What is the Role of Basic Ethical Principles?
As we have seen the Belmont Report cites three basic ethical principles as its core ethical theory. The Report makes two quite different suggestions about the role of basic ethical principles. The Report notes that IRBs establish and implement codes, rules and guidelines to determine under what circumstances research on human subjects is ethically acceptable and should be permitted to proceed. The first suggestion about what basic principles are for is that they provide a basis on which specific rules may be formulated, criticized and interpreted.18 That is to say, basic ethical principles could serve as metarules, which would guide people in formulating the specific rules that they would actually use in ordinary day to day decision making. They would also serve to justify the specific rules and to defend them against criticism from researchers who thought they imposed excessive restrictions on their freedom to do research or against criticism from members of the public who thought the
