American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Along with the late 20thCentury’s great boom in information technology, emerged knowledge societies that pivot on the common practice of research. Knowledge is considered the power whose capacity depends on the amount of research involved in its attainment. Research-based knowledge production has already become part and parcel of academia in the rational world, and individuals and institutions claim patents and copyrights for the intellectual products they release to society in terms of ideas or commodities of technical and commercial value. Thus, knowledge being a market item and knowledge production, a lucrative industry, very often the ethical norms of research are violated by individuals affected by corruption. Ethics in research help maintain the patents and copyrights of such knowledge-based products, to safeguard their inventors or discoverers against issues of plagiarism, corruption, exploitation, disreputation, defamation, and moral and intellectual deterioration that tend to become the ruination of the individuals as well as the institutions concerned. It can be resolved only by replacing grotesque materialistic and existentialist defilements with sublime moral and spiritual integrity and conscience as humans. Against this background, this paper attempts to promote integrity and conscience as part of research ethics with an overview of the threats and dangers that corruption would impose on society. The paper thus proposes a way to connect research ethics that has a legal foundation with integrity and conscience as humans that have a moral and spiritual foundation, with a focus on developing a society working with lofty ideals far from mundane materialistic expectations.