The ‘ethics committee job is administrative: a response to commentaries

What job should authorities give to review boards? We are grateful to Soren Holm, Rosamond Rhodes, Julian Savulescu and G Owen Schaefer for their thoughtful commentaries on our answer.1–4 Here we add to the discussion.

Let us summarise the claims for which we argued.5 Relevant authorities can task boards with review for consistency with duly established code (‘code-consistency review’ or ‘CCR’), thereby making code-consistent activities apt for approval and code-inconsistent activities apt for rejection. They can instead task boards with review for ethical acceptability (‘ethics-consistency review’ or ‘ECR’), making ethically acceptable activities apt for approval and ethically unacceptable activities apt for rejection. For every proposal a board might consider, these two different jobs establish different review bases, and their approvals and rejections also sometimes conflict. Some international and national statements require ECR, others instead require CCR, and others again seem either to…

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