Nathan Emmerich

What follows is the text of a brief talk I gave as part of QUB leg of a series of events run by Nuffield Bioethics concerning The Culture of Scientific Research

Towards a Vocational Ethics for Scientific Researchers

My name is Nathan Emmerich and I did my PhD here at QUB, looking at the ethical education of medical students. At the present time I am a Visiting Research Fellow in PISP where, amongst other things, I am writing about the idea of ethical expertise. I have also been part of the Academy of Social Science’s project on Generic Ethical Principles for the Social Sciences. If you are interested you can find out more about this project on the Academy website, including a position paper on ethics in social science research that concluded a major phase of the project. It is interesting that some of the broader questions that arose during the course of this work are reflected in the concerns expressed by yourselves in advance of this meeting. Part of what I am interested in is connecting what we normally think of as the ethics of research with these broader issues and, at least for the social sciences, I am trying to do so by moving away from talking about ‘research ethics’ and instead returning to the idea of a professional ethics or science as a vocation. I am going to try to illustrate these points by talking about Stanley Milgram’s infamous obedience experiments.