Responsiveness to Host Community Health Needs*

There is near universal agreement within the scientific and ethics communities that a necessary condition for the moral permissibility of cross-national, collaborative research is that it be responsive to the health needs of the host community. It has proven difficult, however, to leverage or capitalize on this agreement in order to facilitate a reasoned resolution to some lingering disputes about the ethics of international medical research. This is largely because different sides in these debates have sometimes provided different interpretations of what this requirement amounts to in actual practice. The goal of the discussion that follows is to clarify the nature of this important moral requirement. The first section motivates the responsiveness to host community health needs requirement in the context of international medical research. The second section examines various formulations of this requirement as they are enunciated in some of the core consensus documents in research ethics. The following section then defends a particular interpretation of this requirement and the final sections examine more liberal * This paper was written with the generous support of a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W