Daku Mark
Department of Political Science, Texas Christian University, TCU Box 297021, Fort Worth, 76129, TX, USA.
Institute for Health & Social Policy, McGill University, 1130 Pins Ave. W., Montreal, Canada.
BMC Med Ethics. 2018 Jun 15;19(Suppl 1):42. doi: 10.1186/s12910-018-0281-6.
Research ethics boards (REBs) exist for good reason. By setting rules of ethical behaviour, REBs can help mitigate the risk of researchers causing harm to their research participants. However, the current method by which REBs promote ethical behaviour does little more than send researchers into the field with a set of rules to follow. While appropriate for most situations, rule-based approaches are often insufficient, and leave significant gaps where researchers are not provided institutional ethical direction.
Through a discussion of a recent research project about drinking and driving in South Africa, this article demonstrates that if researchers are provided only with a set of rules for ethical behaviour, at least two kinds of problems can emerge: situations where action is required but there is no ethically good option (zungzwang ethical dilemmas) and situations where the ethical value of an action can only be assessed after the fact (contingent ethical dilemmas). These dilemmas highlight and help to articulate what we already intuit: that a solely rule-based approach to promoting ethical research is not always desirable, possible, effective, or consistent.
In this article, I argue that to better encourage ethical behaviour in research, there is a need to go beyond the rules and regulations articulated by ethics boards, and focus more specifically on creating and nurturing virtuous researchers.
研究伦理委员会（REBs）的存在是有充分理由的。通过制定道德行为规则，研究伦理委员会可以帮助降低研究人员对研究参与者造成伤害的风险。然而，研究伦理委员会目前促进道德行为的方法只不过是让研究人员带着一套规则进入研究领域。虽然这种方法在大多数情况下是合适的，但基于规则的方法往往是不够的，并且在研究人员未得到机构伦理指导的方面留下了重大空白。
通过对最近一项关于南非酒后驾车的研究项目的讨论，本文表明，如果仅为研究人员提供一套道德行为规则，至少会出现两种问题：需要采取行动但没有道德上的好选择的情况（进退两难的伦理困境）以及只能在事后评估行动的伦理价值的情况（偶然的伦理困境）。这些困境凸显并有助于阐明我们已经直观感受到的：单纯基于规则的促进道德研究的方法并不总是可取、可行、有效或一致的。
在本文中，我认为为了更好地鼓励研究中的道德行为，有必要超越伦理委员会阐明的规则和条例，更具体地关注培养有道德的研究人员。
