While social scientists have long lamented the institutionalized practice of prospective ethical review, it is nonetheless increasingly common. These regulatory institutions interpret and apply core ethical principles enshrined in the Belmont Report: respect for persons, justice, and beneficence. Despite what appears to be an increasingly coherent institutional practice, we argue that the underlying substance is not becoming more coherent. Instead, research ethics in the social sciences has no substantive core. This means that scholars may hold and maintain fundamentally irreconcilable views as to what constitutes ethical practice, and that these views cannot be resolved using existing ethical principles nor by the rules that reviewing institutions implement. Focusing on the principle of beneficence, this research strand examines several ethical “scandals” in the social sciences as key moments when scholars articulate and justify ethical principles within their scholarly community. Examining the argumentation in these debates reveals that the principle of beneficence is fundamentally indeterminate, such that there is no stable way to establish whether research achieves principled ethical goals. Instead, in the face of an empty principle, scholars rely on background principles, norms, and processes to claim and contest ethics.