Scientific integrity from a meta-ethical perspective: more contextualization and research ethics committees? A preliminary meta-ethics study

Abstract

Objective: We aimed to begin studying, more empirically, within our ethics department,scientific integrity itself, considering scientific integrity as an integral part of morality. We therefore decided to start with a preliminary meta-ethics study, based on a small sample of chapters from two conference proceedings, published exclusively in French in 2016 and 2021, to which two of us have actively contributed. Results: A thematic analysis of secondary information extracted from this sample enabled us to identify three principal themes in scientific integrity: its institutionalization, definition and applicability. And these themes, with their subthemes, highlighted two trends. On the one hand, scientific morality tends towards moral absolutism, whereas, on the other, it tends towards moral relativism. In other words, context does not, morally, justify anything in the first case, but can, ethically, justify certain things in the second. We think that it would be questionable to formalize scientific integrity as a moral absolutism, but this does not necessarily tip the balance in favor of radical moral relativism either. Scientific integrity should allow a contextualization of certain scientific practices within the framework of the activities of research ethics committees applying pragmatist ethical theories.