Foucault And Research Ethics On The Autonomy Of The

foucault and research ethics: on the autonomy of the researcher this paper uses the later writings of foucault as a means of reflecting on

Foucault and Research Ethics: On the autonomy of the researcher
This paper uses the later writings of Foucault as a means of
reflecting on research ethics, and in particular on the notion of
researcher autonomy. It is suggested that such autonomy is a
precondition for ethical practice, and also for sound research, and it
is noted that it is under threat today, not least from creeping
ethical regulation. Foucault’s philosophical position is outlined,
noting the shift in his positionthat took place in his later writings.
There have been only a few attempts to use his ideas in relation toin
thinking about research ethics, but we examine how they have been
applied in thinking about the ethics of anthropology. This is followed
by a discussion of some widely recognised, and quite serious, problems
with Foucault’s position. Finally, a number of positive and negative
lessons that can be learned from his work are presented.
It is commonly argued that one of the main ethical principles that
should guide the behaviour of social researchers is respect for the
autonomy of the people being studied. The influence of this principle
is most evident in the common tendency to treat informed consent as
virtually an absolute requirement: it is frequently insisted that
people must be free to decide whether or not to be involved in a
research project, and to do this on the basis of an informed
understanding of what the research entails and what the consequences
of participation might be. Emphasis onPriority given to the principle
of autonomy also underpins more the radical arguments that research
should never be carried out ‘on’ people but always ‘with’ them; in
other words that they should be involved in decisions about what to
research, what data to collect, how to analyse it, what conclusions to
draw, and/or how to disseminate and apply the findings.1
However, the concept of autonomy is central to research ethics in
another way too: unless researchers themselves are able to exercise
autonomy in some respects, the very notion of research ethics, as a
set of principles or considerations that should guide their actions,
would be pointless. Only if they have some freedom to decide how to do
their work can they be held to account in ethical terms. More
generally, it could be argued that a researcher’s primary
responsibility is to pursue the task of research well, and that this
also requires the exercise of autonomy, this being the core of
academic freedom.2
Our focus in this paper will relate specifically to the concept of
autonomy as it applies to the researcher, since we believe that this
has been given insufficient attention in most previous discussions of
research ethics; and it is an issue that takes on great significance
in the context of the recent rise of ethical regulation. Such
regulation generates questions about who is responsible for the
conduct of research projects if researchers are effectively coerced
into complying with requirements laid down by ethics committees or
institutional review boards – through the threat that since they
control whether resources will not be provided for their work, orand
that whether access to the data that they needed will not be granted
(Hammersley 2009).
In order to think about researcher autonomy we will draw on the later
writings of Michel Foucault about ethics (notably, Foucault 1990b,
1992, 1997, and 2000). Autonomy is, in many ways, his central theme.
He offers a distinctive approach that highlights important issues, and
we believe that engaging with his arguments can be very fruitful.
Relatively little use has been made of his work in thinking about
research ethics, and what there has been is almost entirely restricted
to the field of anthropology (Faubion 2001; Pels 2010; Carduff 2011;
Fassin 2011).3 This is in dramatic contrast to the very wide impact of
other parts of Foucault’s writings on substantive areas of social
science over the past 30 years. Part of our motivation for using the
work of Foucault is that we believe discussions of research ethics
should draw on a broader range of philosophical ideas than the common
tendency to rely primarily upon Kantianism and consequentialism.4
We will outline Foucault’s ideas about ethics, look at what
implications have been drawn from these in relation to social research
ethics, examine some of the problems intrinsic to his position, and,
finally, assess what lessons can be learned.
Foucault’s ethics
A fruitful way of approaching the whole orientation of Foucault’s work
is to note that he rejects one version of historicism while
reconstituting another. There are at least two senses that have
traditionally been given to this term in twentieth-century Western
thought (see Scruton 1996:236-7 and Mandelbaum 1967). For Karl Popper,
‘historicism’ refers to a teleological view of history according to
which the future of human societies is laid out by some process of
historical development, frequently one that is supposedly directed
towards the realisation of human ideals (Popper 1957; see also Hayek
1952:1,VII). Hegel and (at least early) Marx adopted a historicist
perspective of this kind, and Berlin (1954:11) gave it the label
‘metaphysical historicism’. The other sense in which the term
‘historicism’ has been used, itself open to some variation in
interpretation (see Rand 1964; Lee and Beck 1953-4; Beiser 2011),
refers to the view that different periods in history are characterised
by distinctive, we might say incommensurable, systems of belief, and
sharply divergent ways of life; and that these cannot be understood,
even less evaluated, except in their own terms. From this point of
view, there is no overall perspective in terms of which different
historical cultures can be explained or judged, not even one that is
immanent in the process of historical development in the manner that
is assumed by metaphysical historicism.5
Foucault clearly rejects the first kind of historicism. Like many of
his intellectual generation in France, he reacted against the
teleological meta-narratives built into both Orthodox and Western
Marxism. For him, this was not so much a matter of playing down
determinism so as to recognise human agency, but more radically of
both insisting on the presence of historical discontinuities and
rejecting any tendency to view the process of historical development
in terms of a collective subject. This is part of a broader
anti-humanism that can be found across post-structuralist philosophy,
and also in the historical epistemology of science developed by
Bachelard and Canguilhem, which was very influential for on Foucault
(Gutting 1989; Davies 1997; Dews 1995).
Foucault adopts a version of the second kind of historicism, even
though he distances himself strongly from earlier forms of this which
had been organised around ideas like ‘the spirit of the age’ or
typical modes of consciousness (Foucault 1972:Intro). Much of his work
was concerned with identifying the governing ‘épistémès’ or
‘discursive formations’, what might be thought of as historical a
prioris of possible experience, operating at particular historical
times, and the network of practices they entailed, these practices
being bodies of rules to which people are ‘subjected’ rather than
products of their conscious decisions.6 And he treated these as sui
generis, rather than as part of any grand narrative or as representing
fixed universal types. At the same time, a distinctive feature of his
historical research was that it was aimed at understanding present-day
modes of thinking and ways of life through documenting how they had
come about. His aim was a ‘history of the present’ (Roth 1981) or more
significantly, as Miller (2007:17) puts it, to ‘historicize the
present’. Referring to Foucault’s first book, Gutting (1989:105)
writes:
Foucault’s history of madness was not written simply to provide an
accurate overall picture of how people’s views of and treatment of the
mad have changed through the years. It also had the critical intent of
discrediting the idea that our contemporary conception of mental
illness is […] the objective scientific truth about what madness
really is.
Moreover, Foucault presents his attempt to understand the present
through studying the past as of value for its role in facilitating
action aimed at bringing about a different future. His model here is,
to a large extent, Nietzsche, who had criticised (under the heading of
‘antiquarian’ history) what we listed earlier as the second kind of
historicism for only understanding ‘how to preserve life and not how
to create it’, complaining that it hindered ‘the mighty impulse to a
new deed’ (Nietzsche 1893:pgh28). Foucault’s historical work was
motivated by, if not precisely aimed at, facilitating creative new
deeds. Thus, the conclusion he drew from historicism was that what we
believe and how we act today are arbitrary, in the specific sense that
they come out of a contingent history and are therefore themselves
open to change. This contrasts with the more usual tendency for
historicists to assume that those living within some particular
historical culture will, and perhaps should, accept the legitimacy of
that culture.7
Thus, in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, where he starts
to address the issue of ethics, Foucault (1990a) challenges the idea
that we have liberated ourselves in our attitude towards diverse
sexual practices as compared with the repression of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. He emphasises continuity here, how what
occurred previously was not so much repression as a ‘discursive
explosion’ as regards sex – a preoccupation with differentiating forms
of deviance. This still continues today, albeit perhaps with a
different inflection from before, and it constrains, as well as
enabling, what we can be and do – perhaps to much the same extent as
in the past. This line of argument parallels his claims elsewhere that
the change from what we now regard as barbarous forms of punishment to
therapeutic treatment amounts to a shift in mode of control rather
than to a relaxation of it, and perhaps to one that is more insidious
(Foucault 1977a). The demand for self-examination, from religious
confession through to modern counselling and occupational appraisal,
is associated with the authority of various sorts of expert and of the
bodies of knowledge on which they rely, and it structures our
experience of who we are and our ideas about what we can and should
do. In broad terms, his interest is in how our lives today have come
to be directed by a particular set of ethical norms that give our
existence a specific meaning and purpose without our being aware of
their historical and contingent character.
So, much of Foucault’s work would suggest that we are ourselves
constituted in and through the operation of socio-historical
discourses and practices. As has often been argued, this seems to
leave little room for any kind of active role on our part, in other
words for personal autonomy. There is, however, an apparent break with
this position in the two later volumes of the History of Sexuality
(Foucault 1990b and 1992).8 In these later volumesHere, instead of
focusing on developments in nineteenth century medicine and
psychopathology and how these shaped present-day attitudes and
practices, the focus is on ancient Greek and Roman ethical practices.9
Furthermore, rather than analysing the contingent character of these
practices, and how they were constituted in and through the power
relations characteristic of Greek and Roman society (notably those
around both slavery and patriarchy), we find Foucault preoccupied with
the way in which ancient ethics prescribes ‘care of the self’ (επιμέλεια
εαυτού/epimeleia heautou) and the techniques it offers for this.
From this new point of view, ‘[ethics is the] process in which the
individual delimits that part of himself [sic] that will form the
object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the
precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that
will serve as his moral goal. And this requires him to act upon
himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself’ (Foucault
1987:28). In other words, the demand here is for ‘a certain way of
attending to what we think and what takes place in our thought’
(Foucault 2005:11), with a view to engaging in ‘actions by which one
takes responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, purifies,
transforms, and transfigures oneself’ (Foucault 2005:11).10
Another model for Foucault in thinking about such ‘action on the self’
was the cultural invention characteristic of modernist art. Faubion
(2001:87) notes that Foucault follows Baudelaire in adopting a modern
attitude towards the value of the present that involves ‘a desperate
eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to
transform it not by destroying it but by grasping in it what it is’
(Foucault 1997:311). An exemplar here is Baudelaire’s dandy, who
‘makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very
existence a work of art’ (p312). Rabinow (1997: xxxix) refers to this
as ‘a form of continual self-bricolage’, one that involves not just
resistance to prevalent practices but also active transgression.
Faubion goes on to argue for the significance of Blanchot’s influence
on Foucault in this respect, as one ‘who willfully transgresses the
stylistic criteria that distinguish one genre from another, who
conflates fiction with philosophical reflection, critique with
narration’ (Faubion 2001:87; on Blanchot see Haase and Large 2001).
One way to understand Foucault’s position here is as a radicalisation
of Kant’s earlier radicalisation of the notion of autonomy, in which
all reference to nature (and therefore all external constraint) is
excluded in favour of an idea of selfhood as rationality willing
itself entirely from its own resources (see Pippin 1991). However, for
Foucault, as for Nietzsche and modernist art theory, imagination is
substituted for rationality – in light of the allegedly oppressive and
groundless character of any assertion of rationality, whether the
instrumental form of reason associated with Western capitalist
institutions or the dialectical reason of Hegel and Marx.
Implications drawn for research ethics
In relation to social research, Foucault’s ethics can be read, first
of all, as demanding reflexive interrogation of ethical norms, and
indeed of methodological rules and established conventions more
generally. This fits with the model that he provides in his own work.
He operated in what might be called a post-disciplinary fashion, in
the sense that his work conformed neither to the rules of philosophy
nor to those of historiography – the two disciplines with which it is
most obviously connected. In this way, like Blanchot, he seeks sought
actively to challenge existing ‘genres’ in the development of ‘the
history of thought’ (see, for example, Foucault 1989:294).11
So, a first ethical injunction that seems to followhas been derived
from Foucault’s work is that researchers must subject to continual
scrutiny prevailing ethical and methodological ideas – both those
ingrained in institutional norms and practices, and their own
intuitions about what is good or bad, right or wrong – to continual
scrutiny, thereby opening the way for new modes of research and forms
of life. After all, Foucault sees research knowledge as always
implicated in the operation of power. Indeed, many of his analyses
were precisely concerned with this aspect of ‘the human sciences’, and
the institutional practices associated with them. It could even be
that the primary goal of research from a Foucaultian perspective
should be to unsettle the systems of thought that underpin current
social institutions and practices, including those of social science,
to show that alternatives are possible. In these terms, much
conventional discussion of research ethics, and of methodology more
generally, would be seen as ‘an inhibition to creative, liberating and
significant social research’ (Pels 2010:1).
An equally important implication that has been drawn from Foucault’s
work for research ethics is the idea that through empirical study of
ethical ideas and practice in diverse societies we can come to
understand what must be challenged and what should be accepted
(Faubion 2001). For example, Caduff (2011) argues that Foucault’s
later work provides a model for how the anthropological study of
morals could inform the ethics of anthropology. Building on the
discussions of Fassin (2008) and Stoczkowski (2008), he suggests that
this can provide a via media between ‘moral positionalism’, on the one
hand, and a ‘cultural relativism’ that amounts to a form of nihilism,
on the other. He sees the kind of ‘critical’ anthropology
characteristic of, say, Nancy Scheper-Hughes (see Scheper-Hughes 1995)
as representing a version of moral positionism in which evaluations
are made of people, institutions, etc on the basis of the researcher’s
own values, these simply being taken for granted. This contrasts with
a more traditional cultural relativism that effectively undercuts any
such evaluation because this would amount to an imposition of alien
values on the culture being studied.12 What Caduff proposes, instead,
is that a moral framework for evaluation can be developed internally
to the discipline of anthropology through the study of ethical ideas
and practices within societies, in a similar manner to the way that
Foucault seeks to draw lessons from ancient ethics.13
Of courseNeedless to say, Foucault’s work has been subjected to
considerable criticism, and, before reflecting further on what can be
learned from it in thinking about research ethics, it is necessary to
consider the problems it involves.
Problems with Foucault’s position
As we have seen, lLike many other philosophical perspectives on
ethics, that of Foucault implies a critical attitude towards both
prevailing moral codes and our own ethical intuitions. This is a
feature not just of those views that are commonly associated with
critique – such as the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Marx – but
even those, most notably utilitarianism, that have come to be seen as
constituting the prevalent ethical culture.14 From Foucault’s point of
view, as from these others, we must not treat acting ethically as a
matter of obeying the dominant moral code or, even more subtly, of
finding reasonable compromises among the values to which we and others
happen to feel committed. Instead, there must be continual reflexive
assessment not just of the moral norms that others seek to impose upon
us but also of our own ethical commitments and beliefs. In other
words, Foucault argues that we must seek to understand and challenge
the socio-historically constituted character of what passes for
morality – objectively and subjectively.
At the same time, there is an important difference between what is
offered by Foucault and other critical philosophies. The latter
generally provide some means for deciding what should and should not
be subjected to critique and in what terms, or at least they offer
general guidance about the sort of evaluation required. For example,
in the case of Kant, genuine duties are to be determined by using a
principle that (he claims) any rational agent would adopt simply by
virtue of being a rational agent. And he supplies arguments specifying
what these duties include. By contrast, Foucault’s position does not
provide any substantive guidance: there is an injunction to be
critical, but no suggestion of principles that should guide the
critique.15 Similarly, while, drawing on ancient ethics, he emphasises
the use of techniques to craft the self in light of an ‘aesthetics of
existence’, he does not tell us how we are to decide what sort of
person to become: in other words, which aesthetic criteria are most
appropriate or how to determine this.
Nor is this a matter of simple omission. Any such specification would
be at odds with his interest in opening up the possibility of some
quite new form of life, since the specification would necessarily
depend upon current assumptions. As we saw, he is keen to emphasis
historical discontinuity. Such a specification would also violate his
principled rejection of general principles. Thus, along with many of
his French philosophical peers (see Gutting 2011), Foucault rejects
all of the various foundations that have been used to ground some
alternative to existing moral codes or ethical concepts: whether
appeals to human nature – either as manifested at all times, or as
represented in some genuine form to be found in the historical past
(Rousseau) or to be realised in the future (Marx) – or rationality –
whether an a priori mode of reasoning (Kant) or some naturalistic
‘felicific calculus’ (Bentham).
In the case of Foucault, then, we are faced with a theoretical
problem, and one that has serious practical implications. While he
insists that we must recognise the arbitrariness of whatever presents
itself as an ethical demand, externally or internally, he provides us
with no grounds on which to decide what should be resisted and what
ought to be accepted, or how this could be determined; no indication
even of towards what human ideals our efforts ought to be directed.
Yet, from a commonsense point of view at least, it seems clear that
not all new possibilities would be desirable. In effect, Foucault
resists such evaluations on historicist grounds: we cannot know what
the future will find of value or what it will denounce. But the result
is that his position has no capacity to evaluate ethical demands,
internal or external, in either theoretical or practical terms (Fraser
1989:ch1; Ramazanoğlu 1993:11); though this certainly does not stop
him Foucault engaging in practical evaluations, as we shall see.
The problem can be illustrated by considering a legal case discussed
by Foucault in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1990a).
He describes Jouy as a ‘simple-minded’ farmhand, who was arrested and
imprisoned ‘till the end of his life’ for the purposes of medical
study (p32) after he had ‘obtained a few caresses from a little girl’
(p31): he ‘would give a few pennies to the little girls for favors the
older ones refused him’ (p32). Foucault asks ‘What is the significant
thing about this story?’ and his answer is: ‘The pettiness of it all;
the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village
sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from
a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of
a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical
examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration’ (p31).16
What is interesting about this case, for our purposes here, is that
while one could certainly view it in the way that Foucault does, on
the evidence he provides it is at least as plausible to argue that it
amounts to an example of child abuse, so that Jouy perhaps deserves
the treatment he received. More importantly, the judgment Foucault
provides in this case is not, and cannot be, derived from his
philosophical principles but relies instead upon notions of what is
(and is not) ‘consequential’ and the idea that because something is
common (an ‘everyday occurrence’) within a particular culture it is
therefore legitimate – arguments that are very questionable.
In fact, the absence of philosophical guidance effectively leaves open
the way for the exercise of dogmatism or whim. In terms of Foucault’s
framework, his own arguments in this case cannot be exonerated from
such a charge any more than could others. Gutting comments:
Foucault’s […] concrete judgments about what is oppressive and what is
not conform fairly well with the standard views of leftist
intellectuals [at the time]. For him the major threats to human
freedom are such things as bourgeois morality and the exploitation of
workers. But why should we prefer these judgments to those of
rightists who think labor unions, pornography, abortion and
international Communism are real problems? (Gutting 1989:283)
Foucault does not have any answer to these questions, other than by
appealing to his personal preferences, along with his sense that the
present is ‘intolerable’ (Foucault 1977:216, see also Glucksmann
1992), and that something new is required – though we should note
that, ironically, in the case of Jouy he is actually arguing in favour
of village tradition.
So, the key issue for us here is not which of the two interpretations
of the case is most persuasive, but rather that while Foucault takes a
stand he does not do this on the basis of assumptions that are
intrinsic to his philosophical position, and he could not have done so
because his philosophy offers no guidance one way or the other. It
could equally have justified dismissal of ‘village sexuality’ as a
normalising patriarchal force that should be challenged rather than
validated.
The conclusion we must reach is that Foucault’s position results in a
kind of decisionism, whereby all evaluations are unavoidably
arbitrary. Furthermore, as we have seen, it is not just that
Foucault’s philosophy is incapable of providing crucial guidance, but
that it specifically rejects any possibility of such guidance. At the
same time, Foucault puts forward his own evaluations as obviously
correct, denouncing opposing views.
Gutting writes about the case of Jouy: ‘Many of us today will be
shocked at Foucault’s insouciance over what we might well judge sexual
molestation, but [he] would no doubt see our reaction as itself a sign
of the effects of the modern power/knowledge system’ (Gutting
1989:95). While this might have been his response, he would have had
no grounds for it. How are we to determine what does and does not
derive from the modern power/knowledge system – if, in fact, anything
does not – or to decide why some alternative framework, in which the
activities of Jouy would be tolerated, should be regarded as more
desirable? That this is undecidable in terms of Foucault’s philosophy
reflects the relativism long associated with historicism. If each
historical era has a culture that is incommensurable with all others,
we have no basis for judging them outside of themselves. The paradoxes
that this generates become particularly obvious when historicism is
used to ‘historicize the present’.17
It appears that for Foucault, even more than Kant, the only important
value is autonomy, formulated in this case as detaching ourselves from
the effects of the power-knowledge system. Yet Foucault’s
philosophical position cannot justify even his valorising of
resistance and transgression, or the positive valuation of novelty and
difference that lies behind it. On what grounds should resistance or
transgression be regarded as a virtue, and why should novelty be
treated as the most important ideal? He simply takes it as a given
that the present is intolerable, and that alternatives would be better.
Moreover, we should note that what he champions here are, in effect,
the characteristic values of modernism: the valuing of change and
novelty has long been a prevalent feature of the dominant culture in
Western society (see Oakeshott 1962). This surely undermines any claim
that Foucault has managed to ‘escape himself’ or the culture that had
formed him, and perhaps highlights the futility of this projectaim.
This connects to another fundamental problem, mentioned earlier: that
any injunction ‘to resist’ assumes that there is some part of us that
is not constituted by what is to be resisted. In other words, the
concept of resistance assumes some ‘I’, some agency, that is not
constituted by the power-knowledge system. Yet it is not clear what
grounds Foucault could have for believing that any such agency exists.
Gutting (2005:101) writes ‘No doubt the reason [Foucault] so resisted
any fixed identity was his realization that even what might seem to be
his own autonomous choice of identity could be just an internalization
of social norms’. Within the framework that Foucault has developed we
not only have no basis for deciding what to resist but also no grounds
for believing that we have the autonomy required for doing this
anyway. Our resistance could, without our being aware of it, be just
as much a product of normalising forces as our conformity.
Indeed, the general thrust of Foucault’s work as a whole is to suggest
that there can be no escape from normalising forces. He writes at one
point:
these ‘power-knowledge’ relations are to be analysed, therefore, not
on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in
relation to the power system, but, on the contrary, the subject who
knows, the objects to be known, and the modalities of knowledge must
be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of
power-knowledge and their historical transformations. In short, it is
not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of
knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the
processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up,
that determines the form and the possible domains of knowledge.
(Foucault 1977: 27-8)
On this basis it seems that only the power-knowledge system itself
could exercise any autonomy. There is a paradox, then, that while, on
the one hand, Foucault seems to treat autonomy as the most important
ethical principle – interpreting it in an absolute way as the shaking
off of all constraints – on the other hand his philosophy denies the
possibility of autonomy of this kind, or at least that we can know
whether and when we are exercising it. We are in the grip of a process
that produces both who we are, and what we can be, as well as any
knowledge we believe we have about this. Here, the very possibility of
an ethics seems to be denied.
There has, of course, been a perennial tension within social science
generally, including within Marxism, between recognition that we
cannot be completely autonomous – that our thoughts and actions are
always constrained in various ways – and an insistence that we must
have (or believe we have) at least some autonomy or agency. In line
with this, in his later writings on ethics Foucault seems to shift to
a less radical view of the nature of autonomy, and to suggest how the
problem might be solved. Faubion (2001:89) argues that:
[In] the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault often
seems of the opinion that our modern ‘‘liberal’’ polities diminish
ethical possibilities nearly to a zero-degree. [However,] during the
course of the long interruption between the first and second volumes
of the History, he undergoes a change of mind. He never comes to
presume that liberalism had led to anything approaching a true ethical
commons, but does come to acknowledge in the present a greater array
of ethical interstices than he had previously recognized. Such
interstices are not removed from power. They are not, however, spaces
or places of the political micromanagement or psychosocial bondage
[…].
According to this interpretation, then, in his later work Foucault
recognises variation in degree of autonomy rather than defining it in
absolute terms; in other words, as either simply present or absent.
And, it is suggested, he seeks to deal with the issue through the
notion of ‘problematisation’. Gutting explains what is involved as
follows:
Problematizations formulate fundamental issues and choices through
which individuals confront their existence. The fact that my existence
is problematized in a specific way is no doubt determined by the
social power relations in which I am embedded. But, given this
problematization, I am able to respond to the issues it raises in my
own way, or, more precisely, in a way by which I will define what I,
as a self, am in my historical context. (Gutting 2005:103)
Gutting presents Foucault as contrasting problematization with
marginalisation:
Marginalisation corresponds to the strongest constraints that a
society exercises on individuals. Even the marginalized are not
entirely determined by a society’s power structures, since they are
capable of engaging (and succeeding) in revolutionary movements
against what dominates them. But they can define themselves only
through their struggle with power. The ‘mainstream’ members of a
society, those who are not marginalized, are less constrained. The
power network defines them in a preliminary way but allows for a
significant range of further self-definition. Unlike the marginalized,
they have available ‘niches’ within the society that provides them
room for self-formation in their own terms. (Gutting 2005:103-4)18
While treating autonomy as a matter of degree may be a more defensible
position, it remains unclear how it can be reconciled with Foucault’s
broader philosophy. For example, how can the claimed difference
between problematization and marginalisation operate when, according
to Foucault, power is dispersed throughout the whole of society rather
than centralised (Foucault 1990a:92-7)? Given this dispersal, why
would those at the centre have any more scope for resistance than
those at the margins? Furthermore, the practical question of what is
an unavoidable constraint determined by the current problematisation
and what would amount to the exercise of freedom is left unanswered.
And, here again, it seems as if the exercise of autonomy itself is all
that matters, even if this is now more of a possibility than it was in
the case of absolute autonomy.19
A final problem is that it is not clear how any genealogical analysis
we carry out, in the manner of Foucault, on the prevailing moral code
– or, more broadly, on the institutional arrangements within which we
live – or on our own ethical intuitions, can itself escape the
sceptical questioning that Foucault unleashes. Much the same is true
of any history or anthropology of ethics; at most all that these could
do would be to loosen the grip of current preconceptions and
commitments. But to what purpose?
Discussion: lessons for research ethics
In the previous section we have discussed some very serious problems
with Foucault's arguments. There may be a temptation to conclude from
this that little can be learned from him in thinking about research
ethics. We believe that this would be a mistake: there are both
positive and negative lessons.
One positive lesson is that research ethics should not be entirely
preoccupied with how researchers ought to deal with other people,
notably the people they are studying – as it currently tends to be.
Foucault’s ethical writings are concerned with ‘action on the self’ (Foucault,
1992:28), a focus that derives from the character of much ancient
ethics, and that is inherited by modern ‘virtue ethics’.20 The idea
behind this approach is that only if we acquire relevant virtues will
we be able to act well in relation to other people. This is because
acting well is not a matter of enacting principles – of following
rules in a mechanical way – but rather of making wise judgments in
particular situations about what is the best course of action. The
implication of this for research ethics is that it should start from
the question of what virtues are required of researchers. And, to us,
this suggests that what is and is not ethical in dealing with other
people must be judged in the context of the distinctive obligations
built into the role of researcher, rather than simply being assessed
in terms of general ethical principles. Moreover, the central
obligation here is to pursue knowledge effectively (Hammersley and
Traianou 2012).21
A second positive lesson from Foucault is that we must be fully
prepared to question institutional pronouncements about what is and is
not ethically acceptable, as well as our own initial judgments and
feelings about this. The implication is that we must adopt a highly
reflexive attitude and seek to make our own independent assessments.22
As researchers we necessarily act in contexts where other agents make
declarations about ethical principles and put forward ethical
judgments, ones which they sometimes seek to enforce upon us – whether
this is university authorities, ethics committees, funders,
gatekeepers, or people in the field. We must take account of these
judgments, at the very least prudentially, but Foucault would demand
that, however plausible and justified they may seem, we should not
simply treat them as valid, nor do this on the grounds of respecting
others’ views. Equally important, he insists that our own initial
judgments about what would and would not be ethically justified ought
to be questioned, since these too may be the product of normalising
socio-cultural forces.23
A third lesson from Foucault’s ethics is that while the individual has
a personal responsibility to examine critically both external ethical
demands and felt commitments, this cannot be done on the basis of some
absolute foundation, whether a set of principles derived from nature
or a fixed, determinate method. Rather, it must be done in ways that
recognise the endemic uncertainty surrounding what can and cannot be
relied upon, in which the ‘origins’ of ideas and feelings neither
count unequivocally for nor against them. Thus, Foucault rejects the
idea notion that we can achieve a single system of knowledge, a
general theory, that will encapsulate everything and serve all
purposes, insisting instead that we rely upon more local, situated,
and acknowledged-to-be-fallible, forms of understanding.
While, as we have seen, he provides us with no grounds for justifying
these forms of understanding, this problem can be addressed by drawing
on contextualist arguments in analytic epistemology. A starting point
would be Elgin’s (1996) notion of ‘considered judgment’, where the aim
is to achieve ‘reflective equilibrium’. Here, the idea that we can
engage in rational judgment is preserved despite recognition that all
judgments are fallible, that there can be no absolute principles on
which we can depend without fear of being misled. Furthermore, it
might be argued that reflection is not only fallible but is also
always situated, in the sense that it involves assumptions that,
within the contexts concerned, must necessarily be treated as fixed,
at least for the moment. And it must be stressed that this is a
defensible stance, not one that needs to be corrected or even defended
in the face of challenges from foundationalism or radical
epistemological scepticism. It is true, as sceptics argue, that there
can be no knowledge of the world that is logically founded upon
empirical givens, nor any other means of establishing its demonstrable
validity, but they are wrong to conclude from this that no knowledge
is possible. Moreover, not even sceptics can stand entirely outside
the web of existing belief to ask their challenging questions, and
there are potential costs associated with doubt, just as there are
with belief, so that the pertinence of those sceptical questions is
always open to dispute (see Williams 2001).
What might be concluded from this more contextualist epistemology is
that the false binary according to which ethical requirements are
either absolute or entirely arbitrary should be rejected. Rather,
following Ross and some other philosophical writers on ethics (Ross
1930), we need to recognise that all value principles and their
implications are defeasible, so that what we give priority to should
depend upon judgments about what is relevant, and what ought to be
treated as a priority, in the circumstances. The implication here
seems to be, rather against the grain of Foucault, that what is
usually required is not total rejection of current demands, and of
what exists, but rather a judicious assessment of these matters as
against other concerns – in ways that are not unduly influenced by
prevailing opinions or personal feelings.
Another important lesson we can take from Foucault trades on one of
the main points that he seems to derive from ancient ethics. This is
that we should neither demonise those desires or personal interests
that are conventionally judged to be immoral, or of low status, nor at
the same time believe that acting upon them is a form of liberation.
Most obviously, the pursuit of sexual gratification is neither to be
rejected, as in some influential interpretations of Christianity, nor
to be freed from all restraint, in the name of personal fulfilment or
socio-cultural transformation, as some have argued (see, for example,
Marcuse 1969). A rather less seductive example of demonization, this
time in the context of research ethics, is the commonly expressed
denunciation of researchers as pursuing their own careers at the
expense of the people they study. Not only does this, as a general
criticism, rely upon an implicit set of questionable assumptions about
the necessarily inequitable nature of the ‘exchange’ involved in the
researcher-researched relationship (Hammersley and Atkinson
2007:ch10), but it also appears to deny that pursuing a career is a
legitimate aspiration. This stems from the fact that the notion of
career is effectively being interpreted as the pursuit of personal
gain. Yet this is a very narrow and reductive assumption – one that
neglects any notion of vocation or even a more mundane commitment to
the value of one’s work. At the same time, we should not assume that
pursuing a career is always justified: whether or not it is, at what
cost, and what this entails, are matters for situational judgment.
There are also negative lessons to be drawn from Foucault’s work.
Above all, we can learn that great care needs to be exercised in
handling the concept of ‘autonomy’. If we think of it in absolute
terms, as Foucault does most of the time, then we are locked into a
framework which is likely to lead to the conclusion that autonomy is
impossible, that there can be no agent who is not entirely constituted
in and through socio-cultural forces of one kind or another, and that
(so the argument goes) we are therefore entirely constrained.24
Furthermore, it is not even clear that autonomy in this absolute sense
could be a coherently thinkable concept: there must always be some ‘I’
exercising autonomy, and this must necessarily involve, at any point
in time, at least some fixed substance, however thin, which will by
its nature involve potential constraints. Moreover, in practice if an
agent is going to be able to act effectively in the world then this
substance will have to be relatively ‘thick’, in other words to
include all manner of capabilities and tacit knowledge. A newborn baby
is a relatively thin agent and is, as a result, relatively incapable
and dependent. So, a more effective agent would have to be ‘thicker’
and thereby also, ironically, more constrained internally. This is the
other side of the idea that power is enabling not just constraining.
Foucault recognised this, of course, but in our view did not follow
through on its implications. In effect, most of the time, his
philosophy is the obverse of Sartre’s: it is locked within the same,
unsatisfactory, framework whereby, in principle, we must either be
absolutely free or totally constrained. What is required instead is
recognition that autonomy and constraint are normative more than
ontological matters – they are evaluations; and situationally relative
ones at that.
There is at least one other lesson we might learn from Foucault. If we
draw from him the conclusion that research ethics should focus on
identifying the virtues researchers ought to have, we can note that at
least some of these will be epistemic in character; in other words,
they will be concerned with what is required on the part of
researchers if knowledge is to be pursued effectively – and as we saw
earlier this links up with Foucault’s later interest in ancient ideas
about ‘truth-telling’. Included amongst these epistemic virtues would
be, for instance, being explicit about changes in one’s own views and
the reasons for these. Equally important would be a commitment to
trying to be as clear and precise as possible about what one is
claiming and why, and about the appropriate degree of confidence there
should be in the likely validity of any conclusions offered.
Now, it seems to us that, in practice, Foucault did not match up well
to these requirements. It was noted earlier that he shifted his
position significantly over the course of his work, and particularly
in writing the last two volumes of his History of Sexuality. Yet he
does not explicitly acknowledge this.25 Indeed, he famously rejected
any requirement placed upon him as regards consistency: ‘Do not ask
who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our
bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At
least spare us their morality when we write.’ (Foucault 1972:17).
However, a concern with consistency, and honesty about changing one’s
mind, is not simply the morality of bureaucrats or the police; and it
is of particular importance in the context of intellectual work – if
collective discussion, so important for the production of research
knowledge, is to operate effectively (Hammersley 2012). Of course,
Foucault might well have argued that consistency is of little
importance by contrast with continual transgression in search of new
possibilities. But, as we saw, in fact his philosophical position can
offer no justification for that futile project; and, in practice, his
work was clearly aimed at contributing to academic knowledge, where
the epistemic virtues we have identified are of obvious importance.
Similarly, despite Foucault’s recognition of the difficulties and
uncertainties involved in producing knowledge, he took positions and
denounced other views in a manner that implied a much stronger basis
for his own conclusions than he could justify. His judgment in the
case of Jouy, discussed earlier, is a case in point. Gutting – a very
sympathetic commentator – writes as follows, referring to one of
Foucault’s early books, Madness and Civilisation:
the rhetorical force of Foucault’s prose often goes far beyond the
evidentiary force of his arguments in condemning modern psychiatry.
[…] Here his view is particularly distorted by his prejudice against
bourgeois morality and by his romantic desire to see madness as an
infrarational source of fundamental truth. Foucault simply assumes
that a moral system built around respect for property and family
relations strikes at the root of the individual’s autonomy and
happiness. His overwhelming emotional aversion to such a morality
leads him to reject it in toto, with no analysis of its precise values
and deficiencies. […] Similarly, his romanticization of madness as a
source of deep truth blinds Foucault to the fact that, quite apart
from any exclusion or exploitation by society, the mad are often
cripplingly afflicted by the distortions and terrors of madness
itself. (Gutting 1989:108-9)
Summarising, Gutting comments: ‘[…] alternatively befogged by the
tortuous opacities of his prose and dazzled by the seeming
gratuitiousness of his audacious claims, [readers] may well ask if
there is anything at all here worth their while’ (Gutting 1989:261).
His answer to this question is that there is, and we agree. But the
deficiencies of Foucault’s work must also be recognised.
There are, then, both positive and negative lessons to be learned from
Foucault’s later writings, and they carry quite profound implications
for our thinking about social research ethics.
Conclusion
Our aim in this paper has not been simply to apply Foucault’s ideas to
research ethics but to use critical engagement with them to facilitate
thought about this topic and also about those ideas. We started from
the importance of researcher autonomy, and we have explored Foucault’s
ideas views on ethics to gain some illumination of its character and
importance. We noted that the most obvious injunction that follows
from his views requires that prevailing moral codes and ethical
intuitions must be subjected to reflexive assessment. In our view,
this emphasis is of considerable value in the context of research
ethics today, not least because there seems to be great pressure to
believe that acting ethically is exhausted by conformity to codes and
regulations, or to the decisions of ethics committees. Meanwhile,
there are those who want to insist that principles of social justice
or human rights lay down absolute requirements on how others must be
treated, and that these should be placed at the centre of the research
process (Mertens and Ginsberg 2009). In the spirit of Foucault we
reject both of these contemporary tendencies.
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1 See, for example, the arguments in several chapters of the Handbook
of Research Ethics (Mertens and Ginsberg 2008), especially those
relating to research on indigenous communities and on people with
disabilities. This position is also taken by many working in the field
of Childhood Studies, see for example Alderson and Morrow 2011.
2 On academic freedom, see Tight 1988 and Menand 1998. Of course, the
principle of researcher autonomy may come into conflict with showing
respect for the autonomy of others: this is one of many dilemmas that
can be faced in doing social research.
3 Elsewhere, his earlier work has sometimes been invoked in discussing
ethical regulation, see for instance Koro-Ljungberg et al 2007.
4 Some writers have drawn on wider resources, notably virtue ethics:
see, for example, Macfarlane 2008. See also Usher’s (2000) use of the
work of Levinas.
5 This second form of historicism is closely related to the ‘cultural
relativist’ approach that was adopted by many anthropologists, from
Boas onwards – where the distinctive values, norms, knowledge, and
practices characteristic of each culture are treated as valid within
that culture and not open to any trans-cultural evaluation. For an
example of the radical ethical implications of this approach, see
Shweder 2005. The sources of both historicism and cultural relativism
can be traced back at least to the work of Herder, see Beiser
2011:ch3.
6 There is a parallel here with the focus of Annales historians on
‘mentalités’, see Foucault 1972:Intro. For an account of the Annales
tradition, see Iggers 1985:chII. For a powerful critique that
challenges the adequacy of an exclusive focus on discursive
formations, see Lecourt 1975.
7 While other historicists have sometimes used study of the past to
raise questions about present-day assumptions and practices, this has
not usually been their main purpose. But it was certainly Foucault’s.
8These do not conform to Foucault’s original plan, and also display a
change in style. Gutting (2005:101) speculates that one reason for the
change was that in studying ancient ideas and practices ‘Foucault had
entered a world that was removed from the present he so often found
“intolerable” and that suggested modes of existence he found immensely
appealing’. While he did not regard these as a blueprint for a new way
of life, he did believe that they opened up ways of thinking about
ethics that could serve as an ‘heuristic guide’ for action today.
Miller (1993) seems to put down the change in orientation, in part at
least, to Foucault’s discovery of gay culture in the bath-houses of
San Francisco.
9 Foucault’s interest in antiquity was by no means idiosyncratic in
the context of French intellectual life in the 1960s and 70s. Miller
(2007) demonstrates this, and he draws a contrast between the use of
antiquity by Foucault’s generation and that of their predecessors, as
exemplified in the dramas on classical themes written by Camus,
Sartre, and others.
10 One aspect of Foucault’s interest is how ideas about ‘care of the
self’ in the ancient world came to be deformed through the influence
of Christianity. Here again there is a direct parallel with Nietzsche.
11 Megill 1987 argues that Foucault’s work is ‘antidisciplinary’.
12 See d’Andrade 1995. For explorations of this problem in relation to
the issue of child abuse, see Scheper-Hughes 1987 and Morton 1996.
13 There is an interesting parallel, in principle if not in practice,
with the kind of ‘anthropology’ developed by Kant and Herder in the
eighteenth century, concerned with empirical investigation of ethical
and aesthetic feeling, this being seen as an essential precondition
for drawing any conclusions about how ethical judgments ought to be
made. See Zammito 2002:109 and passim. Of course, Kant subsequently
came to adopt a very different approach to ethics.
14 Were we resolutely to insist on evaluating all policies and
practices, individual and collective, solely in terms of whether or
not they promised to lead to the greatest happiness of the greatest
number, major changes in our current attitudes and practices would be
required. For example, there could be no privileging of ‘the national
interest’ or of friends and family, no recognition of human rights or
respect for privacy, etc, aside from where this serves the utilitarian
goal – and much of the time it probably would not.
15 This is a problem identified by a number of commentators, see for
example Fraser 1989. The clearest specification of what Foucault has
in mind is an approach in which by transgressing what have previously
been taken to be ontological or ethical limits we can discover new,
hitherto unrecognized, possibilities (see Foucault 1997).
16 Foucault’s last point refers to the fact that the doctors produced
a report on the offender which was subsequently published.
17 Much the same problem arises when Foucault distinguishes between
power, which is ubiquitous, and domination, which he evaluates
negatively (Foucault 2000:283): see Faubion (2001:97) and Patton
(1998). It seems to us that the distinctiveness of Foucault’s concept
of power derives from the fact that the opposite of ‘being subject to
power’ is ‘autonomy’, defined as escape from all constraint, a
possibility that Foucault simultaneously seems to deny.
18 It is not clear to us whether what Gutting presents here is
Foucault’s attempted solution to the problem or his own reconstruction
of what Foucault could have argued. As he notes, Foucault himself does
not make the link between problematisation and marginalization.
19 Another way of trying to make sense of Foucault’s position here is
in terms of his distinction between modern governmental rationality
and earlier forms (Foucault 2009; see Dilts and Harcourt 2008 and
Davidson 2009), but this too conflicts with the conception of power he
adopts, and leaves the crucial questions unaddressed.
20 Faubion (2001:85) portrays Foucault’s work as ‘an anthropological
renovation of the Aristotelian enterprise’, in other words of the sort
of virtue ethics developed by Aristotle. On more recent forms of
virtue ethics, see Slote 2000.
21 Interestingly, there may be a link here to Foucault’s later concern
with parrhesia, or truth-telling: see Foucault 2001 and 2012.
22 We can do this without assuming that ‘independent’ means free from
all influences, assumptions, etc.
23 Foucault’s primary emphasis on challenging internal forces perhaps
stems from his rather surprising, and surely false, claim that ‘the
idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rules is now
disappearing, has already disappeared’ (Foucault 1989:311).
24 Kant’s defence of freedom on the grounds that we cannot know we are
fully determined, and must assume that we are not, is not available to
Foucault, even were it convincing.
25 He notes a change in his plans but he does not indicate any major
shift in position and what this entailed; quite the reverse, he tends
to suggest continuity. He declares, for example, that he ‘reversed
tack’, that his earlier and later work represent ‘two inverse ways of
access to the same question: how is an “experience” formed where the
relationship to self and to others is linked’ (Foucault 1989:296).
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