges. We also urge researchers to join the call to action for policy change to provide proven safe and effective HIV prevention and harm reduction interventions for PWID around the world.
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Slippery slope arguments as precautionary arguments: a new way of understanding the concern about geoengineering researchIt has been argued that geoengineering research should not be pursued because of a slippery slope from research to problematic deployment. These arguments have been thought weak or defective on the basis of interpretations that treat the arguments as relying on dubious premises. The paper urges a new interpretation of these arguments as precautionary arguments, i.e. as relying on a precautionary principle. This interpretation helps us better appreciate the potential normative force of the worries, their potential policy relevance, and the kind of evidence required by slippery slope arguments. Understood as precautionary arguments, it is clear that slippery slope arguments against geoengineering capture concerns that are worth taking seriously.
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The Marginalist Revolution in Legal ThoughtFor legal policy the two most important scientific ideas of the nineteenth century were Darwinism and marginalism. Both became the starting points for the great revolutions in the social sciences that took place in the 1870s and later. The central principle of Darwinism is the theory of evolution by natural selection. Because nature produces many more offspring than each niche in the environment can accommodate, individuals of a particular species must compete to survive. Purely at random each individual acquires from its parents a set of characteristics that are different from those of any other individual. Those who inherit characteristics that give them a competitive advantage tend to live long enough to have offspring of their own. They pass these characteristics on to future generations, who then continue the struggle. The starting point for Darwinian analysis of the human individual is the environment. Both the human organism and its behavior are a product of the environment, shaped over many generations. The organism's choices are determined by the situation around it. By contrast to Darwinism, marginalism begins with the human being as an autonomous decisionmaker. Each individual has a certain amount of wealth and a collection of wants, but as his desire for some particular thing is fulfilled, his wish for more of that thing diminishes. The individual then maximizes his satisfaction by purchasing goods in such quantities so that, at the margin, the amount of satisfaction each gives him is precisely the same.
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On Burning, Saving and Stealing LettersWhat happens when the social scientist's vulnerable, at risk subject meets the robust subject of oral history? I hope this seminar will tell me. For the subject I bring with me, from a training in literary criticism, is neither vulnerable nor robust but tragicomically both, agent of its own misfortune. This is the subject who puts their lover's letters in an archive for an uncertainly dreamed-for posterity; and the subject who discovers their letters have been put there by their ex-lesbian-ex-wife; and the subject who agrees to archive those texts for - well for more than the record. And, most of all, I bring along the subject who wishes then to read, quote, interpret such letters in her own uncertainly dreamed-for career-book. How can we be ethical about using personal archives, while also enjoying the ambiguity of lovers', donors', archivists', researchers' stories? What codes of conduct might acknowledge the contrariness of all our characters, what forms of university research ethics may indeed be instrumental in producing a contrary subject? And can an ethics based on care rather than justice help? I will explore these questions in relation to my search for letters by women and men involved in women's liberation struggles since the 1970s, and why I ended my book with a meditation 'On Burning, Saving and Stealing Letters'.
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Trust me, I'm a researcher: Experiences of archiving dataLanguage and identity in the narratives of Polish people - 30 interviews in Greater Manchester - RA recent migrant, PI second generation Polish - Focus on methodological issues in cross language research and substantive focus on identity and language
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Informed consent for reusing data: Is it possible? Does it matter?Informed consent for reusing data: Is it possible? Does it matter?
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The history of bioethicsThe assumption that developments in technologies and societies create new ethical issues for health and medical research is intuitively appealing. However, a closer inspection of the history of bioethics reveals a surprising consistency in the core issues that have formed the basis of bioethical debates over time. If the issues involved in bioethical debates remain essentially constant, are new discussions and new guidelines and principles-produced in the wake of research scandals or inspired by the introduction of new technologies-redundant? This article examines some of the implications of the history of bioethics for understanding current ethical debates and for the formation of a culture of ethical conduct in health research. © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Canadian journal of bioethics : = Revue canadienne de bioéthiqueHeinOnline, [2018]-
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Benefit sharing in genomic and biobanking research in Uganda: Perceptions of researchers and research ethics committee membersBackground: Genomic and biobanking research has increased in Africa over the past few years. This has raised pertinent ethical, legal, and societal concerns for stakeholders such as sample or data ownership, commercialization, and benefit sharing. There is limited awareness of the concept of benefit sharing by stakeholders in sub-Saharan Africa.Objective: This study aimed to explore the perceptions of researchers and research ethics committee members on benefit sharing in international collaborative genomic and biobanking research.Methods: Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 15 researchers and 19 research ethics committee members. A thematic approach was used to interpret the results.Results: Six themes emerged from the data and these included perceptions on the benefits of genomic and biobanking research; discussion of benefit sharing with participants during the informed consent process; legal implications of benefit sharing and the role of material transfer agreements; equity and fairness in sharing the benefits of genomic research; perceived barriers to fair benefit sharing; and recommendations for fostering fair and equitable benefit sharing in genomic and biobanking research. Most respondents clearly understood the various forms of benefits of genomic and biobanking research and opined that such benefits should be fairly and equitably shared with low and middle-income country researchers and their institutions, and research communities. The perceived barriers to the fair benefit sharing unfavorable include power disparities, weak research regulatory frameworks, and lack of scientific integrity.Conclusion: Overall, respondents believed that the distribution of the advantages of genomic and biobanking research in North-South collaborative research was not equitable nor fair, and that the playing field was not leveled. Therefore, we advocate the following for fair and equitable benefit sharing: Building the capacities and empowering research scientists in developing nations; strengthening regulatory frameworks and extending the purview of the research ethics committee in the development and implementation of material transfer agreements; and meaningfully involving local research communities in benefit sharing negotiations.
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Wissenschaftliche FairnessPlagiate und andere Fälle wissenschaftlichen Fehlverhaltens landen regelmäßig in den Medien und geben auch Außenstehenden Einblicke in problematische Forschungsprozesse. Während diese Skandale ein Schlaglicht auf offensichtliche oder absichtliche Fehler werfen, sind die alltäglichen Herausforderungen wissenschaftlicher Praxis weitaus komplexer. Die Autor*innen analysieren die Vielschichtigkeit und Verwobenheit von fragwürdigen Forschungspraktiken, Machtstrukturen und Fehlverhalten. Ihr Konzept der wissenschaftlichen Fairness dient als Folie zur Analyse bestehender Problematiken und zeigt in einem Gegenentwurf Handlungsoptionen für mehr Integrität, Verantwortung und wissenschaftsethisch gute Forschung auf.
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Global Media Ethics and the Digital RevolutionThis volume responds to the challenges posed by the rapid developments in satellite TV and digital technologies, addressing media ethics from a global perspective to discuss how we can understand journalism practice in its cultural contexts. An international team of contributors draw upon global and non-Western traditions to discuss the philosophical origins of ethics and the tension that exists between media institutions, the media market and political/ideological influencers. The chapters then unveil the discrepancies among international journalists in abiding by the ethics of the profession and the extent to which media ethics are understood and applied in their local context/environment. Arguing that the legitimacy of ethics comes not from the definition per se, but from the extent to which it leads to social good, the book posits this should be the media’s raison d'être to abide by globally accepted ethical norms in order to serve the common good. Taking a truly global approach to the question of media ethics, this volume will be an important resource for scholars and students of journalism, communication studies, media studies, sociology, politics and cultural studies.
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Higher Education Transformation for Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Transformation FrameworkThe field of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) will change the shape of education in the future completely, current classroom environment management, collaboration with teachers, and development of AI-based technology platforms. The intelligent adaptive transformation of learning and teaching in higher education required the emergence of all educational process structures. This paper presents a revolutionary educational process called AI-based learning, Which involves technologies within universities, cultures, practices, goals, and communities. This transformation reduces the gap between higher education’s outcome and industry’s needs, by producing lifelong learners. The proposed framework illustrates the full structure, the development steps, and the implementation benefits. The proposed framework also provides connections of scattered scientific research work in different related domains. Using AI competency-based learning will let students achieve the course outcomes easier and faster and increase student engagement by solving real-life industrial problems in different application domains. The paper also presents implementations phases, benefits and provides a comparison after applying the framework.
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The Multidimensional Nature of Research Ethics: Letters Issued by a French Research Ethics Committee Included Similar Proportions of Ethical and Scientific QueriesDebate is ongoing concerning the activities and functioning of Research Ethics Committees (REC), especially a possible science-or-ethics dichotomy in research ethics review. We retrospectively analyzed 145 letters issued by a French REC over 18 months. All queries were classified in three levels: qualification (definition of the problem), category (aggregation of broader topics) and finally fields (ethical, scientific, or administrative). Overall, 971 queries were identified, of which 407 (42%), 379 (39%), and 135 (14%) were deemed ethical, scientific, and administrative queries, respectively. The most frequent concern was about participants' information. The main influencing factor was the profession of the reporting readers-scientific queries were more frequently raised by a methodologist, whereas ethical queries were more frequently raised by an ethicist. These results indicate that research ethics review is a multidimensional task that should be considered a collaborative effort.
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The Multidimensional Nature of Research Ethics: Letters Issued by a French Research Ethics Committee Included Similar Proportions of Ethical and Scientific QueriesDebate is ongoing concerning the activities and functioning of Research Ethics Committees (REC), especially a possible science-or-ethics dichotomy in research ethics review. We retrospectively analyzed 145 letters issued by a French REC over 18 months. All queries were classified in three levels: qualification (definition of the problem), category (aggregation of broader topics) and finally fields (ethical, scientific, or administrative). Overall, 971 queries were identified, of which 407 (42%), 379 (39%), and 135 (14%) were deemed ethical, scientific, and administrative queries, respectively. The most frequent concern was about participants' information. The main influencing factor was the profession of the reporting readers-scientific queries were more frequently raised by a methodologist, whereas ethical queries were more frequently raised by an ethicist. These results indicate that research ethics review is a multidimensional task that should be considered a collaborative effort.
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Social Ethics Components of an Utopia in Terms of Hafez's Lyric PoemsBackground and Aim: Social life in any age requires the familiarity with social norms. Ethical living also requires the familiarity with the right action and correct and constructive interaction with the world. Therefore, recognizing the axes of social ethics and observing its limits will create a civilized society based on ethics. The main purpose of this research is to search in Hafez's lyric poems to find the criteria of social ethics to build a utopia. Methods: The approach of the present study is descriptive-analytical and is performed qualitatively. In order to conduct this research, Hafez Divan collection has been studied and its verses based on ethics of living and social ethics, which are a kind of Hafez’s statement in this regard, have been extracted and analyzed. Ethical Considerations: In conducting the present study, in accordance with the ethical norms of conducting all research, all aspects of honesty and trustworthiness have been observed. Results: Hafez's poem is a poem of morality and reliance on the principles of social ethics and ethics of living, but according to the reverse hypocrisy and the language of ridicule that flows throughout Hafez's poems, this centrality of morality manifests itself in the opposite form and in a ridicule way. According to Hafez, a perfect human being is a person who possesses sublime qualities such as coexistence and respect for other beliefs, avoidance of hypocrisy, patience in the face of calamities, freedom, avoidance of authoritarianism, compassion and so on. Conclusion: Studying and recognizing Hafez's lyric poems, his views and thoughts, clarifies a part of the individual and living ethics in ancient Persian texts. Moreover, it acquaints man with the Hafez’s essential definition of morality. This acquaintance not only will lead to the purification and training of the human soul in the face of society, but also will provide a basis for the creation of a utopia based on social ethics if its boundaries are observed. In Hafez's poetry, moral teachings are generally expressed indirectly and covertly in the veil of irony and humor. Please cite this article as: Mousavinia SM, Razzaghi M. Social Ethics Components of an Utopia in Terms of Hafez's Lyric Poems. Akhlaq-i zisti, i.e., Bioethics Journal. 2022; 12(37): e16.
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A comparison of the philosophical traditions of Neo-Casuistry and Situation Ethics in the context of morality issues arising in the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’The purpose of this research is through extensive examination to compare and contrast two very different ethical decision-making frameworks, both forged in the Christian tradition. An examination will be undertaken of Neo-Casuistry and Christian Situationism and their respective abilities to provide their practitioners with the tools for moral decision-making, moral resolution and ultimately moral truth that will serve to positively address moral dilemma and/or moral conflict resulting from the use of Fourth Order Technologies (4OT) in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)
 Neo-Casuistry falls within the Catholic tradition and Christian Situationism falls within the Protestant tradition and the abilities of both religious, ethical decision-making frameworks to provide moral truth in 4IR will be examined, assessed and compared within the contemporary context of ‘privacy’ and the ‘personal’. The results of this research will support that an ethical decision-making framework that judiciously makes use of the ‘best practices’ from each of the traditions would appear to provide 4IR with the most suitable and practical means of finding moral truth in situations of moral dilemma and/or moral conflict.