The job of ‘ethics committees’

Abstract

What should authorities establish as the job of ethics committees and review boards? Two answers are: (1) review of proposals for consistency with the duly established and applicable code and (2) review of proposals for ethical acceptability. The present paper argues that these two jobs come apart in principle and in practice. On grounds of practicality, publicity and separation of powers, it argues that the relevant authorities do better to establish code-consistency review and not ethics-consistency review. It also rebuts bad code and independence arguments for the opposite view. It then argues that authorities at present variously specify both code-consistency and ethics-consistency jobs, but most are also unclear on this issue. The paper then argues that they should reform the job of review boards and ethics committees, by clearly establishing code-consistency review and disestablishing ethicsconsistency review, and through related reform of the basic orientation, focus, name, and expertise profile of these bodies and their actions.

The structure of ethics review: expert ethics committees and the challenge of voluntary research euthanasia

“…They do admit ‘ethical thought and response are always fallible and potentially improvable’ (ref. 6, p. 13). But they fear that ‘[d]ue to the relative inscrutability of ethical considerations, ethics-consistency review would tend in practice to drift into the fundamentally different but epistemically easier practice of treating the say-so of boards as being what makes reviewed activities ethically acceptable or unacceptable’.…”

“…In a thoughtful article in this issue, Andrew Moore and Andrew Donnelly divide ethics review into ‘ethics-consistency’ and ‘code-consistency’ review 6. This division is orthogonal to the subjective/objective distinction.…”

“…One of these is that ‘One risk of ethics-consistency thinking is that it invites the idea that ethics-consistency reviewers are answerable only to higher masters than, or at least to factors independent of, democratically elected governments’ (ref. 6, p. 12).…”

Reviewing code consistency is important, but research ethics committees must also make a judgement on scientific justification, methodological approach and competency of the research team

“…We have followed with interest the commentaries arising from Moore and Donnellys1 argument that authorities in charge of research ethics committees (RECs) should focus primarily on establishing code-consistent reviews 1. We broadly agree with Savulescu’s2 argument that ethics committees should become more expert, but in a different way and for a different reason.…”

The job of ‘ethics committees’ should be ethically informed code consistency review

“…Moore and Donnelly argue in the paper ‘The job of “ethics committees”’ that research ethics committees should be renamed and that their job should be specified as “review of proposals for consistency with the duly established and applicable code” only 1. They raise a large number of issues, but in this comment I briefly want to suggest that two of their arguments are fundamentally flawed.…”