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The Ethics of Pharmaceutical Research Funding: A Social Organization Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Garry C. Gray
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Extract

What does unethical behavior look like in everyday professional practice, and how might it become the accepted norm? Examinations of unethical behavior often focus on failures of individual morality or on psychological blind spots, yet unethical behaviors are generated and performed through social interactions across professional practices rather than by individual actors alone. This shifts the focus of behavioral ethics research beyond the laboratory exploring motivation and cognition and into the organizations and professions where unethical behavior is motivated, justified, enabled and supported in specific social contexts. For instance, when pharmaceutical firms fund academic research, how do the funding arrangements intersect with individual behaviors that are typical in academic research? In turn, how do academic-industry interactions affect scientific norms, particularly those involving compliance with rules, regulations, and ethical codes of conduct? A social organization approach to ethics allows us not only to examine ethics in practice, but also to tease apart unethical behaviors that might operate on an unreflective level and become accepted as “just the way it is.”

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , Fall 2013 , pp. 629 - 634
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2013

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