ABSTRACT

This chapter examines ethical arguments related to human research, looking at why, when and where they were formulated and where regulating practices emerged. It also briefly considers the question of researchers' compliance with such regulations. Research on human beings gives an example of the slow progress made concerning an ethical need in Western-style medicine, namely that for protection of the participants. The chapter provides the emergence of international codes of ethics. One code illustrates the traditional approach at regulating moral issues in medicine. It endorses the paternalistic ethos of the health care professions that foster patients' beneficence as defined by professionals. The chapter provides a typology of the international ethics codes resulting from these scientific and cultural developments. It describes the reasons for, and the mechanisms involved in, their genesis by looking more closely at two typical codes from the perspective of an NGO, and an IGO, respectively.