I am Sorry Immanuel, but I Can’t Foresee the Future!

I never had to consider a lot of ethics in my research. Of course, I tried to avoid academic misconduct, but I never had to think about informed consent when I downloaded pages over pages about Peacekeeping Missions in DRK from the United Nations homepage. Or about respecting the autonomy of the census-data I tabulated in every possible way. I never worked with ‘real’ humans, just with their aggregated data. But since I started studying Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), I discovered my love for community-based research. That caused a second spring for my interest in research. But also, for the first time, it made me seriously think about ethics in research. Interacting with ‘real’ humans could cause so much more damage than messing up my cross-tabulations- but is also way more exciting for me. There are countless ethics boards and university research guidelines that provide information on research ethics. And I felt, at least in theory, equipped to consider informed consent, inclusion, vulnerability, welfare, and so on in my research. But what should I do if I cannot ensure one hundred percent to meet all these criteria? Should I just stop my research, should I never start it? And is the prohibition of risky research itself unethical? How important is a research outcome compared to something with negative implications that might happen during the research process? Or to put it a little more provocative: What is ethical about allowing risky research? This still is a question that seemed a little bit too big to answer to me, so let’s break it down: Ethics is the scientific exploration of morals; consequently, the questions could be as well: What is moral about allowing risky research?

Contemplating morals in the sense of Kant means that there is a universal moral law, which leads to moral absolutism, meaning that there are things universally wrong or right. Bad actions are always bad, regardless of their intention (so if I became a feminist Robin Hood and stole tampons from drugstores to give them to people on their periods without access to sanitary products, I would still act immorally, according to Kant). And good actions will not be moral if the intentions are corrupt (so if I handed out sanitary products, just so I could write in a resume- or a blog, I still would be acting immorally). Translating Kant’s assumptions about morals onto my question means that, if the risky research acts ethically, it would be unethical to prohibit it. Unfortunately for Kant, it is impossible to foresee the future. So how could we make sure that the outcome would be ethical? A question that a lot of other people must have asked themselves before. And they answered them with the aforementioned ethics commissions and ethical research guidelines. So, I ran around in a big circle… And if I would stop here, the answer to my initial question ‘is the prohibition of risky research unethical?’ would be the unsatisfying answer, a lot of problems in the social sciences face: It depends.

It depends if we can, with a clean conscience, ensure that the moral guidelines we set ourselves as a society (or that were set for us, as researchers) will be followed. Following the critique points of the Milgram experiment (the one with the fake-electric shocks), that means: No use of deception, no possible harm to participants and the right to withdraw. But now again, it is unclear if that would lead to scientific evidence. And is scientific evidence necessary in this equation for the act to be ethical? Re-reading some ethics guidelines, with Kant in the back of my head, I suspect intentions and actions are more important than the outcome. Of course, we could go down the rabbit hole now and debate if, in the long run, the harm of a few would help a million others to thrive (and we would face the well-known trolley problem). But according to Kant, that would not be ethical. In another attempt to answer my initial question, now, with Kant’s help, I would say: It is ethical to allow risky research if you will succeed in executing it ethically. And while this is a nice mantra on paper, it holds some difficulties to apply in real-world research.

Without being able to foresee the future of my research undertakings, I must start taking measures to find out how risky my research will actually be. Because first and foremost, no one should be harmed during the research process. Not the participants, nor the researcher. Nonetheless, I do think that research always contains a certain amount of risk, which never can be eliminated, without refraining from conducting research altogether. But since Kant’s sharp distinction between action and intentions, as well as right and wrong, were not helpful in my real-life scenario, I must come up with a solution myself. Maybe risky research is ethical; perhaps we need this kind of knowledge. But I know that I do not want to be that person who conducts dangerous research. Because if I already can not figure it out with Kant, I will not survive in front of an ethics board. And after things did not work out with Kant and me, I am looking for a philosopher who would be a guide in how to restore moral integrity if the intentions were right, but the actions have gone awry. If you have any suggestions, let me know!

*** MW

Note: This blog post is a reflection on research and ethics in PACS’ 602 Research Methods class on ‘The Practice of Peace.’ And the author (MW) is a current MPAC international student from Germany.

Featured Image: Immanuel Kant // Credit: Jason Soren.