Abstract
Research conducted on humans has a long history of ethical protections, with the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 triggering stronger protection across most jurisdictions. While there have been many reorientations and corrections in the emphasis of codes protecting human research participants, all have implicitly assumed a conception of human decision-making and the person that are psychologically not feasible. In this paper, we examine two problematic assumptions dominant in many research ethics guidelines: (1) implicit reliance on a model of classical rationality in conceptualizing the process whereby individuals make a decision of whether to give consent to participate in a study and (2) the assumption of autonomous subjects in the bioethical principle of autonomy and in operationalizing informed consent processes. For both of these problems, we outline theoretical psychological work that provides more compelling accounts of (1) human decision-making and rationality as bounded and ecological and (2) of personhood and agency as relational and emergent. We conclude by considering approaches to bioethics that are compatible with such conceptions of personhood and therefore provide a more satisfactory framework for a relational ethics.
Highlights
Research involving human beings requires ethics oversight in most jurisdictions of researchintensive countries
A key principle in most research ethics policies is that researchers must respect the autonomy of potential research participants, typically by informing them about the nature of the study, outlining all potential harms and benefits, and obtaining their informed consent before recruiting them into the study
We discuss two specific problems: (1) implicit reliance on a model of classical rationality in conceptualizing the process whereby individuals make a decision of whether to give consent to participate in a study and (2) the assumption of autonomous subjects in the bioethical principle of autonomy and in operationalizing informed consent processes
Summary
Research involving human beings requires ethics oversight in most jurisdictions of researchintensive countries. What is often overlooked is that in the process of requiring researchers to respect participant autonomy through informed consent procedures, there are implicit notions of rationality, decision-making, and personhood that are imposed on individuals asked to make the decision about whether they will be part of a study.
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