Teaching Ethics

A Review of Codes of Ethics in the United States and Ethical Dilemmas Surrounding the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

“…This is typically accomplished by the collective scientific community conveying regulations and best practice standards to lawmakers [20]. More importantly, a human skeletal collection serves as a focal point where a number of professionals from diverse disciplines with different technical training, experience, and ethical traditions work together [21]. In order for these diverse professional groups to operate in harmony, there is an urgent need to establish an institutional tool, a 'code of ethics', with respect to treatment of human remains for research in Korea.…”

“…Therefore, one set of ethics can neither be labeled as right or wrong, nor predict all the possible problems that might occur in the course of scientific research [20,21,34]. In this respect, "learning ethics is so much more than memorizing factsit is an abstract topic shaped by questions that may not have answers, which requires participants to step outside of their comfort zones and question everything around them [21]". Many academic texts are devoted entirely to the development of codes of ethics [35,36].…”

“…Relevant codes of ethics should be part of the education received by biological anthropologists in their training [21]. Ideally, a semester-long course fully dedicated to ethics and ethical issues raised from real-world research situations should be mandatory training for graduate students in anthropology.…”