The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments

jewishvirtuallibrary.org

4 points·mhb··3 comments

How about the ethics of not using that data and having to do the experiment again? These experiments were far beyond perverse and I can imagine why we would not want to use that data, but it is far too late. Most of our lives and science after WWII are already based on most of that data.

You may be right about the practicality of collectively 'forgetting' the data. But practical considerations do not change the ethics of using the data. And I'm disturbed by the idea that saving lives justifies using data obtained by murdering others. To do so means that we are judging the lives being saved as more valuable than those lost.

We might make that judgment today because the lives lost are 70 years in the past. But perhaps tomorrow someone else will make that judgment because the lives lost are of one tribe and the lives saved are from a 'better' one.

I was not talking about that we should forget the data generated by these experiments in that era. I am just stating that how bad these experiments were, they did make the lives of later generations better, including the tribes that suffered most from this ordeal. I mean that it would be awful to have to do these experiments again, rather use the current set of data, how bad the methods were.

Good things can come from bad things, just like the other way around, science itself is hardly to describe with morality, the usage of said science is what makes the user either moral or a-moral.

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