Introduction

Chapter Three sought to establish the validity of the duty-based perspective in moral thinking by showing some of its foundations, namely the tradition of natural law ethics, and the Kantian categorical imperative. It suggested that the practical implication for the ethics of research on humans of the duty-based moral perspective is that, by virtue of their function, the doctor/researchers have a duty to care for each of their patient/participants, which they exercise by acting only in their best interests. This duty has no contingent justification. It is absolute, inherent in the function of the doctor. Hence, a research project might be aiming at a goal which is good, and it might have the agreement of the research participants who are to help achieve the goal, but it still needs to be justified according to duty-based criteria, namely that it is in the patients' best interests that they participate.

The issues that arise in the context of duty-based morality in research do so because of clashes with competing goal- and right-based moral claims. The examples investigated in this chapter will show how this happens. Clashes with goal-based morality happen frequently in therapeutic research with the question of whether or not there should be a placebo control with which to compare the experimental treatment. Goal-based morality, expressed as scientific rigour, demands that new treatments are compared with placebo unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary.