Ethics and Ethnomusicology

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  • Ethics: the Good.
    • Human rights, such as freedom and equality, as minima (equal inputs) and in potential conflict as emergence (i.e. freedom, say, may lead to inequality)
    • Social justice (equal outcomes; may require equity rather than equality on input)
    • Deontological vs. Consequentialist approaches towards Ethical Action.
  • Key ethical principles (cited in research literature) balance the deontological (duty: action inputs, intentions) with the consequentialist (action outcomes, cost/benefit assessments). The following are often cited:
    • Humanity: respecting human dignity and rights--minima--and avoiding exploitation (duty)
    • Beneficence (ensuring that good outweighs harm) (outcome)
    • Equality (social justice, equal outcomes)
    • Informed consent (dignity; duty)
      • Full disclosure of information (no deception!)
      • Data anonymity (subject identity is unknown to researcher),
      • Data confidentiality (subject identity is known but hidden in raw data via encryption or use of keys, and not shared in publication through pseudonyms or data aggregation)
      • Privacy: limits to research contexts (appropriate time and place of research); use of recordings (who may view/hear them)}
      • Right to withdraw
  • Philosophical ethics: Deontological (focus on duty to respect human rights) and consequentialist (focus on maximizing Σ {outcomes}, whether + or -) positions and how to resolve them.
    • Problems:
      • Whose good? The individual's? The group's? What group? When? (now? later?)
      • deontological: respect human rights (whose rights?)
      • consequentialist: sum total utility (how to quantify? sum?)
      • How to translate theoretical principles into actions?
    • Deontological
      • Traditional ethics: The Golden Rule
      • Kantian ethics - the categorical imperative: action considered a necessary end in itself (vs the hypothetical imperative: an action to achieve a particular end)
        • "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law")
        • "Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end."
      • Habermas: Communicative Action (treating people as a communicative end, not a means - illocutionary mood)
      • Problem: how to determine how people are being treated? what is the temporal scope of the assessment (now, or into the future...)? whose rights are considered?
    • Consequentialist:
      • Utilitarians, e.g. Jeremy Bentham (consequentialist): summation of an action's positive and negative effects ("cost/benefit analysis").
      • Cost/benefit analyses of any sort (included in the UofA ethics process)
      • Problem: how to compute the sum for qualitative ethnographic fieldwork? how far into the future? (unlike cost/benefit for a new drug, where results are quantitative and immediate)
      • Theoretical conundrums: The trolley problem[1]. Weaknesses: The transplant problem.
      • A real research conundrum: The Stanley Milgram obedience experiment. Use of deception for the greater good (?). Examples from ethnographic fieldwork abound.
  • Complexity of ethnographic fieldwork (as compared to, say, biomedical research on a new drug)
    • Qualitative research is many faceted; research is immersive to a great extent
    • Privacy and confidentiality are hard to ensure
    • Research design is typically not constructed in advance, but develops along with research (e.g. informal interviews).
    • there are many ambiguities that may never be clarified completely...
      • It's not clear who's "in" and "out" - who is a "research subject" and who is not.
      • It's not clear who's an "insider" and who isn't
      • For ethnography in "another culture" it's not clear what ethical codes should prevail - the researcher's or the cultures.
    • Special considerations:
      • Interviews, often eliciting the personal, information that should remain private?
      • Participant observation in ordinary life, or special events
      • Multimedia recordings, which may be revealing
      • Collaborative ethnography, introducing many issues concerning inter-researcher relations
  • Ethnomusicology as a special case...Why is ethics important for ethnomusicology? What special considerations arise?
    • Music can be less problematic (as entertainment), or more so (as ritual sound, or due to the status of music as IP - "intellectual property", or carrying esoteric knowledge), or representing collective property (who has the right to share or teach it? how should it be preserved and who should have access?)
    • What are the ethical implications of our work? How would you compare ethics in ethnomusicology to that of, say, psychology, engineering, or medicine?
    • Confidentiality vs. credit.
    • Implicit (or explicit) promises...musicians gaining traction through researcher. Avoiding false expectations.
    • How is ethics especially important for applied and activist ethnomusicology (and M4GHD projects)? Collaborative ethnomusicology?
      • The ethical impetus behind M4GHD itself
      • Their focus on disempowered or marginalized communities - which are also (almost by definition) vulnerable
      • Potential pitfalls: can you think of ethical problems that may arise in the course of ethnomusicological research? (think about conflicts in "doing the right thing" conflict?)
    • Discussion:
      • Ethical conundrums in ethnomusicology! What happens when various ethical principles (or applications) conflict? What do you do in such cases? (e.g. the good of the whole as opposed to the good of the individual; deception as a valid tradeoff for important information...)
      • Come up with an ethnomusicological conundrum of your own.
  • Research Ethics documents applicable to the UofA
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