THINKING ABOUT THE INSEPARABILITY OF RESEARCH ETHICS, SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY, AND THE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OF SCIENCE

With ethical questions about scientific research becoming increasingly institutionalized, we posit the need for a conceptual clarification of research ethics, scientific integrity, and social responsibility. The challenge is to qualify each of these three domains and suggest how they are positioned in relation to each other, a positioning that must also distinguish between ethical, normative, and political issues. The hypothesis we defend in this article is that research ethics acts as a reflexive pivot between scientific integrity (community-oriented approach) and social responsibility (socially-oriented approach). We give an epistemological dimension to this positioning by qualifying research ethics as an epistemologically generic ethics.