Desmond Hugh, Dierickx Kris
Centre for Biomedical Ethics and Law, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Department of Philosophy, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium.
BMC Med Ethics. 2021 Apr 14;22(1):45. doi: 10.1186/s12910-021-00610-w.
Professional communities such as the medical community are acutely concerned with negligence: the category of misconduct where a professional does not live up to the standards expected of a professional of similar qualifications. Since science is currently strengthening its structures of self-regulation in parallel to the professions, this raises the question to what extent the scientific community is concerned with negligence, and if not, whether it should be. By means of comparative analysis of medical and scientific codes of conduct, we aim to highlight the role (or lack thereof) of negligence provisions in codes of conduct for scientists, and to discuss the normative consequences for future codes of conduct.
We collected scientific and medical codes of conduct in a selection of OECD countries, and submitted each code of conduct to comparative textual analysis.
Negligence is invariably listed as an infraction of the norms of integrity in medical codes of conduct, but only rarely so in the scientific codes. When the latter list negligence, they typically do not provide any detail on the meaning of 'negligence'.
Unlike codes of conduct for professionals, current codes of conduct for scientists are largely silent on the issue of negligence, or explicitly exclude negligence as a type of misconduct. In the few cases where negligence is stipulated to constitute misconduct, no responsibilities are identified that would help prevent negligence. While we caution against unreasonable negligence provisions as well as disproportionate sanctioning systems, we do argue that negligence provisions are crucial for justified trust in the scientific community, and hence that there is a very strong rationale for including negligence provisions in codes of conduct.
诸如医学界等专业团体极为关注过失行为，即专业人员未能达到具有类似资质的专业人员所应达到的标准的不当行为类别。鉴于科学目前正在与各专业并行强化其自我监管结构，这就引发了一个问题：科学界在多大程度上关注过失行为，若不关注，是否应当关注。通过对医学和科学行为准则的比较分析，我们旨在突出过失行为条款在科学家行为准则中的作用（或缺乏该作用的情况），并讨论对未来行为准则的规范性影响。
我们收集了经合组织一些国家的科学和医学行为准则，并对每一项行为准则进行了比较文本分析。
过失行为在医学行为准则中总是被列为违反诚信规范的行为，但在科学行为准则中很少如此。当科学行为准则列出过失行为时，它们通常没有提供关于“过失行为”含义的任何细节。
与专业人员的行为准则不同，目前科学家的行为准则在很大程度上对过失行为问题保持沉默，或者明确将过失行为排除在不当行为类型之外。在少数规定过失行为构成不当行为的情况下，没有确定有助于预防过失行为的责任。虽然我们告诫要警惕不合理的过失行为条款以及不成比例的制裁制度，但我们确实认为，过失行为条款对于科学界的合理信任至关重要，因此在行为准则中纳入过失行为条款有非常充分的理由。
