Ethics, Power and Intellectual Virtue: Doing Right in a Diversified Educational Research Environment

Abstract

The paper is broadly sympathetic to McTaggart’s position on participatory action research, but points, in particular, to three limitations in its treatment of the issues. First, it suggests that McTaggart has broadly assumed that the researcher is in a position of power vis-à-vis the researched and that the ethical precautions are designed primarily to safeguard research participants. However, when researchers are investigating up the power hierarchy (e.g. enquiring into powerful arms of government, large corporations or even manipulative and over-protective headteachers) different sets of ethical issues and obligations start to kick in, in which the researcher’s obligations such as to public understanding may over-ride obligations towards research participants. Secondly, not all educational research fits the model of participatory action research, nor can it all involve those who are its focus in quite the same way. Historical research and at least some biography have research ‘subjects’ who are no longer with us. Large population studies clearly cannot engage with participants in the same way as participatory action research. Philosophy, critical theory and discourse analysis stand in different relations again to those with whose writing, policy or practice they engage. All of these carry certain kinds of ethical requirements, but these start to look rather different from those which McTaggart is occupied. Finally, I raise the question of whether the source of the morality of research practice is really to be found in codes of ethical behaviour — especially when these become institutionalised and bureaucratised. Perhaps instead we should be looking to how intellectual virtue is embedded in and cultivated by the practice of our universities?