TY  - JOUR
AU  - Heinrichs, Jan-Hendrik
AU  - Aslan, Serap Ergin
TI  - Agent regret and the moral responsibility for the misuse of research results
JO  - Research ethics
VL  - 21
IS  - 2
SN  - 1747-0161
CY  - London [u.a.]
PB  - Sage Publ.
M1  - FZJ-2024-05516
SP  -  245-266
PY  - 2024
N1  - The project has been funded by the German Ministry für Education and Research (BMBF) Project DUMFE (Dual Use and Misuse of Research Results), 01GP2187
AB  - An increasing number of research fields must expect that their projects will be classified as susceptible to misuse or otherwise security relevant, even if the reasons or criteria for this classification have not yet been uniformly developed. Research institutions will commonly distribute the obligation to predict and prevent misuse across multiple members and structures including ethics committees. However, cases of misuse occur even in spite of these precautions, raising the question of the type and distribution of responsibility for the resulting harm. This question becomes even more pressing if research ethics committees in their decisions ask researchers to provide a misuse- specific risk assessment or risk mitigation plan and thereby shift back a part of their responsibility on the researchers. While this kind of requirement may be considered as unsatisfactory by researchers, members of research ethics committees or boards and third-party funders, will argue that it fulfils two important functions. On the one hand, it makes use of the best available source for misuse risk-assessment available to most committees; on the other hand, it guarantees that the researchers at least try to take responsibility. If researchers, committee members and others involved discharge their obligation to predict and mitigate misuse risks with due diligence, any backward-looking responsibility they retain is to show agent regret for the results of their work having been misused.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:001299423100001
DO  - DOI:10.1177/17470161241272760
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1030923
ER  -