Abstract

When the Belmont Report was published in 1979, the European research ethics community was very small, even if we take this community to include everyone who was working in research ethics academically or professionally, and the report itself made very little impact in European medical journals.1 If we try to trace Belmont’s later reception history in Europe and in much of the bioethics literature worldwide, we find that it is most often quoted either as a landmark in the history of research ethics, without any further explication of its actual content; as a forerunner of the principle-based approach to biomedical ethics developed by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress in The Principles of Biomedical Ethics ; or...