Many people argue that disagreements and inconsistencies between Research Ethics Committees are morally problematic and there has been much effort to 'harmonise' their judgements. Some inconsistencies are bad because they are due to irrationality, or carelessness, or the operation of conflicting interests, an so should be reduced or removed. Other inconsistencies, we argue, are not bad and should be left or even encouraged. In this paper we examine three arguments to reject the view that we should strive for complete consistency between committees. The first argument is that differences in judgement are not necessarily incompatible with ideas of justice for patients who are potential participants of research reviewed by different committees. We call this 'the justice argument.' The second argument is that such committees do not have access to a single moral truth, to which their judgement is supposed to correspond. We call this the 'moral pluralism argument.' The third argument is that the process of ethics committee review is also morally relevant and not solely the outcome. We call this the 'due process argument.' While we fall short of establishing exactly how much variation and on what substantive issues would ethical permissible, we show that it is largely inevitable and that a certain amount of variation could be seen as a desirable part of the institution of medical research.
Having dismissed two other anti-separationist strategies, this chapter presents the best way of attacking separationism and articulating nonseparationism. It is denied that thick concepts can be split into thin evaluation and nonevaluative descriptive content by showing that thick evaluation is itself a basic and fundamental response to the world. Evaluation cannot be reduced to stances that are merely pro or con, as separationists do, because doing so results in a strange view of the world. This idea is elaborated in many ways: the proposal’s radical nature is revealed since the notion of the evaluative is shown to stretch further than one might think; it is suggested that there is no obvious clear dividing line between evaluative and nonevaluative concepts; there is a final discussion of evaluative flexibility; and two worries from Chapter Two are met. Work by Jonathan Dancy, Philippa Foot, Gilbert Ryle, and Bernard Williams is discussed.
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