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Good Ethics Can Sometimes Mean Better Science: Research Ethics and the Milgram Experiments

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Abstract

All agree that if the Milgram experiments were proposed today they would never receive approval from a research ethics board. However, the results of the Milgram experiments are widely cited across a broad range of academic literature from psychology to moral philosophy. While interpretations of the experiments vary, few commentators, especially philosophers, have expressed doubts about the basic soundness of the results. What I argue in this paper is that this general approach to the experiments might be in error. I will show that the ethical problems that would prevent the experiments from being approved today actually have an effect on the results such that the experiments might show less than many currently suppose. Making this case demonstrates two conclusions. The first is that there are good reasons to think that the conclusions of many of Milgram’s commentators might be too strong. The second conclusion is a more general one. The ethics procedures commonly used by North American research ethics boards serve not only to protect human participants in research but also can sometimes help secure, to an extent, the integrity of results. In other words, good ethics can sometimes mean better science.

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Notes

  1. While it is outside the scope of this paper to evaluate Harman’s case against virtue ethics and character traits in general, some comment is warranted here. Harman’s case against character traits is probably over-stated. As I will demonstrate at a later point, the Milgram experiments are more ambiguous in their results than Harman supposes. However, setting this aside for a moment, Milgram himself and many other commentators do not take the experiments to make so strong a case against general character traits, and Milgram takes them to point to a specific trait, deference to authority. In any event, as I will show, such debates would be easier to resolve if the experiments appealed to had less ambiguous results, and this entails controlling the variable of coercion which would have been the case if current ethical standards had been used.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, School of Arts and Letters, Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON, Canada, M3JIP3

    Dan McArthur

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  1. Dan McArthur
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Correspondence to Dan McArthur.

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McArthur, D. Good Ethics Can Sometimes Mean Better Science: Research Ethics and the Milgram Experiments. Sci Eng Ethics 15, 69–79 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9083-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-008-9083-4

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