Ethics and mono-disciplinarity: positivism, informed consent and informed participation

Abstract

There are a number of pressures on researchers in academia and industry to behave unethically or compromise their ethical standards, for instance in order to obtain funding or publish frequently. In this paper a case study of Deaf telephony is used to discuss the pressures to unethical behaviour in terms of withholding information or misleading participants that can result from mono-disciplinary orthodoxies. The Deaf telephony system attempts to automate multiple aspects of relayed communication between Deaf and hearing users. The study is analysed in terms of consequentialist and deontological ethics, as well as multi-loop action learning. Discussion of a number of examples of bad practice is used to indicate both the compatibility of ethical behaviour and good scientific method and that ethical behaviour is a pre-requisite for obtaining meaningful results.