Thursday, June 3
1:30-3:30pm EST
Title: Must an Education in Research Ethics Engage Issues of Culture, Context, and Community?
Abstract: Beginning with an activity exploring case studies featuring dilemmas in research ethics, Dr. Thompson will lead the group towards asking and answering a question which cuts to the core of whether and why we might have an obligation to advance a socially responsive view of research and researchers. Namely, can a coherent and defensible account of research ethics education be pursued without reference to social justice concerns of culture, context, and community? In this keynote/workshop, Dr. Thompson leads participants through a response to this question in four parts. First, he suggests that a subset of the concerns of research ethics are moral in nature. The remainder of his remarks address concerns located within this set. Focusing his attention in this way, Dr. Thompson makes a distinction between research ethics training programs and research ethics education programs, asserting that the latter is a type of moral education. This moral educational work is operationalized to provide broad attention to matters related to developing an appropriate relationship to standards of conduct that might be ‘universally enlisting’ and ‘penalty endorsing’ (Hand, 2018) in relation to research activities.
Second, Thompson provides a limited, working definition of social justice. Of course, social justice in the broadest sense might merely identify all social matters related to justice (i.e., that each person receives what they are due within society). This account fails to duly acknowledge the recent and widespread usage of the term “social justice” which, Thompson argues, is a specific conception of the general concept of social justice. Further, Thompson will synthesize recent work on the special relevance of “culture”, “context”, and “community” within these invocations of social justice in research ethics. Against the backdrop of these definitions, the session returns to its central question, namely, whether a coherent and defensible account of research ethics education (as a domain-specific type of moral education) can be pursued without reference to social justice concerns of culture, context, and community.
Third, in direct response to this question, Dr. Thompson outlines reasons that might incline one to answer in the negative. In this, he considers the view that research ethics education has no duty to engage issues of social justice as supported by two claims: A) the worry of indoctrination and B) a “generalizability” account of moral education as applied to research ethics education. Finally, Dr. Thompson outlines some reasons that might incline one to answer the titular question in the affirmative. In this, he pursues the view that the moral educational work of research ethics education has an unambiguous duty to engage issues of social justice, arguing that these social justice concerns are an important expression of moral concerns contextualized in the world in which one lives, the cultures through which one makes epistemic claims, and the communities that result from both. On this view, a failure to engage social justice issues in research ethics education constitutes an incomplete moral education within this domain of practice. In developing this view, Dr. Thompson shows why it significantly erodes confidence in the negative answer (above) and its two supporting claims (A and B) as these are shown to lead to morally inferior research practices and products.
Presenter:
Dr. Winston Thompson
Associate Professor, Philosophy and History of Education
College of Education & Human Ecology, The Ohio State University
Biography:
Winston Thompson, PhD (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education within the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University and an internationally regarded philosopher of education concerned with social, political, and ethical issues related to justice and education. Before coming to OSU, he was a faculty member at New York University, Hofstra University, and the University of New Hampshire. In 2016-17, Dr. Thompson was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is on the Executive Board of the Association for Moral Education and is the Immediate Past President of the New England Philosophy of Education Society. Dr. Thompson’s scholarship focuses upon normative ethical and social/political questions of justice, education, and the public good, with recent efforts analyzing dilemmas of educational policy. His work has appeared in Educational Theory, Philosophy of Education, Teachers College Record, The Journal of Philosophy of Education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Studies in Philosophy and Education. Dr. Thompson is currently working on a book project that takes the mainstream view of the relationship between education and politics to 1) cheapen our sense of justice in education and 2) imperil our understanding of the political essence of justice in public life. By enlarging the mainstream view of this relationship and asking what is owed to persons and polities as a matter of educational, rather than only political, justice, this project explores a renewed approach to the very core of democracy within pluralistic societies. This work gives special attention to ethical dilemmas of identity related to race, immigration, and citizenship. Dr. Thompson received his PhD (with distinction) in Philosophy and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
For more information visit Dr. Thompson’s faculty website and ongoing project on the ethics of punishment.
