Chapter 21 Compensatory Service for Conscientious Objection

Abstract

In his book, Human Guinea Pigs (1945), Kenneth Mellanby argues that not only is research participation appropriate compensatory service for those who claim conscientious objection (CO) to combat during war time, but that research participation could/should be a national effort; towards the end of the text he recommends a government bureau devoted to this pursuit. While we will explore the risks of each kind of activity, we argue that the conversation really should turn on the other side of the research calculus. That is, in any research endeavor, risk must be balanced with benefit at least to society (and also, in some cases, to research participants themselves). To the extent that military participation provides benefit to society (security, promotion of particular social values, etc.), we propose to explore what social benefit research participation would have to promise in order to compensate for CO to combat participation. So instead of asking “what research risk is equivalent to combat participation,” we will ask “what is the equivalent public benefit to compensate for opting out of combat?” In answering this question, we will consider other examples of conscientious objection in society and analyze them from the perspective of compensatory benefit rather than compensatory risk. Doing so will facilitate the analysis of societal benefit in/of research in a way that furthers the discourse about research ethics more broadly.