When Ethics Limits What We Can Know
- In the human sciences, knowledge is cut off in three ways:
- Method restrictions: some techniques are banned because they cause harm.
- Topic taboos: some questions can’t be studied at all.
- Participant protections: strict rules about consent and treatment.
- These limits shape the scope, methods, and reliability of knowledge itself.
Definition
Ethical constraints
Systematic limitations designed to protect people, animals, or communities from harm in the process of knowledge production. They act as gatekeepers of what can (and cannot) be studied.
Method Restrictions Block Powerful Experiments
- Method restrictions force researchers to use less effective approaches.
- Sleep deprivation research is a great example of this.
- We desperately need to understand how extreme fatigue affects critical decision-making, surgeons work for days straight, pilots fly exhausted, military personnel make life-or-death choices while sleep-deprived.
- The ideal study would keep people awake for five days and test their judgment under pressure.
- But of course, ethics boards allow only mild sleep loss studies of 24-48 hours maximum.
- These are known as topic taboos, which emerge when any method to study a question would be inherently unethical.
- The nature-versus-nurture debate in criminal behavior exemplifies this.
- Understanding whether people are born with criminal tendencies could reshape criminal justice systems worldwide but any definitive study would require raising children in controlled environments that promote criminal behavior.
- The question obviously remains largely unanswerable, leaving us with incomplete twin studies and statistical correlations that satisfy no one.
- Modern consent requirements mean researchers often study only people willing to participate in studies, potentially excluding those most relevant to understanding certain phenomena.
- Modern consent requirements mean researchers often study only people willing to participate in studies.
- These kinds of participant protection requirements can introduce sampling biases that limit knowledge reliability.
- For example, people who volunteer for psychological studies tend to be more educated, more compliant, and less representative of general populations.
- This means our knowledge about "human behavior" often reflects the behavior of college students willing to participate in experiments for course credit.
Topic Taboos Remove Entire Questions
- Sometimes the barrier is not the method but the question itself.
- Some questions can never be tested ethically, no matter how creative researchers are.
- These are known as topic taboos, and often involve situations where knowledge could be valuable but the human cost would be unacceptable.
- Psychologists have long debated whether language is innate or learned.
- The definitive test would be raising children without any social contact but of course, such an experiment would be abusive and off-limits.
- Therefore, the question can only be answered indirectly through case studies of neglect or computational modeling.
- Entire topics like this remain permanently closed.
- Don't assume that if a question cannot be studied it mustn't matter.
- In TOK, the opposite is true: often the deepest questions in human sciences are exactly the ones blocked by ethics.
Participant Protections Reshape Data
- Even when studies go ahead, ethical rules about protecting participants influence the kind of data collected.
- This is most visible in medicine, where clinical trials require informed consent, meaning only those who agree can participate.
- While this protects autonomy, it also excludes children, prisoners, and the critically ill, which are groups who are often the most affected.
