Research Ethics Committees: Differences and Moral Judgement

Abstract

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.

Defining Financial Conflicts and Managing Research Relationships: An Analysis of University Conflict of Interest Committee Decisions

“…Even when committees are structurally similar and subject to the same federal, state, and institutional policies, there may be procedural and judgmental differences that result in varying definitions and assessments of problematic relationships and appropriate management Defining Financial Conflicts and Managing Research Relationships 417 strategies [4]. Previous research has examined variation in IRB decisions regarding particular protocols [22,23]; one previous study has determined that COI committees vary in their assessment of financial disclosures and the appropriate management strategies and that local concerns dominate their written rationales for particular decisions [4]. However, to date, there are no empirical data regarding the actual social processes by which COI committees reach their decisions.…”

Written work: The social functions of Research Ethics Committee letters

“…A particular focus of criticism has centered on apparent irrationality, incompetence, and "inconsistencies" in REC decision-making (e.g. Hannigan and Allen 2003;Lux et al 2000;Edwards et al 2004). It is only more recently that a social scientific analysis of RECs has begun to emerge, as the social science community itself has moved towards increased ethical oversight of research (e.g.…”

HRECs and journalism research: The uneven playing field

“…Soares observed that the four-month long process of negotiation and gaining HREC approval resulted in his project shifting from being journalism, to being an oral history project. He observed that 'sometimes compliance with the ethical guidelines was made impossible by the logistics in the field' (p. 47) and he raised the issue of paternalism, first flagged by Edwards et al (2004), and wrote 'for me to have assumed in this instance that my interviewees would not be capable of judging for themselves the legitimacy of the risks they faced, having been fully informed of those risks, would in my view have itself been unethical" (Soares,p. 48).…”