Moving life science ethics debates beyond national borders: some empirical observations

Abstract

The life sciences are increasingly being called on to produce “socially robust” knowledge that honors the social contract between science and society. This has resulted in the emergence of a number of “broad social issues” that reflect the ethical tensions in these contracts. These issues are framed in various ways around the world, evidenced by differences in regulations addressing them. It is important to question whether these variations are simply regulatory or in fact reflect a contextual approach to ethics that brings into question the existence of a “global system of ethics for the life sciences”. Nonetheless, within ethics education for scientists these broad social issues are often presented using this scheme of global ethics due to legacies of science ethics pedagogy. This paper suggests this may present barriers to fostering international discourse between communities of scientists, and may cause difficulties in harmonizing (and transporting) national regulations for the governance of these issues. Reinterpreting these variations according to how the content of ethical principles is attributed by communities is as crucial for developing a robust international discourse. To illustrate these issues, this paper offers some empirical fieldwork data that demonstrates how the concept of dual-use (as a broad social issue) was discussed within African and UK laboratories. African scientists reshaped the concept of dual-use according to their own research environmental pressures and ascribed alternative content to the principles that underpin it. This suggests that the limitations of a “global system of ethics for the life sciences” cannot be ignored.