There are those whom argue ethics cannot be taught and issues like licensure, signatures, and other "blame line" methods of accountability are meaningless as an ethical person will do the same no matter what, and an unethical person will ignore, bypass, or falsely use those measures.
Is this accurate, or can ethics be taught and does having a professional license that can be revoked, signing a document to indicate completeness and/or accuracy, and similar measures increase the likelihood of conforming to an ethical outcome?
Dennis -- can you be more specific, at least with respect to your experience as a licensed medical professional? Does the training and licensure-related measures make a difference to a group (ie, cause change in those who can be influenced), or is everyone going to do what they want regardless?
Bart Kemper has definetely raised an important topic and trigerred a discussion, which I believe will be nice.
I believe ethics can be taught. At the end of the day, I was taught ethics in the research training program for my PhD.
Now, I am not sure whether this is at the expense of accountability.
I would day that stressing methodology and limitations at the end of the research (journal article etc) helps in this case. At least the researcher clarifies what and how has been done in each case.
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