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Ethical guidance and oversight of research with human participants has developed largely in reaction to historical abuses of human beings, such as the Nazi research on concentration camp prisoners, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook Hepatitis Experiments, and the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital Study. Most of these episodes involved harming and exploiting imprisoned, institutionalized, socioeconomically disadvantaged, or otherwise vulnerable people to achieve scientific or social objectives. The sociopolitical response to these abuses, as well as more recently discovered ones (such as the US government's secret human radiation experiments), has been to adopt ethical and legal standards to protect the rights and welfare of human research participants in order to restore and promote trust in the research enterprise. These standards consist of an assortment ethical codes and guidelines (such as the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki), regulations (such as the US Common Rule and Food and Drug Administration regulations), influential government documents (such as The Belmont Report), and legal cases (such as Grimes vs. Kennedy Krieger Institute). Because these standards have arisen in response to diverse social, political, economic, and institutional pressures and conditions, they lack an overarching unity (Resnik 2018; Wertheimer 2010).
Investigators and research administrators who have learned to how to operate within this system often view the absence of a unifying foundation for human research ethics and oversight to be an annoyance, because it can generate bureaucratic decisions that appear inconsistent, arbitrary, or obstructionist. But they tolerate the situation because it permits science to move forward with the requisite social and legal approval. Some philosophers and ethicists, such as Alan Wertheimer (2010), argue that human research ethics does not require a foundation. Others worry that the lack of a unifying foundation for human research ethics is a serious flaw that needs to be rectified. Alex John London falls into the latter camp.
In his book For the Common Good: Philosophical Foundations of Research Ethics (2022), London argues that the current framework for human research ethics and oversight is built upon mistaken assumptions, policies, and practices that create spurious dilemmas and serious moral failings, and that his theory can fix these problems and place human participant research on a solid philosophical foundation.1 According to London:
The philosophical foundations of...