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

intuitions would be able to provide it. Would it be acceptable for a
researcher to justify a particular course of action because her intuitions
told her so?
A response to these problems seems to point in the direction of
an ethical code for comparative education researchers. But would
this really be the ideal, for researchers to act ethically only because
of their sense of obedience to a code of conduct? This sounds more
like authoritarianism than professional responsibility. And although
a conscience-driven moral responsibility may point uncomfortably
towards a degree of subjectivism unacceptable in a public enterprise
such as research, wouldn’t it be nice to know that researchers were
creatures of conscience?
Perhaps our aim then 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.
If the idea of ethics motivated in conscience is attractive but not
sufficient, we should try to derive core ethics for researchers without
losing the idea of conscience. At the same time, we should avoid
imposing principles in a top-down fashion, because that would remove
the possibility of professional autonomy, it would have more than a
whiff of authoritarianism about it, and it would be difficult to justify
the universality of the principles. Core ethical principles in educational
research need, therefore, to be derived ‘upwards’ from the most basic
of assumptions.
Let’s start then with the simple assumption that one of the features
that distinguish us as humans is our moral capacity. This is not to
assume that we are born good or bad, but simply that we have moral
capacity as humans. Bauman asserts that it is our moral capacity
that makes us human. Our moral capacity is expressed at its most
fundamental level in terms of conscience or in terms of our intuitions.
Whether conscience and intuitions are entirely or partly the result of
socialisation is immaterial to the argument. The key issue is that what
makes us human is this moral capacity, and that this moral capacity is
realized in our socialization, in our interactions with others.
Since we are, following the postmodern turn, sceptical of the
shortcomings of moral regulation by comprehensive and absolutist
ethical codes, we will start with conscience as our most basic expression
of our moral capacity as humans, and assume, initially at least, that it
is all we have to guide our actions. But if I am to trust my conscience, I
must respect it as a source of moral judgement. In other words, I must
respect myself as a person capable of making moral judgements. In
like manner, you are obligated in the first instance to respect yourself
as a person capable of making moral judgements. But if we are to trust
conscience as a source of moral judgement, then we are to respect each
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