Virtue Ethics and Being a Researcher: Introduction to Ethical Decision-Making

Whilst the main body of this book focuses on illustrating the British Educational Research Association’s fifth edition of its ethical guidelines for educational research (BERA, 2024) in action, this chapter steps back to set the scene by looking at how culturally situated values affect how researchers enact any set of guidelines. It does so by taking a meta-ethical viewpoint to explore the basis for how and why researchers and those who participate in their studies might value different virtues and vices in their own lives and those of others. Virtue ethics is a framework which offers one way of looking globally at what might be expected of a researcher and a researcher can expect of those they interact with, as they seek to put into practice any set of ethical guidelines they have chosen to take advice from. The chapter explores commonalities and divergences in different cultural expressions of virtuous living to leave a reader with an awareness of how different views of virtuous behaviour, might inform decisions made in the course of research.