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9 - Ethical Considerations for Human Biology Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

By
Trudy R. Turner
Edited by
Michael P. Muehlenbein
Michael P. Muehlenbein
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Summary

The past 25 years have seen an ever increasing emphasis on and discussion of ethics in professional life. The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology currently has a library of over 850 Codes of Ethics for various professions. Professional societies often have ethics modules online. Courses on ethics or ethics training are recommended parts of graduate curricula. Medicine, law, engineering, and business all have ethical standards and codes. The scientific community as a whole also shares a set of guiding principles that have been codified into a code of ethics for research and practice. In addition, each academic discipline has its own set of standards and principles, since each discipline has its own history and its own ethical dilemmas. Here I will briefly review ethical principles common to the scientific community as well as some of the ethical dilemmas faced by human biologists. This is not a comprehensive account. I direct the reader to the volume Biological Anthropology and Ethics: from Repatriation to Genetic Identity (Turner, 2005a) for a fuller discussion of the issues presented here.

Codes of ethics exist because every individual faces choices. These codes provide a framework for making informed choices in situations where there are conflicting obligations and responsibilities. The codes provide a framework of general principles for discussion and choice. No code can anticipate each unique situation. Discussion and reflection are vital to anticipate situations that may require quick decisions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Human Evolutionary Biology , pp. 144 - 149
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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References

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