Contesting Risks and Benefits through Ethical Scandals

• In Event: Building an Evidence Base for Research Ethics in Political Science

Abstract

The US Common Rule stipulates that IRBs can only approve research as ethical if the benefits of research outweigh its risks. While intuitively appealing, this article argues that the concepts of risk and benefit are so vague as to be indeterminate when applied to the social sciences. As a result, people may maintain fundamentally irreconcilable views as to what constitutes ethical practice, and assessments using this risk-benefit calculus are arbitrary. To illustrate this problem, this article examines four ethical “scandals” in the social sciences as moments when scholars articulate and justify costs versus benefits. The article makes three contributions: Empirically, I find that in the face of indeterminacy, scholars rely on background principles, norms, and processes to claim and contest ethics. Analytically, I identify three mechanisms that sustain the Common Rule criteria as indeterminate when used to evaluate social science research. These are ambiguity, incommensurability, and incompleteness. Normatively, I conclude that while indeterminacy is in some ways a well-understood and well-recognized problem, the implications are nonetheless significant. They demand a careful assessment of the costs of institutional ethical review, the trade-offs entailed in continued investment in this system, and the role it should be given in policing ethics going forward.

Author

• Rebecca Tapscott