Abstract:

Ethics committees like Institutional Review Boards and Research Ethics Committees are typically empowered to approve or reject proposed studies, typically conditional on certain conditions or revisions being met. While some have argued this power should be primarily a function of enforcing clear, codified requirements, most institutions and legal regimes allow discretion for IRBs to ethically evaluate studies, such as to ensure a favourable risk-benefit ratio, fair subject selection, adequate informed consent, and so forth. As a result, ethics committees typically make moral demands on researchers: require them to act in a way the committee considers ethically right or appropriate. This paper argues that moral demands are legitimate only if publicly justifiable; and as a result, committee decisions are subject to a public justification requirement. Ethics committees can permissibly request for more information, changes to the research protocol or that the research is delayed or even stopped only if these demands are publicly justifiable. This latter claim is in turn justified on the basis that moral demands to φ are permissible only if we are in a position to know that the addressee ought to φ and that we are in a position to know a proposition only if it is publicly justifiable.

This argument suggests that ethics committees must consciously and explicitly appeal to public justification in their decision-making. In cases where public justification cannot be offered, committees would not be permitted to reject a given study or make approval conditional on an
amendment.

Biography:

Murali graduated from NUS with a BSc in Life Sciences (2010) and then an MA in Philosophy (2014). After a couple of short stints in 2014 and 2015 as a TA at the Philosophy department and as an RA at CBME, Murali did his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Warwick in UK. After graduating in 2020, he became a lecturer at SUSS before re-joining CBME as a research fellow in 2021. Murali has research interests in Political Philosophy, Epistemology as well as Normative and Applied Ethics.