Abstract
Nowadays the ethical problem of how incidental findings should be managed in human subjects research is hotly debated. Less discussed is why researchers should handle the problem of incidental findings. In this paper, I will outline two ethical arguments which try to ground the researcher's obligations to handle incidental findings: the argument from general beneficence and the argument from researcher's privileged access to subjects' private information and bodies. Then I will discuss what these arguments imply on the limits of researcher's duties to subjects, specifically in light of the duty to reduce the risk of false positive/negative error. At the end of the discussion, it is suggested that the difficulty in grounding researchers' obligation to handle incidental findings is closely related to the ambiguity of distinctive professional integrity in human subjects research.
