The Purpose Of The Belmont Report

Someone who has not read the Belmont Report may misunderstand the intent of the researcher that must follow the principle of beneficence. They might think that the designers of the research and may hide and modify the experiment design for the design plan to pass. However, that is the opposite of the purpose of the Belmont Report. He or she will need to understand that the origin of this report was from lack of transparency in a research experiment that brought tremendous harm to its participants. (The experiment was the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986.) The Belmont report also requires researchers to “maximize potential benefits” therefore, the researchers, by design, will not be able to obscure any significant potential harm that

The principle of beneficence states that harm need not be done and potential benefits need be maximized while the potential harms be minimized (Belmont Report). They tried to weigh the consequences of all the potential harm that could have yielded from the research. The benefits of the research were not explicitly stated but the potential harms were examined in the following dilemmas: identifications of individuals in small organizations, capacity and limited resources, research in politically sensitive settings, and the ethically behind interventions. One of the main concerns of the dilemmas was about protecting the confidentiality of individuals that were involved in the process that was exposed during research. Whether it was about the identification of people in small organization or the organization itself, the researchers were concerned about the potential harm that came with identifying the subjects, even if they were mentioned anonymously. Another concern was to not disrupt the existing interactions that were established prior to the conduct of the experiment. Researching in a politically sensitive setting could affect relationships between an organization/lobbyist who may be developing a relationship with a policymaker. The researchers also examined how appropriate the method of group selection was. If they refused to research a certain group, were other groups related to that group automatically disqualified? How were the subjects chosen initially? These researchers would then weigh out the potential harms and see if “it is justifiable to seek certain benefits despite the risks involved” (Belmont Report). Specifically, the researchers involved in this study may want to adjust the study design to eliminate the harm that was examined to be the worst out of the potential harms to