Feminist Research Ethics

Helen is dying of breast cancer. Facing her own mortality uncertainly, she struggles with how to help her young children through this experience. A few miles away a research ethics board hesitates about approving a study of the relationship between dying parents and young children. Approaching people at their most vulnerable to request consent to study them and their family seems crass at best. How could the risk of intrusion possibly balance any benefit from what might be learned? Ethics and moral theory are about making judgments, especially judgments informed by some explicit framework. Feminism and the varieties of feminisms themselves constitute such moral and ethical frameworks because they each represent value positions on the experiences and places of women around the world. I agree with the pragmatist feminist Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1996) that all feminisms seek to improve the lot of women. Making gender a basic category of analysis, of course, also revalues women in relationship to men and leads to interrogating the categories of sex and gender themselves (Butler, 1990). As Tong (1998) emphasizes, feminisms vary in how women’s revaluation, empowerment, and emancipation ought to be formulated, accomplished, and assessed. Liberal feminists are said to advocate social reform of existing social arrangements, socialist and Marxist feminists advocate restructuring society, and so forth. In this chapter, I explore the development of feminist research ethics over the past several decades in the context of two influences: the increasing worldwide attention to responsible conduct of research and feminist ethics more generally. Feminist ethics developed in part as an explicit challenge to conventional patterns of Western epistemology and ethics and thus has its roots in two feminist projects. The first is work by psychologists such as Carol Gilligan and philosophers such as Nel Noddings who have formulated an ethic of care believed to better characterize the moral decision making of females than the modernist variety of Western moral theories centered in abstract principles. This project posits differences between how men and women conceptualize and practice ethics and morality. The second feminist project, discussed more fully in other chapters in