Ethics and educational research: philosophical perspectives
Ethics and meta-ethics: the philosophical contribution to the discussion of research ethics
Ethics – including research ethics – is slightly unusual territory as far as philosophical writing is concerned. In many other areas of philosophy there is a (comparatively) sharp distinction between eg science and the philosophy of science, between history and the philosophy of history, between religious belief and practice and the philosophy of religion – between what might be called the first order and second order questions. Typically there is even a division of labour: on the whole different people do science from those who write philosophy of science.
In ethics, however, this separation is much less pronounced. One can – and people do – distinguish between ethical questions (eg about how one ought to act) from what might be called the more strictly philosophical or ‘meta-ethical' questions (eg about how can one know how one ought to act or about the epistemological status of ethical judgements) – though just to make matters complicated this same distinction is observed in terms of ‘morals' and ‘ethics' The first of these sets of questions might lead one into discussion of competing principles and their interpretation and consideration about how to apply them in particular situations: the second into consideration of theories about the derivation and justification of such principles, the character of ethical language, the links between ethical theories and eg theories of human nature, into discussion of naturalism, emotivism, untilitarianism, Aristotelian conceptions of human virtue and Kantian theories of the categorical imperative.
We offer some reading which can take you into these theories, ie the territory of philosophical or meta- ethics, and a number of the contributions which will be featured on this website will no doubt refer to such sources but we shall not be populating this resource site primarily with this kind of material. Philosophers have also engaged more directly with ethical issues underpinning educational research and the problems associated with the application of such principles – and this is what we shall feature.
Recommended introductory philosophical texts on ethics
Richard Pring's chapter on the ‘Ethical dimensions of educational research' in Pring R (2000) Philosophy of Educational Research , London, Continuum can provide a useful starting point (and a brief one) because, as he explains ‘this chapter is more concerned with the meaning and justification of moral considerations which underlie research, than it is with making any particular moral judgements' (Pring 2000: 142)
Blackburn ,S. (2001) Being good: a short introduction to ethics , Oxford , Oxford University Press
Williams, B. (1996) ‘Ethics' in A.C.Grayling, Philosophy: a Guide through the subject, Oxford , Oxford University Press.
Frankena, W. (1963) Ethics , NY, Prentice Hall.
Crisp, R. (2006) Reason and the good , Oxford , Oxford University Press.
Useful web-sites
There is an annotated bibliography on ethics in educational research produced under the aegis of the ‘Association of Active Educational Researchers' at www.aare.edu.au /ethics/aareethc.htm
This has some helpful references (though of course it does not focus particularly on philosophical material) and it is quite seriously out of date (latest refs seem to be about 1995) but the fairly detailed summaries and commentaries compensate somewhat for this www.teach.newport.ac.uk/research/download_ethics/Ethics%20reading%list.doc
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