Do We Need Research Ethics Committees?

Setting some of the foundations for a response.

Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

This is a quick attempt at setting out the basics to the respond to the question Do we need research ethics committees? Three points should be noted at the start:

1. The question is closed-ended: it allows only for a yes-or-no answer, but such a simple response carries the nuances entailed by points (2) and (3) below;
2. The precise nature of “research ethics committees” is up for grabs — for the purpose of this post, picture a small body within a research institution that reviews the ethical considerations of that institution’s many projects;
3. The question asks about necessity and not sufficiency: a positive response does imply that a research project is wholly responsible by virtue of its undertaking a research ethics committee’s (REC, hereafter) process.

This third point raises the question of what each response (yes or no, as remarked in (1)) requires. It would be a poor response if it had no supporting evidence or argumentation. I propose the following condition to be necessary and sufficient to respond “no”:

It is okay to respond in the negative if it can be demonstrated that there are sufficient mechanisms for an institution to conduct research responsibly and ethically without the need for RECs.

Conversely, I I suggest the following condition to be necessary and sufficient to respond “yes”:

It is okay to respond in the positive if it cannot be demonstrated that there are sufficient mechanisms for an institution to conduct research responsibly and ethically without the need for RECs.

The argument seems rather one-sided on this basis: demonstrating that there are sufficient mechanisms to render an REC unnecessary could become a Sisyphean task. Regardless, the response requires engaging with the following question: What mechanisms does an institution have to render its research projects responsible and ethical? Other underlying questions inlcude: What renders a research project responsible and ethical? What does “responsible research” entail? and What does “ethical” mean? as well as What is research?

Setting aside any attempt at a full-blown analytical inquiry into research ethics, I propose we focus on the first question: What mechanisms does an institution have to render its research projects responsible and ethical? I propose three mechanisms:

1. Training;
2. Adequate governance structures; and
3. RECs.

By training, I mean training on research ethics for all researchers at a research institution. This responds to two important factors: (i) ethics is an expert field of inquiry, and (ii) the current (and very traditional) academic infrastructures encourage narrow expertise — researchers rarely get to develop skills and knowledge in the realm of ethics by virtue of gaining, say, a PhD. This means allowing researchers to acknowledge their responsibility in downstream consequences of their projects. However, this places the onus entirely on researchers and their employers — at the least — must be held accountable when projects do turn out to raise concerns.

NB: I am using the terms “expert” and “expertise” loosely, basically to mean “somebody with a PhD, which is, lest we forget, in a very narrow field”. I am quite gladly not an expert — much less pressure.

By adequate governance structures, I mean processes and procedures that ensure two things: (i) that decisions throughout projects — from applying to grants, to recruiting researchers, all the way to publication and project-output maintenance — are justified and documented; and (ii) that projects are conducted wtihin the law. This means there must be procedures in place that render institutions accountable by virtue of the infrastructure they provide to their researchers. However, governance processes often rely on checklists and ensure legality rather than responsibility or ethicality.

We have already defined RECs, but the idea is that they support researchers by (i) taking some of the responsibility in a research project, or (ii) –as a minimum and maybe controversially– allowing researchers to outsource some of the work around thinking through the ethics of their projects. By this account, RECs can compensate (i) for the lack of time and expertise researchers have to engage with ethics, and (ii) for the more legalistic processes within traditional governance infrastructures.

Now a great deal of questions remain for each mechanism, for example:

1. Training: Who needs the training? Who designs and delivers the training? How often is it delivered?
2. Governance: How many processes might there be? How detailed should these processes be? How are these kept up-to-date and communicated?
3. RECs: Who sits on RECs? How are RECs structured? What frameworks do they rely on?

And the list of questions can go on for a while — indeed, we introduced some more earlier on without even getting to this level of detail. A further complexity with the above three mechanisms is that the list is not exhaustive. This means that there may be many more mechanisms — consider an institution’s recruitment practices, their reward schemes, funders… And with each mechanism, the responsibility held by any one individual, department or organisation becomes diluted and more difficult to trace. This intuitively renders their sufficiency an even thornier question.

With the above, I hope to have set some of the foundations for responding to the question do we need research ethics committees? However, I can be severely critiqued for the stringent conditions for accepting a no response. It might be interesting to revisit this question with tweaked conditions, hopefully avoiding the inevitable need for possibly infinite mechanisms — including RECs — to ensure the responsibility and ethicality of research.

I haven’t cited anybody in the above but feel that Professor Heather Douglas (very cool YouTube channel here) and Polliti, V. & Grinbaum, A. (2020) influenced my thinking when I heard from them at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, postgradute philosophy conference in March 2021 (link to my brief Twitter thread on it).