Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

Ethical Responsibility in Comparative Education Research
Mark Mason
In an increasingly globalized world whose urban environments are
hence more multicultural in nature, what is right or good or true is
frequently disputed from different cultural perspectives. This is as true
in education as it is in other fields, and raises difficult questions about
the ethics of research and, more specifically for our purposes here, about
the ethics of comparative education research. What is the comparative
education researcher to conclude, for example, in a cross-cultural study
of rural schooling practices when she finds that in one jurisdiction there
are policies in place to improve the retention of girls in the system, and
that in another the prevailing cultural beliefs frown on the schooling
of girls? She cannot avoid the normative issues if her study is to be
more than just descriptive, and the question arises as to how she might
conclude, if indeed she does, that the policies in the former case would
do much to enhance the life chances of girls in the latter.
My aim in this article is the development of core ethical principles
in comparative education research which could be both foundational
to the practice of research, and applicable universally to all researchers.
To get there I consider a dominant contemporary perspective on ethics,
known as postmodern ethics, finding in it aspects of what are known
as intuitionist ethics, and building out of the minimal assumptions
associated with these moral perspectives core ethical principles not
only for a code of ethics in comparative education research, but for any
professional code of ethics.
Many perceive the apparent challenges associated with contemporary
moral comportment as a consequence of moral and cultural
relativism. Relativism is the view that our values and beliefs are
relative to our cultural background, and that there are consequently
no universally accepted notions of good and bad, or right and wrong.
The concept of cultural relativism may have had noble origins in the
attempts of Western anthropologists to view other cultures as different
rather than inferior and therefore unable to be judged in terms of
Western values, but its strong interpretation and pervasive influence
today have led, some suggest, to the undermining of the possibility of
a universal ethics.
A dominant strand of postmodernism, that field of thought that
is concerned in part with cultural and other aspects of globalization,
is about scepticism towards the possibility of a universal ethics. Some
postmodernist thinkers certainly do adopt a relativist perspective. But
23