Ethical proceduralism and educational research: Rejoinder to Nicholas Burbules.

In a discipline where constructive dialogue is praised but not always practised, the thoughtful comments of Nicholas Burbules on my paper are most welcome. In this brief rejoinder, I wish to support his attempt to move the discussion forward by focusing on some questions which neither of us has yet resolved.

Our common ground seems to be that a flexible, problem-solving approach to the ethics of educational research is preferable to an appeal to ethical principles from which judgements are derived through some mode of deduction. What remains under debate is the relation between this theoretical issue and the practices of the research community. I defended an approach which Professor Burbules aptly labels `proceduralism', emphasising learnable skills and tested techniques of making good ethical decisions. Professor Burbules argues that procedures themselves have an ethical content; and he is surely right about this: otherwise their leading to ethical outcomes would be rather like drawing a rabbit out of a hat. However, he draws attention to the danger of thinking of procedures as principles in disguise. As he puts it, they `are no more generalisable or inviolable than other norms; they need to be interpreted and applied to circumstances too'. As for codes, these `serve multiple purposes, of which their potential usefulness for ethical deliberation is only one'.

If codes of ethics are useful, we are fortunate to have so many of them. The typical educational researcher in Australia, for example, would come under the codes of the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Association for Research in Education, his or her own university, and one or more disciplinary bodies such as the Australian Psychological Society or the Australian Early Childhood Association. These differ widely in their scope and emphasis. Like most practices, they are products of social and historical circumstances, not applications of some theoretical principle. Different purposes might require different sorts of codes: for one it might be a statement of ideals, for another a very prescriptive approach, for a third an argumentative discussion. The mixed character of codes of ethics seems to confirm that view. But this suggests that it is unwise for a code of ethics to attempt to provide its own interpretation: for example, by claiming to represent universal ethical principles. A minimal approach is preferable.

Where do we go from here? I think we need to return to the individual researcher, and consider his or her relation to codes of ethics on the one hand, and institutional ethics committees on the other. I agree that making decisions about the behaviour of others should not be taken as the typical ethical situation. A top-down version of proceduralism would take ethical responsibility away from the researcher, and so be as bad (in a different way) as a top-down principled ethics. I have suggested that the most important ethical issues in research can, in fact, be resolved in the process through which the individual researcher deals with an ethics committee. The checklist of procedures, which is all that most research projects require, carries the force of a code of ethics, without presuming the status of its ethical themes: its points are more than suggestions, but less than a set of dogmatic principles. In this way, the relevance of a code of ethics may be to the interaction between ethics committees and individual researchers, not to the proceedings of ethics committees, taken alone. Whether a more elaborate code, including philosophical argument, is needed in the background is something about which I remain sceptical.

Robin Small Monash University