Ethics committees legitimize harmful practices through procedural compliance

Ethics committees exist not to prevent harm, but to provide institutional cover for predetermined decisions. They transform ethical questions into procedural exercises, creating the appearance of moral deliberation while systematically enabling harmful practices through legitimate channels.

The bureaucratization of conscience

When organizations establish ethics committees, they are not outsourcing moral judgment to wiser authorities. They are creating administrative machinery that converts ethical concerns into manageable paperwork.

The committee structure itself predetermines outcomes. Members are selected for institutional loyalty, not moral courage. Procedures favor incremental approval over fundamental questioning. Time constraints ensure superficial review rather than deep ethical analysis.

This is not accidental. It is the intended function.

Procedural ethics vs substantive ethics

Traditional ethics asks: “Is this action right or wrong?”

Committee ethics asks: “Have we followed the proper procedures?”

This shift is profound. Once proper procedures are followed, ethical responsibility dissolves into collective institutional action. No individual bears moral weight for decisions that emerge from “the process.”

The Nuremberg trials established that following orders is not a defense against participating in atrocities. Ethics committees have successfully reversed this principle through procedural diffusion of responsibility.

Research ethics committees exemplify this dynamic. They do not exist to protect research subjects from harm. They exist to protect institutions from liability while enabling research to proceed.

Consider how “informed consent” operates in practice. Subjects sign lengthy documents written in technical language they cannot understand, describing risks that researchers deliberately obscure, for studies they have no real choice but to participate in due to economic necessity or medical desperation.

The committee’s role is not to question whether meaningful consent is possible under these conditions. Their role is to verify that the consent forms meet regulatory requirements.

Ethics approval becomes a stamp of legitimacy for exploitation.

Corporate ethics committees as capture mechanisms

Corporate ethics committees face an inherent contradiction: they are funded by the organization whose practices they supposedly evaluate. This creates systematic bias toward approving profitable activities regardless of harm.

The committee becomes a laundering mechanism. Harmful practices get reclassified as “ethical challenges requiring balanced stakeholder consideration.” Environmental destruction becomes “sustainability optimization.” Worker exploitation becomes “competitive necessity in global markets.”

The language of ethics gets deployed to obscure rather than illuminate moral problems.

Medical ethics and the industrialization of death

Hospital ethics committees regularly approve withdrawal of life support from patients whose families object, not because they have superior moral insight, but because continued treatment is expensive and bed space is limited.

The committee provides moral cover for resource allocation decisions that would be recognized as barbaric if stated plainly. Instead of saying “we are ending this person’s life because it costs too much to keep them alive,” the committee says “we have determined that continued treatment is not in the patient’s best interests.”

This is ethics as administrative convenience.

AI ethics committees and technological determinism

AI ethics committees at tech companies represent the most sophisticated evolution of this phenomenon. They exist to provide ethical legitimacy for deployment of systems that their creators know will cause harm.

The committees engage in elaborate theoretical discussions about fairness, transparency, and accountability while the systems being evaluated are specifically designed to be opaque, biased, and unaccountable.

The ethical review process becomes performance art while actual deployment decisions are made by product managers based on revenue projections.

The structure enables the function

Ethics committees work precisely because they appear to address moral concerns while systematically neutralizing them. The structure creates several layers of insulation:

Expertise mystification: Complex ethical issues get presented as requiring specialized knowledge that only committee members possess.

Procedural legitimacy: Following established processes creates presumption of correctness regardless of outcomes.

Collective responsibility: Group decisions diffuse individual moral accountability.

Institutional protection: The organization can claim it “takes ethics seriously” by pointing to committee existence.

Liability management: Documented ethical review processes provide legal protection against misconduct claims.

Historical precedent: the banality of administrative evil

Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann revealed how ordinary bureaucratic processes enabled extraordinary evil. Eichmann was not a monster driven by hatred. He was a functionary who focused on administrative efficiency while remaining willfully blind to moral consequences.

Modern ethics committees represent the institutionalization of this dynamic. They create systems where well-meaning people can participate in harmful practices by focusing on procedural correctness rather than substantive outcomes.

The banality of evil becomes the bureaucracy of ethics.

International ethics committees and institutional capture

Medical research conducted by Western institutions in developing countries routinely receives ethics approval for studies that would be prohibited in the researchers’ home countries. Ethics committees approve research that exploits economic desperation, inadequate healthcare systems, and limited regulatory oversight.

The committees provide moral laundering for medical colonialism. Procedures are followed. Forms are completed. Approval is granted. Harm proceeds under ethical cover.

The alternative: structural accountability

Real ethical oversight would require structural changes that ethics committees are designed to prevent:

Independent funding: Ethical review bodies funded by parties with no financial interest in approval decisions.

Consequentialist evaluation: Committees judged by actual outcomes, not procedural compliance.

Transparent processes: Public access to committee deliberations, not just final decisions.

Individual accountability: Named responsibility for decisions rather than collective anonymity.

Power to halt operations: Authority to immediately stop harmful practices, not just recommend modifications.

None of these reforms will be implemented because they would eliminate the committees’ actual function: providing institutional cover for predetermined harmful practices.

The ethics of ethics committees

The existence of ethics committees is itself an ethical problem. They create the illusion of moral deliberation while systematically undermining genuine ethical accountability.

Organizations that establish ethics committees are not demonstrating ethical commitment. They are demonstrating sophisticated understanding of how to manage ethical criticism while continuing harmful practices.

The tragedy is that many committee members genuinely believe they are serving an ethical function. The system depends on this self-deception.

Value implications for institutional design

Ethics committees reveal how institutions can capture and neutralize the value of ethical reflection itself. They transform ethics from a challenging practice of moral reasoning into a comfortable administrative routine.

This represents a profound corruption of what ethics should be: an uncomfortable confrontation with the possibility that our actions cause unjustifiable harm.

The committee structure ensures that this confrontation never occurs. Instead, ethics becomes another form of institutional risk management.

When we ask “what is the value of ethics committees,” the honest answer is: their value lies in making harmful practices appear morally acceptable through procedural legitimacy.

This is not an accidental side effect. This is their primary function, and they perform it very well.

The author has served on multiple institutional ethics committees and observed these dynamics firsthand. This analysis is based on institutional experience, not theoretical speculation.