Abstract
This chapter examines the principles for the ethical conduct of research widely recognized in the United States. The contributions of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. to the development of research ethics in the U.S. are examined. Special attention is given to the relationship among the principles and to different accounts of how to address conflicts among the principles, an issue Engelhardt addressed early in his career.
Engelhardt has been the enfant terrible of bioethics: irrepressible, irreverent, unpredictable, but ever insightful and brilliant
(Jonsen 1998, 82).
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Notes
- 1.
The first principle laid out here became more and more the focus of Engelhardt’s secular philosophical project. The need to start off with a basic sense of respect for the status of another person as a free agent and to respect that agency applies not only to human subjects but to all persons. If we do not recognize persons as free agents and respect them as such, we have stepped outside the project of philosophical ethics and into something else. That something else might be a project of religious ethics, but it might also be a project of ethics grounded in particular, rather than diverse, moral intuitions.
- 2.
Jonsen is referring to the principle Beauchamp discussed in Beauchamp 1978.
- 3.
This example is based on a study reported in the British Medical Journal by Bhagwanjee et al. (1997).
- 4.
A separate issue concerns the treatment of individuals who are not free and responsible agents, such as children. That is not the focus here.
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Iltis, A.S. (2015). The Ethical Conduct of Research: The Legacy of the Three Principles. In: Rasmussen, L., Iltis, A., Cherry, M. (eds) At the Foundations of Bioethics and Biopolitics: Critical Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 125. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18965-9_10
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