What is ethical? Every day we make decisions about whether we’re doing the right thing, and in doing so we draw on our values – usually we can say why something was wrong or right.
In universities, much of the decision-making about ethics, and thus about values, is “outsourced” to ethics committees.
Yet the recent critique of committees by OfS makes clear that the values those committees base their judgements on are often, if not usually, hidden from view.
OfS issued guidance on research and freedom of speech, following on from the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. Ethics committees were instructed to note the importance of academic freedom and to be transparent in decision-making.
They were also told not to worry about impacts on institutional reputation, and not to concern themselves with whether research or conclusions from research conflict with the values of the university. As with the rest of the Act, the test should be whether or not something is within the law.
The guidance went further, warning that committees should be “closely monitored so that research is not suppressed unnecessarily”. Although this isn’t the first time by any means that there has been critique of ethics committees, in my experience such critiques have always been just undercurrents – “well the system is not perfect, but we have to live with it” in character.
Yet here is the government, in effect, saying committees need to rein themselves in, and stop imposing specific values on other people’s research.
Benefit versus harm
Transparency sounds good, but there’s a problem. If universities aren’t to consider specific values in relation to ethics, what criteria are they supposed to use in coming to ethical decisions? Look at the policies of most universities, and almost exclusively, the central criteria that ethics committees have for making decisions about whether research is ethical is the balancing of benefit and harm – do the benefits of the research clearly enough outweigh the risk of harm?
This is, of course, an important principle. But if you have no possible reference to values, just the law, can you really assess the benefit to society or indeed the harm?
Take this example – a computer science department wants to test out the effectiveness of an AI “grief companion” for the recently bereaved, which is partly trained on the deceased partner’s public social media profile.
This is likely to be legal, but the committee has to weigh up whether the possible benefits – and there could conceivably be benefits – outweigh the risks of emotional damage. They might also have to consider that other less scrupulous actors might already be releasing such AI tools on to the market without proper testing.
The committee would have to contend with all sorts of value complexities – whether safety trumps the unknown potentials of innovation, how to conceive of what it means to be human, and a whole set of possible different views on technology and its impacts on society. How does the committee balance the different values involved?
Existential crisis
But of course, universities don’t have an easy answer to this sort of question, because they don’t know what values are important to them and which are not. Universities currently have a sort of existential crisis about what they are for, and thus what values might underpin their work.
Help people get the best jobs possible, make lots of money from consultancy and enterprise – without worrying too much where the dosh comes from – revolutionise society, open minds, or inculcate them into one world view? Promote academic freedom or play it safe in case someone or some group gets offended? Who knows.
Certainly, marketisation and financial pressures play some role. If you’re an institution facing declining student recruitment, and a large enterprise project offers a much-needed injection of cash to bolster the bottom line, then surely this might influence what values the institution chooses to prioritise?
Standing up for social justice and the right side of the culture wars might be important one week, but if you’re close to the line on announcing redundancies the week after, then other values might take priority.
Refuge in process
The confusion over values runs across the institution and its whole approach to governance, not just in the ethics committee. Because of the difficulty universities have in admitting to the underlying value tensions and disputes in ethical decision-making, they often find it easier to seek refuge in bureaucracy.
And so they place lots of emphasis on things that are easier to latch on to – processes and form-filling, and on minimising the risk of reputational harm to the university or the researcher. It’s much easier to do this than to actually have an honest open conversation about what your values are and which matter more when making ethical decisions.
Spell it out
OfS guidance, with its focus on transparency, could of course be interpreted as encouraging ethics committees to spell out the values involved in ethical decisions, and to openly engage in debate on them. I have my doubts this will happen.
Nevertheless, as I’ve argued in some of my writing on inclusion, by openly engaging in a process of negotiation that recognises people have different values, and that these can be in conflict, the work of ethics committees might become more open and even more ethical. Rather than seeking refuge in proceduralism, ethics committees, and universities more generally, should engage in open debate about values, and make it clear what values lie behind what they choose to do.
This is, of course, a challenging and messy thing to do. It could though include things like running consultative forums where values and their implications for the institution are openly discussed. As well, ethics committee members could be asked to engage in training where they openly discuss the values involved in exemplar cases and their prioritisation.
The minutes of these discussions could be made available to students and staff. Committees could then be required to make it clear what values were considered and how they were ranked, when communicating decisions on actual cases.
The culture war risk
Of course, there’s a counter-argument. Being open about values might risk politicising ethics committees even further – especially if the values they prioritise and defend land on the “wrong” side of the culture wars for the legacy media or whoever else.
Yet this could in fact be a positive if it means that the values universities implement are more aligned with their key stakeholders, society at large. I think it’s worth doing if the end result is institutions that are clearer about their purpose.
When you dig beneath the sugar-coated rhetoric, the article contains an argument against pluralism. In the conclusion, the author floats the idea that it might be good that ethics considerations be politicised and for universities pick a side in the “culture wars” if in doing so they align with society at large. Perhaps that author hasn’t noticed that society is divided on the so-called culture wars. In any case, it’s not the purpose of universities to be echo chambers for the majority opinion.