What if ethics regulation actually fostered ethics?

In a Times Higher Education article earlier this year, Martyn Hammersley worried that “social research is being stymied by excessive ethical oversight”. While we tend to agree with common worries about the dangers of overreach by certain institutional bodies, we feel that a broader view could be taken, offering alternative avenues to explore.

Importantly, for all its current faults, research ethics regulation was born out of a series of scandals that needed to be addressed. The “original sin” was the terrifying series of experiments carried out by Nazi scientists in death camps, which resulted in the Nuremberg Code specifying voluntary consent, consideration of risks and the avoidance of unnecessary harm and suffering.

While foundational, however, the code remained almost forgotten for nearly two decades, until a series of academic scandals reactivated its relevance. The famous Milgram Experiment in 1961 at Yale University and the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo 10 years later triggered protests regarding their cavalier experimental protocols and treatment of participants. Multiple calls for clearer guidelines followed, leading to the establishment of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in the 1970s. Though always encompassing local specificities, most IRBs enforce what is known as the Common Rule, which demands integrity, respect for persons, informed consent, beneficence based on a benefit-risk assessment and justice in process and treatment.

Regulation of research ethics quickly spread from the US to other anglophone countries and beyond, becoming increasingly formalised as it did so. This led to two major issues. The first was the export of both an American worldview (in terms of regulation, research and understanding of ethics) and a biomedical view of science (formed by the requirements of clinical trials, for instance). The second issue is what Charles Bosk called in a 2007 article “the new bureaucracies of virtue”, which favoured standard procedures and compliant behaviours at the expense of ethical reflection.

Facing the many concerns and frustrations regarding research ethics regulation – the main ones being well expressed in Hammersley’s article – some scholars tried to offer alternatives. Published in 2012, the New Brunswick Declaration proposed a new approach to the regulation of ethics in the humanities and social sciences.

While converging on the core principles already set out in the Common Rule, the declaration’s authors also offer guidelines for research ethics regulation: scientists should be “held to professional standards of competence, integrity, and trust”, but regulators also have to “grant researchers the same level of respect that researchers should offer research participants”. The declaration calls for IRBs to serve their purpose in a wider environment that fosters a culture of research ethics – not just act as the ethical police.

Inspired by this, we have recently proposed in the Revue Française de Gestion an alternative model. At its core are two fundamental principles: that the essence of research ethics is reflexivity (individual, collective and professional) and that the vocation of ethics regulation is to foster ethical reflections. Importantly, an IRB is not the alpha and omega of research ethics. Training offering space for researchers to express and share their ethical concerns and reflections should therefore be placed at the heart of the system. Research ethics must be constantly cultivated through discussions and debates, at individual, collective and institutional levels.

That said, certain constraints remain unavoidable and must be integrated, such as regulatory and legislative frameworks (the European GDPR, for example) and the founding principles of the Common Rule. Most institutions will thus need to create or maintain an IRB, whose official function will be to evaluate and validate research projects, but without imposing an extensive normative research ethics framework and with the clear aim of supporting researchers towards validation.

We recommend a two-tier application system, initially requesting only a broad overview of research protocols (as most of them will not be problematic). Further information should only be requested if specific aspects trigger additional questions. In line with the work of Martin Tolich and Maureen H. Fitzgerald, those questions could be limited to “What ethical issues does the researcher believe are raised by this project?” and “How does the researcher plan to address these ethical problems?” Any overburdening request will trigger avoidance strategies and/or compliant behaviours – none of which serve a culture of research ethics.

At a national level, research ethics committees for each discipline are necessary, but their role should be neither to arbitrate nor to evaluate. Following the model of the French research institute Inserm, they should rather aim at addressing major trends and problems of the profession in terms of research ethics, providing food for thought for institutions, academic associations and researchers themselves.

Their composition will need to be diverse in terms of the individuals, disciplines and approaches represented. Members will have to address the ethical questions raised in an open manner, making themselves neither the arbiters nor the prescribers of the profession.

It is not realistic to refuse any formalisation of research ethics. IRBs and ethics committees have become unavoidable, but they also can be put at the service of a culture of research ethics, rather than acting as judge and jury. Above all, they must invite researchers to tackle ethical questions themselves and foster and fuel these reflections.

Yoann Bazin is a professor of business ethics at EM Normandie and an associate scholar at Said Business School, University of Oxford. Élise Goiseau is an assistant professor in the department of human resources at Excelia Business School, La Rochelle.