Why ethics are important

I think the most important thing from the lecture is keeping the personal space and respecting an individual. When using ethics in any research, we have unwritten rules about what is ethical and what is not. We can use many of these ethical rules when we work with impaired people, but we may also have to add rules, and that is important.

I also really liked the part about the saviour syndrome. I think that the absolutely most important questions to ask when we try to fix something that unimpaired people may think is broken, is the following: Is it really broken? If it is, do we really need to fix it? If we fix it, whom will it benefit? Should we impose our fix on everyone?

We should really consider these questions, and I also think we should ask these questions to our intended target group. If we do this, we will probably learn that we will get all kinds of answers from the target group. If we use the glasses example that we talked about in class, some people will definitely answer that they would like to have the laser correction, but other will say that they will prefer not to have it.

There is another very important thing to learn from this. If someone does not want to have our “perfect fix” it doesn’t mean that he is stupid.