argue that they are nonetheless culpable. Relatedly, the guilty individuals or
institutions may insist that their critics and colleagues were just as guilty, and that
they are unjustly escaping censure, or are being judged hypocritically. Exactly
these arguments were used in their defence by the Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg
Trial for instance.
The epistemology of values and the difficulty of balancing principles lead us to
consider a problem which is much discussed in the nursing ethics literature:
whether any principles exist, whether they are in any sense universal or objective,
and whether the principles 'approach is consistent with the orientation of caring which many argue is what typifies the nursing relationship. This is a large topic, which is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, for present purposes, it is important to distinguish between the genuine problems of knowledge and appli- cation of principles, and the relativist proposal that ethical principles are merely matters of stance and subjective attitude. Isuggest that moral relativism is neither a practical possibility ± since in fact all nurses are regulated by a framework of law and by professional codes of conduct ± nor a viable intellectual stance. Evensituational 'approaches, such as the `ethics of
care 'approach, turn on judgements that certain values are non-negotiable. Where
ethical approaches differ is generally in relation to how we know and apply values
and principles to situations.
Epistemological questions arise in another context in research ethics, as we will
consider in the next section.
12.9 Ethics and the design of research
It is commonly said that bad science is bad ethics'. Before we consider why this is so, we must understand better what is meant bybad science'. I propose the
following definition as a description of science:
Science is the activity of the disciplined, collective acquisition of reliable,
generalisable knowledge; science is also the evolving set of outcomes of that
activity.The scientific activity includes a great range of methods, styles, techniques and
practices, such that good 'science is hard to define and perhaps amounts to nothing more thansuccessful 'science. Nevertheless, bad science 'is easier to define. Bad science isscience 'which contradicts the very idea of science, as
defined above. Hence, science which is methodologically ill-defined or likely to
result in meaningless or unreliable data, unjustified knowledge claims, or no
significant contribution to generalisable knowledge at all, is bad science. What is
meant by generalisable 'is somewhat controversial, but at least it requires the scientific experience to be communicable, that is, understandable by others and in some way usable by others. Science is about public knowledge, rather than some essentially private experience. This view applies as much to qualitative or action research as to quantitative research or othernatural science 'inquiry. Likewise,
scientific research which is kept secret or is unreported breaches the requirement
that science be a collective enterprise.
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