On Ethical Principles for
Social Research
Martyn Hammersley
The 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/keyword
s/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 decisionmaking 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/AcademyGener
icEthicsProject2013home.htm
Arguments for Principlism
Starting 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 nonWestern 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: Anonymisation
Traditionally, 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:12631). 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?
Bibliography
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