The Varied Roles and Responsibilities of Ethics Committees in Biomedical Research: Mentor, Guide and Mediator

Ethics Committees (ECs) play a pivotal role in ensuring ethical conduct in biomedical research. They have traditionally been seen as a compliance function, but their work goes beyond the bounds of regulation into counselling, guidance, and making hard ethical decisions. Expanded international networks of research, novel technologies, and the inclusion of vulnerable participants further push the boundaries of their mandate, necessitating a philosophical re-examination of their role. This article draws on a philosophy-conceptual framework, integrating normative ethical theories with bioethics literature, philosophy of medicine, and research governance literature. The current analysis proposes a systematic review of the existing ethical theories, i.e., utilitarianism, deontology, principlism, virtue ethics, and the ethics of care, by case-based reasoning and theoretical synthesis, with the purposes of illuminating the ethical duties assigned to ethics committees (ECs). The results show that ECs can be used as mentors, building ethical sensitivity and researcher identity; guides, brokering norms in reflective equilibrium and dialogical ethics; and mediators, brokering stakeholder conflict in cultural competence. Philosophical reasoning should be done on complex solutions to ethical dilemma, moral pluralism, technological innovation, commodification, and vulnerability. As a result, ECs are turned into moral agents who can shape research cultures that are not subject to procedural control. The three-way model formulates the ethical conduct of the committee membership, which is moral education, normative guidance, and conflict mediation as the fundamental elements of governance. The creation of ECs is therefore the creation of deliberative reasoning, the development of philosophical literacy and the answer to technological and cultural demands. The next designs must aim at raising the ethical performance to institutional practice supplemented by mass-moral involvement. In this respect, ethical committees are the ethical watchdog of biomedical research, which constantly needs philosophical contemplation to obtain justice, care, and respect as scientific horizons change.