LTT: D. Wenner

Danielle Wenner, Carnegie Mellon University

Clinical Research as Basic Structure & the Ethics of Health Research Priority-Setting

This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EQ1VBg6oSqq__ooSZd4NNA

ABSTRACT:  Much work in research ethics treats clinical research as largely comprised of discrete interactions between research sponsors, investigators, and research participants and thus assesses research primarily via the ethics of free and fair transactions. An alternative model sees clinical research as serving such a fundamental social role that it should be considered part of what John Rawls called “the basic structure of society.” On this view, the primary ethical lens for evaluating research should be that of justice. In this talk, I explore the implications of these two competing views for the ethics of health research priority-setting, and show how recent approaches to the ethics of health research priority-setting are either incompatible with or insufficiently demanding for the basic structure approach. I conclude by sketching some desiderata for an ethics of health research priority-setting that satisfies the basic structure model’s demands.