Dr Muralidharan Anantharaman1
1Centre For Biomedical Ethics, National University Of Singapore
There are no widely agreed upon standards about how Institutional Review Boards (or equivalent ethics review committees) should handle disagreement within boards, between boards, and between board members and researchers should be handled. IRBs may put into practice a number of different approaches to addressing disagreement. As a result, ethics review has been criticised as being arbitrary, bureaucratic and of stifling potentially useful research.
We propose a more systematic approach to disagreement: IRBs may permissibly constrain researchers only if they can publicly justify their demands. After briefly arguing for this claim, this paper examines its implications. An immediate implication of the public justification requirement is that IRBs ought to identify areas of reasonable disagreement and defer to researchers so long as the latter’s’ proposals are reasonable. We argue that in order to put this into practice, any demands that IRBs make on researchers must be accompanied by reasons that no one could rationally reject. Further, this also has the effect of being able to systematically respond to the various criticisms of IRBs. We argue that the requirement to present reasons that cannot be reasonably rejected can reduce inter-institutional variability and arbitrariness with regards to ethical standards. This also has the effect of increasing flexibility with respect to formatting options and allowing more useful research to be conducted by rejecting proposals only when they are obviously unethical.
Biography:
Anantharaman Muralidharan is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. He has research interests in bioethics, political philosophy and epistemology.