History of Ethics

Questions of right and wrong have accompanied us since our emergence as a species more than 1 million years ago. Much of our moral and religious training is concerned with answering questions about proper behavior. Both primitive and civilized groups have created a variety of ethical codes and socialized them into their children. Systems of laws that govern moral behavior emerged from those ethical codes. Throughout human existence, laws, religions, and other spiritual pathways have focused on thorny questions of morality. Thus, ethics and concern about ethical standards are older than science and psychology by thousands of years. Part of being human is to be concerned with ethical questions and their resolution.

In the Know Morality and ethics are nearly synonymous. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language differentiates between these words as follows. Morality relates to personal and sexual behavior according to societal strictures. Ethics, on the other hand, is derived from philosophy and attempts to provide objective and idealistic standards for human conduct.

As civilizations emerged, many ancient peoples transformed their ethical codes into written laws, and some of them survive today. The core of the ancient Hebrew ethical code is the Ten Commandments. Those basic moral rules became the seeds for an extensive set of laws that governed the ancient Hebrews. Indeed, some of those laws such as “Thou shalt not kill” are incorporated into current civil and criminal law codes. Later, in classical Greece (600–300 BCE), the study of ethics became a branch of philosophy. Socrates attempted to answer questions about morality and virtue but later Greek philosophers disagreed with many of his arguments. Those disagreements led to a flowering of different points of view about ethics. When the Roman world was converted by Christianity, its newer and divinely inspired form of ethics (codified in the Bible) shaped the European worldview for two millennia. In the Middle East, another divinely inspired ethical code arose as Islam swept into existence some 500 years after the emergence of Christianity. The words of Mohammed (570–633 CE) became the Koran, Islam’s moral code. Of course, peoples in other parts of the world also created moral codes. In Asia, codes derived from the writings of Confucius (551–479 BCE) survive. Confucius’s writings are known as The Analects or The Analects of Confucius. Much of the practice of any religion consists of learning and living by its particular moral code.

In the 20th century, relativistic thinking challenged older absolutist forms of thinking. In absolutist thinking, moral decisions are based on traditional laws or rules that are usually codified in sacred books. In contrast, relativistic thinking’s moral decisions are based on local norms or specific historical contexts. To explore the difference between the two modes, think of the prohibition against killing other humans. An absolutist thinker would ban all killing under all circumstances. However, a relativistic thinker might allow killing under special circumstances. For instance, a convicted murderer might be put to death ethically in some jurisdictions. Or, consider soldiers in a combat zone. Based on their rules of engagement, they may ethically kill enemy combatants, but not enemy civilians. Like many seeming dichotomies, absolutist and relativistic positions turn out instead to be points along a continuum. The advent of relativistic thinking, along with the emergence of nations with large, pluralistic, and diverse citizenries, has made the study of ethics more interesting and more difficult than in the past. When you add the development of high–speed communications networks, including the Internet, you have a world in which ethical choices are both more difficult and more important than ever before. Today, as in the past, ethics is part of everyone’s daily life. Now let us turn to ethics in social science research.

Until about 60 years ago, researchers were guided by their own personal ethics. No published ethical code existed. Occasionally, there were lapses in ethics. For example, in Watson and Rayner’s (1920) study of Little Albert, an infant was classically conditioned to fear a white rat by using a loud sound as an aversive stimulus. Landis (1924) investigated emotion by administering electric shocks to participants without warning or consent. Neither study would be considered ethical today.

Social science’s attention to written codes of ethics began during the Nuremberg trials (1946–1947) that followed World War II. One of those trials, the Doctor’s trial, revealed atrocities committed by Nazi medical doctors and others (Lifton, 1986). Cohen (no date) summarized some of the horrible violence perpetrated on Jews and other victims of the Holocaust during World War II.

Experiments at the Nazi death camps tested human’s response to freezing temperatures, high altitudes, drinking sea water, tuberculosis, and poisons. Many suffered pain and death as a result of these experiments. The Doctor’s trial exposed the depth and scope of the Nazi experiments to a shocked world. Those experiments were so repugnant that recent attempts to use the data have met with nearly universal disapproval. The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled that the data from those studies could not be used in any way (Sun, 1988). After the Nuremberg trials, the psychological community understood that scientific methods alone do not define science; ethics is also part of the definition of science.

Despite Nazi atrocities and the creation of the Nuremberg Code, ethics was not a commonplace concern in social science research until the last quarter or the 20th century. Around that same time, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published the Belmont Report, which included recommendations for research with human participants. The three main areas covered by the report were: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. By 1991, the Belmont recommendations had been codified into United States law for HHS under Title 45 Part 46. In addition, 14 other federal departments share the same regulations under different sections of the Code of Federal Regulations.

The United States government requires researchers and their institutions to follow formal procedures that ensure ethical research. All scientific and medical disciplines that interact with human participants must conform to certain principles and procedures in conducting research.

The major issues of research ethics are how to conduct research, how to analyze data, and how to report results (Rosenthal, 1994). No statement of ethical principles, scientific or otherwise, covers all possible situations. So, as you conduct and present research, you will have to make ethical decisions.