What Participatory Research and Methods Bring To Ethics: Insights From Pragmatism, Social Science, and Psychology

Ethics can be envisioned as a process where human beings move from a more passive stance in their moral lives to a more active one, in which the moral aspects of their lives become the basis of a project to best live one's life. Participatory research and methods would appear essential to ethics in this light, yet they remain rather marginally used in bioethics. In this article, I argue that participatory research methods are particularly compelling means of ethical enactments because of their ability-when carried out properly-to help promote self-actualization. Although I cannot review in detail the vast array of participatory research undertaken in management, education, communication, and so on, I pinpoint the advantages of this orientation to research, especially in light of a pragmatist and deliberative form of ethics that aims to help understand and enact human flourishing. These advantages include: (1) the co-understanding and co-reconstruction of problem situations and responses; (2) the importance attributed to meaning and intersubjectivity; (3) mutual learning (moral co-learning); (4) empowerment for effective eudemonistic change; and (5) opening the evaluation of outcomes to human flourishing. I also explain that these attributes of participatory research and methods do not preclude the use of non-participatory methods and approaches in ethics.