On Ethical Principles for Social Research 

Martyn HammersleyThe Open University

Annual Conference, Research Institute for Health and Social Change, Manchester Metropolitan University

July 2013

A plethora of advice and direction• A growing number of texts on social

research ethics (for example, Macfarlane 2009, Hammersley and Traianou 2012a, Miller et al 2012, Wiles 2012).

• Ethics codes developed, and continually revised by research organisations (BPS, SRA, BSA, BERA).

• Ethical frameworks used by universities, funding bodies, health authorities, social care agencies, etc., often as a basis for ethical regulation.

A fairly comprehensive listing that covers much of social research, not just education:

Hammersley, M. and Traianou, A. (2012b) Ethics and Educational Research. Available at: http://www.bera.ac.uk/category/keywords/ethics

Ethical regulation• For a long time statements about research

ethics were largely advisory, including those in professional codes.

• However, first in the US, and more recently here in the UK, codes and frameworks have come to be used as the basis for ethical regulation, with decisions being made by ethics committees about whether particular research projects, employing particular methods, can go ahead.

• The development of regulation in the health field, and its spread via ESRC’s REF/FRE.

An Influential Approach: Principlism

• The idea of summarising the ethical considerations or requirements applying to research in terms of a small set of principles goes back at least to the Belmont Report of 1979 (also Beauchamp and Childress 2012)

• Current codes and frameworks vary in their character. Some present a small number of principles, others provide more numerous and detailed listings of ethical considerations.

Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles

1. Autonomy: Respect for the decision-making capacities of autonomous persons

2. Non-maleficence: Avoiding causing harm

3. Beneficence: Ensuring benefits outweigh risks and costs

4. Justice: Distributing benefits, risks, and costs fairly.

Varieties of Principlism

• Strong principlism: aiming at a coherent, exhaustive, and determinate set of principles.

• Weak principlism: recognition that different principles have conflicting implications, that they are not exhaustive, and rarely produce a single, universally convincing conclusion.

Often seems to be oscillation between these two positions on the part of principalists.

Current moves towards principlism

• The 6 principles used by ESRC’s REF and FRE

• BPS Code of Human Research Ethics (2009).

• Moves at the moment under the auspices of the Academy of Social Sciences to develop a set of generic ethics principles. See http://www.acss.org.uk/Ethics/AcademyGenericEthicsProject2013home.htm

Arguments for PrinciplismStarting point is that it is necessary to provide

succinct guidance to researchers, as well as to lay people, about what is and is not ethical in social research.

But it is recognised that there are disadvantages in seeking to specify a set of ethical rules:

a) These will never cover all eventualities, since the conditions in which research is done and the methods employed change;

b) It is important to make clear that ethical responsibility lies with researchers not those who frame codes, or ethics committees

One criticism: liberal individualism• Beauchamp (2010:7 ) describes the

principles he has put forward as ‘mid-level principles’.

• Critics argue that they are a product of Western liberalism, do not apply in non-Western societies or to ‘indigenous’ groups within Western societies.

• Communitarians argue that they are inappropriate even in the West because they do not give enough weight to the common good (see Christians 2005).

Other criticisms of principlism• Fails to provide sufficiently determinate means

of reaching sound decisions about research ethics (Clouser and Gert 1990). And this is often seen as an institutional requirement under ethical regulation.

• Forces thinking about research ethics into too narrow a range of considerations, and offers the mirage of ethical judgment by logical inference (see DuBose et al 1994).

These contrasting criticisms arise in part from ambivalence and ambiguity on the part of principlists about the purpose of principles.

False prospect• A set of principles can never provide an

adequate, exhaustive, and determinate set of recommendations about all the ethical issues in research.

• One reason for this is that we live with potentially conflicting values. Beauchamp and Childress’s principles illustrate this. This was the reason why Ross (1930) argued that principles are ‘prima facie’ in character.

• Another reason is that, as we shall see, any principle has to be interpreted in each situation to which it is ‘applied’.

A quasi-deductive mode of ethical reasoning

• The BPS Code declares: ‘‘Ethical research conduct is, in essence, the application of informed moral reasoning, founded on a set of moral principles’ (BPS 2010:7 emphasis added).

• Beauchamp (2003:269): ‘Specification is a process of reducing the indeterminateness of general norms to give them increased action-guiding capacity, while retaining the moral commitments in the original norm’.

Situationists, casuists, and particularists

They all argue that Principlism gets the very nature of ethical argument wrong:

• It is not a matter of ‘deriving’ practical decisions from a pre-given set of principles.

• Sound ethical judgments rely primarily upon assessing relevant features of each new case against the background of what was judged right and wrong, and why, in previous, similar cases.

Two related criticisms of quasi-deductivism

1. Inductivism: Principles come out of the assessment of particular cases, and are no more than summaries of past experience, rather than being given, first principles.

2. Interpretivism: Any principle has to be interpreted in making sense of a particular case, and in an important sense is reformulated each time.

Casuistry

• A long tradition of approaching ethical issues through clarifying the similarities and differences between particular cases.

• Jonsen and Toulmin (1988), both of whom were involved in preparing the Belmont Report, argue that this is the most appropriate way of thinking about research ethics.

Dancy’s particularism

• In his book Ethics Without Principles, Dancy (2004) argues that what counts as a good reason for a particular judgment in one situation is not necessarily a good reason in another.

• Indeed, the same reason can even count against an action in a new case when it counted for that line of action in a previous one.

An example: AnonymisationTraditionally, it has been standard practice to

anonymise participants in research. But some argue that participants should be allowed to decide whether or not their names are used (see Hammersley and Traianou 2012a:126-31). Examples:

• Proud of their work, a hospital ward team want to be named.

• Hospital administrators responsible for a lapse in care want anonymity to avoid prosecution.

• A cosmetic surgery clinic wants to be named for advertising purposes.

Away with principles?• These casuist and particularist arguments do

not necessarily undermine the role of principles.

• But the implication is that principles can only be treated as summaries of what has been taken to be important in dealing with previous cases, rather than as premisses from which conclusions can be derived.

• And they must be ‘applied’ to new cases with great caution: they can be no more than reminders of what it could be important to take into account.

The problems of ethical regulation• Ethics committees must turn principles into

prescriptions and proscriptions.

• Infringement of the autonomy of researchers potentially undermines their ability to operate in an ethical manner.

• Ethics becomes a largely instrumental matter of getting proposals through the relevant committee(s).

(See Hammersley 2009, Hammersley and Traianou 2012b).

Conclusion• Principles can be no more than, and should

be treated as no more than, reminders of considerations that ought to be taken into account in doing research.

• In the context of ethical regulation, in practice, they will almost always be turned into prescriptions, with potentially damaging consequences.

• As a result, in this context they take on an ideological role, obscuring the nature of ethical judgment and how it ought to operate within research practice.

So, what to do?

BibliographyBeauchamp, T. (2003) ‘Methods and principles in biomedical

ethics’, Journal of Medical Ethics, 29, 5, pp269-74.

Beauchamp, T. (2010) Standing on Principles, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Beauchamp, T. and Childress, J. (2012) Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Seventh edition, New York, Oxford University Press.

(Belmont Commission) The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1979) Ethical Principles & Guidelines for Research Involving Human Subjects, Washington D.C., Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

British Psychological Society (2010) Code of Human Research Ethics, Leicester, British Psychological Society.

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Dancy, J. (2004) Ethics Without Principles, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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