ABSTRACT
Ethics should be understood not in the traditional sense of au thoritative external rules that submerge the individual within their strictures. Such a monologic guide, as Bauman ( 1993) has pointed out, has proven unworkable, for a “non-aporetic, non-ambivalent morality, an ethics that is universal and ‘objectively founded,’ is a practical impossibility” (p. 10). The ethical viability to which we refer is based around an awareness of inherent contradictions within all normative human experience and the provision of analyses that enable individuals to contextually work within this complexity. Research must be examined for its ability to maintain an on-going dialogical and responsive ethics within its population. A key word of the above criteria is the word “ability”; research must be “able to do” certain things if it is to maintain its credibility.
