Risk-Aversion or Ethical Responsibility? Towards a New Research Ethics Paradigm
Issue: Vol 12 No. 2 (2017) Special Issue: Ethics and Fieldwork
Journal: Fieldwork in Religion
Subject Areas: Religious Studies Linguistics
DOI: 10.1558/firn.35665
Abstract:
Ethics seems to be of increasing concern for researchers in Higher Education Institutes and funding bodies demand ever more transparent and robust ethics procedures. While we agree that an ethical approach to fieldwork in religion is critical, we take issue with the approach that ethics committees and reviews adopt in assessing the ethicality of proposed research projects. We identify that the approach to research ethics is informed by consequentialism – the consequences of actions, and Kantianism – the idea of duty. These two ethical paradigms are amenable to the prevailing audit culture of HE. We argue that these ethical paradigms, while might be apposite for bio-medical research, are not appropriate for fieldwork in religion. However, because ethics should be a crucial consideration for all research, it is necessary to identify a different approach to ethical issues arising in ethnographic research. We suggest that a virtue ethics approach – concerned with character – is much more consistent with the situated, relational and ongoing nature of ethnographic research.
Author: Stephen Jacobs, Alan Apperley
References :
Armbruster, Heidi and Anna Lærke
2008 Taking Sides: Ethics, Politics and Fieldwork in Anthropology. New York: Berghahn Books.
Besley, A.C., and Michael A. Peters
2006 Neoliberalism, Performance and the Assessment of Research Quality. South African Journal of Higher Education 20(6): 814–32.
De Laine, Marlene
2000 Fieldwork, Participation and Practice: Ethics and Dilemmas in Qualitative Research. London: Sage.
Dyer, Sarah, and David Demeritt
2008 Un-Ethical Review? Why it is Wrong to Apply the Medical Model of Research Governance to Human Geography. Progress in Human Geography 33(1): 46–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132508090475
ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council)
2017 Research Ethics: Our Core Principles. Online: http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding/guidance-for-applicants/research-ethics/our-core-principles (accessed June 20, 2017).
Ess, Charles
2009 Digital Media Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hursthouse, Rosalind
2002 On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hursthouse, Rosalind, and Glen Pettigrove
2016 Virtue Ethics. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N.
Zalta. Online: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ethics-virtue/ (accessed June 20, 2017).
Israel, Mark
2015 Research Ethics and Integrity for Social Scientists: Beyond Regulatory Compliance. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473910096
Israel, Mark, and Iain Hay
2006 Research Ethics for Social Scientists. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/
9781849209779
MacIntyre, Alasdair
2007 After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edn. London: Duckworth.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy
2000 Ire in Ireland. Ethnography 1(1): 117–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/
14661380022230660
Taylor, Charles
1989 Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, Max
1978 Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Volume 1. London: University of California Press.
UKRIO (UK Research Integrity Office)
2017 Principles. Online: http://ukrio.org/publications/code-of-practice-for-research/
2-0-principles (accessed June 20, 2017).
University of Wolverhampton
2017 Ethics Guidance: What is Ethics. Online: https://www.wlv.ac.uk/research/about-our-research/policies-and-ethics/ethics-guidance/ (accessed February 3, 2018).