Educational assessment policy and practice - a matter of ethics

Long-standing concerns within the field of educational assessment consider the impact of assessment policy and practice as matters of equity, inequality and social justice.Yet educational assessment policy and practice continues to have powerful social consequences for key users such as children and young people.This paper re-positions these consequences as a matter of ethics.It uses the work of Messick to frame how ethical matters extend beyond test instruments into the realm of uses and impact. A case study of the 11+ school transfer system in Northern Ireland is presented to illustrate ethical dilemmas emerging as a consequence of actions and decisions of using assessment systems for particular purposes.In looking forward to how we might attend to ethical matters in assessment policy and practice, a consideration of a children’s rights approach is outlined that may provide a moral and legal framework for action.

Offshoring Clinical Trials: The Mutable Ethics, Weak Protections and Vulnerable Subjects of EU Law

In this paper I engage with science and technology studies work on pharmaceuticalisation to explore how European Union (EU) law helps to produce and support the preference for pharmaceutical responses in public health governance, while authorising the production of vulnerable subjects through the growing off-shoring of clinical trials. Drawing on the analysis of legal and policy documents, I demonstrate how EU law allows and legitimates the use of data procured from vulnerable subjects abroad for market authorisation and corporate profitability at home. This is possible because the EU has (de)selected international ethical frameworks in order to support the continued and growing use of clinical trials data from abroad. This has helped to stimulate the revision of international ethical frameworks in light of market needs, inscribing EU public health law within specific politics (that often remained obscured by the joint workings of legal and technological discourses). I suggest that law operates as part of a broader ‘technology’ – encompassing ethics and human rights discourses – that functions to optimise life through resort to market reasoning. Law is thereby reoriented, instrumentalised and deployed as part of a broader project aimed at (re)defining and limiting the boundaries of the EU's responsibility for public health, including the broader social production of public health problems and the unequal global order that the EU represents and helps to depoliticise and perpetuate. Overall, this limits the EU's responsibility and accountability for these failures, as well as another: the weak and mutable protections and insecure legacies for vulnerable trial subjects abroad.

Clinical Trials Abroad: The Marketable Ethics, Weak Protections and Vulnerable Subjects of EU Law

This chapter explores how the EU is a largely overlooked exporter of normative power through its facilitation and use of clinical trials data produced abroad for the marketing of safe pharmaceuticals at home; a move that helps to foster the growing resort to pharmaceuticals as a fix for public health problems. This is made possible by the EU’s (de)selection of international ethical frameworks in preference to the international technical standards it co-authors with other global regulators. Clinical trials abroad underscore how ethics are contingent and revisable in light of market needs, producing weak protections for the vulnerable subjects of EU law. I argue that these components and effects of the regime are ultimately about that which undergirds, shapes and directs regulatory design. That is, I point to the use, infiltration, perpetuation and extension of market-oriented ideas, values and rationalities into formally non-market domains like biomedical knowledge production and public health. I explain how these are central to efforts at producing and legitimating the EU, its related imagined socio-political order based on a more innovative, profitable and competitive pharmaceutical sector in order to foster economic growth, jobs and prosperity, and with them the project of European integration. ‘Bioethics as risk’ is highlighted as a way to reshape and redirect the regulatory regime in ways that are more consistent with the spirit and letter of the ethical standards (and through them the human rights) the EU claims to uphold.

“How Can a Woman Who Has Been Raped Be Believed?”: Andrea Dworkin, Sexual Violence and the Ethics of Belief

In June 2000, Andrea Dworkin, an American feminist activist and author, published an account of being raped in a Paris hotel room a year earlier. The story was met with widespread disbelief, including from feminist readers. This article explores the reasons for this disbelief, asking how and why narratives of rape are granted – or denied – truth status by their readers. The article argues for understanding the conferral of belief as a narrative transaction involving the actions of both narrator and reader. It posits that Dworkin was widely seen as an unreliable narrator but argues that for ideologically charged narratives such as rape narratives judgements of reliability and belief inevitably draw upon the normative standpoint of the reader. I suggest that there are opposing criteria for establishing the truth of rape narratives; a ‘factual’ or legal model, which sees rape narratives as requiring scrutiny, and an ‘experiential’ model, located within certain strands of feminist politics, which emphasises the ethical importance of believing women’s narratives. The article finishes with a consideration of the place of belief within an ethics of reading and reception of rape narratives.

The Dark Side of Nudging: The Ethics, Political Economy, and Law of Libertarian Paternalism

Libertarian paternalism, as advanced by Cass Sunstein, is seriously flawed, but not primarily for the reasons that most commentators suggest. Libertarian paternalism and its attendant regulatory implications are too libertarian, not too paternalistic, and as a result are in considerable tension with ‘thick’ conceptions of human dignity. We make four arguments. The first is that there is no justification for a presumption in favor of nudging as a default regulatory strategy, as Sunstein asserts. It is ordinarily less effective than mandates; such mandates rarely offend personal autonomy; and the central reliance on cognitive failures in the nudging program is more likely to offend human dignity than the mandates it seeks to replace. Secondly, we argue that nudging as a regulatory strategy fits both overtly and covertly, often insidiously, into a more general libertarian program of political economy. Thirdly, while we are on the whole more concerned to reject the libertarian than the paternalistic elements of this philosophy, Sunstein’s work, both in Why Nudge?, and earlier, fails to appreciate how nudging may be manipulative if not designed with more care than he acknowledges. Lastly, because of these characteristics, nudging might even be subject to legal challenges that would give us the worst of all possible regulatory worlds: a weak regulatory intervention that is liable to be challenged in the courts by well-resourced interest groups. In such a scenario, and contrary to the ‘common sense’ ethos contended for in Why Nudge?, nudges might not even clear the excessively low bar of doing something rather than nothing. Those seeking to pursue progressive politics, under law, should reject nudging in favor of regulation that is more congruent with principles of legality, more transparent, more effective, more democratic, and allows us more fully to act as moral agents. Such a system may have a place for (some) nudging, but not one that departs significantly from how labeling, warnings and the like already function, and nothing that compares with Sunstein’s apparent ambitions for his new movement.