Introduction: Virtue and the Ethics of Social Research

Many of the papers collected in this volume have their origins in an event that took place in London in May 2015. It was organised by the UK Academy of Social Sciences Working Group on Research Ethics with the support of the British Sociological Association (BSA). Largely to accommodate the additional papers that were commissioned, and appear in Section 3, the title of the event Virtue Ethics in the Practice and Review of Social Science Research slightly differs from the one chosen for this volume. The event followed on from the main activities that the Academy Working Group on Research Ethics had been pursuing for a number of years. This was the creation of set of common principles or shared basis for thinking about the ethics of social science research. The call to further investigate the relevance of virtue for the practice and review of social scientific research had been a consistent feature of discussions that took place at events convened by the working group in the pursuit of its primary activities. As such, the event, and the essays collected here, are an organic development of these prior efforts