Today,
most universities have an ethics committee, whose task is to evaluate
ethical problems in relation with research with human participants, as
well as personal data.
That includes issues of personal choice and privacy. Risks to
participants, researchers, and the university should be minimized. The
dignity, rights, and welfare of all involved people should be
respected, as should the law. Special care is necessary when working
with minors or people with disabilities.
These
committees are generally called "Ethics Committee of the University of
X", suggesting that it is their task to consider any ethical issue
surrounding university activities of any kind. Do they do that?
Ethics committees are of course necessary and important, and it is
encouraging that they have become standard in recent years. The
problem is that they tend to focus
only on
problems for which the university could be held to account within a
time span of a few years - the duration of academic posts such as
vice-chancellor or director of research - and within the university's
home country. They tend to avoid more serious ethical
problems for which universities cannot realistically be held to account
because they
are too distant in space and time. In space, they may be distant
because
they cross national or continental borders; consider the indirect
effect (positive or negative) of university activities on poverty in
developing countries. In time, effects may span decades or
generations, such as global warming or other forms of environmental
degradation. The failure of universities to consider ethical issues
across larger distances in space and time contradicts references
to the importance of internationalism and long-term planning in
policy documents such as mission statements.
All of
this suggests that the motives of ethics committees may not
be altruistic at all. Instead, the primary function of an ethics
committee may be to prevent the university
from being sued. If ethics committees really cared about ethics, which
from a
utilitarian point of view means caring about human rights, their
priorities would be rather different.
From a human rights perspective, the most serious problems facing
humanity in the early 21st century are poverty and climate change, as I
have explained elsewhere.
Universities
belong to an elite group of institutions that are in a good
position to solve these problems, or contribute to good partial
solutions. If they fail to do that, they are ultimately co-responsible
for the outcome. This is primarily common sense, but it is also a
general interpretation of the legal principle known as "duty to
rescue". Everyone can do good things for the world, but academics, with
their training in research and teaching and their international
communication networks, are in a much better position to make a
positive contribution than the average person. Universities have
extraordinary potential to identify, understand, and constructively
address the biggest problems of our time. That implies a far greater
responsibility ethics committees are usually preparerd to discuss.
Let us begin with poverty. Every day 20 000 children die of hunger,
curable disease and preventable disease. This is a far more shocking
statement than anything you will ever read in a newspaper, but it is
true. These 20 000 dead children really exist, every day. What has that
got to do with universities? An awful lot, as it turns out. Consider
the academic discipline of economics. The economists are in a good
position to understand and explain the global economic processes that
are allowing poverty to be maintained in a rich world: tax havens,
protectionism, foreign exploitation of natural resources in developing
countries, and the failure of rich countries to meet their development
commitments. From a human rights perspective (and what
other perspective is there?),
these issues are the
most serious issues of all. It follows from an ethical viewpoint (the
viewpoint that ethics committees are supposed to represent) that
universities have an inherent moral obligation to prioritize
teaching and research about global poverty, so that students
are in a position to do something about it themselves
after they leave the university, or so that the main research findings
in this
area will more often appear in the media, to help
politicians address the problem constructively. If
university ethics committees cared about ethics, they
would repeatedly remind universities of this responsibility and
obligation.
If anyone ever had any doubt about the truth of these claims, s/he
would merely have to experience the death of just one of those 20 000
children, who really are dying every day, to be convinced. This is not
some kind of wild, emotional, subjective statement. The truth is the
reverse: those who refuse to take such a statement seriously are in
denial, which from a psychological viewpoint is a kind of wild
emotional
subjective state with serious consequences. People in
denial have access to the truth but find it too uncomfortable
to accept. So they reject it, insisting that it is not true in spite of
the evidence. That's pretty wild and emotional, if you ask me.
If they are merely in passive denial, they just avoid
the
topic, hoping it will go away, or invent excuses for not considering
it. If the seriousness of denial is measured by the
consequences,
then the most serious forms are denial involving the
responsibility of rich countries for global poverty and
climate change. It should be the task of ethics committees to break
through
such serious forms of denial.
The
other crucial ethical issue of our time is climate change. Our
knowledge about climate change
comes mainly from universities. These institutions are also optimally
placed to consider the implications of that research: how exactly
greenhouse emissions are going to be rapidly and drastically reduced,
because according to the research that is the only option that we have.
It follows that every university should be urging governments to push
the energy revolution forward more quickly, citing the research
results; internally, every university should be reducing its carbon
footprint more quickly, as an example for others to follows. That
includes cutting down on flying in aeroplanes. In fact,
university employees are flying more and more each year, as if
climate research did not exist and the future did not matter, and
universities are encouraging them to do it.
I wish to argue that these are the main
issues that university "ethics committees" should be considering. They
are certainly ethically more important than the detail's of someone's
psychological experiment. To worry about the minor problems and risks
experienced by a modern experimental participant and completely ignore
the tragedy of poverty in developing
countries seems remarkably like racism, when you realise the most of
those experimental participants are likely to be white and most of
those dying in connection with poverty (created indirectly by the rich
countries) are black. To worry about such small internal problems and
forget that our research activities may be contributing
to the possible future destruction of humanity, or at least to the
destruction of our high standard of living for future generations, is
wrong headed in the extreme.
There are refreshing exceptions, but they do not seem to be very
common. In 2014, the Norwegian National Committee for Research Ethics
in Science and Technology told universities that oil research can be
unethical. Many universities are stating, sometimes in documents
labeled "ethics" or "ethical", that they are reducing their carbon
emissions; but generally flying in aeroplanes and driving in cars is
conveniently omitted from the calculation, and hardly anyone is
directly talking about the main problems directly. When university
student associations have their own ethics committees, they
tend
to be more concerned about global poverty and global climate than the
official university ethics committees.
The opinions expressed on
this page are the
authors' personal
opinions.
Suggestions for improving or extending the content are
welcome at parncutt@gmx.at.
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