title: Against the principle that the individual shall have priority over science.
abstract: This paper highlights a feature common to many ethical guidelines--namely, the idea that the interests of the individual shall always prevail over the interests of science and society. The paper presents how some major ethical guidelines treat the balancing of research interests against those of research subjects and spells out the difficulties in interpreting the principle of the primacy of the individual in a way that can be action-guiding. It suggests various alternative interpretations of the primacy of the individual and argues that they do not hold. Finally, the implications of this analysis for ethical guidelines are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Bioethics at Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden. gert.helgesson@ki.se
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Helgesson
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Eriksson
mesh_terms: D016265:Conflict of Interest; D017408:Guidelines as Topic; D006801:Humans; D028681:Moral Obligations; D026684:Personal Autonomy; D035842:Research Subjects / Q000523:psychology*; D012586:Science / Q000941:ethics; D036302:Therapeutic Human Experimentation / Q000941:ethics*