- Information
- AI Chat
Ethics Essay (84%)
Ethics in Health Science (2610)
The University of Western Ontario
Recommended for you
Preview text
Pain and death are many people’s greatest fears. As a result, doctors are widely admired for their ability to provide a solution to these fears, while simultaneously acting as a source of hope when a person has no one else to turn to. However, during World War II, some doctors corrupted and betrayed the reliable position they held in society by performing atrocities against humanity through horrific medical experiments and genocide, tainting the medical texts of this history and the legacy it left. Although these horrific acts are part of the past, their consequences linger in the context of present-day healthcare ethics in regard to the medical findings that originated in this time period. Moreover, it is imperative to discuss discoveries originating from the Holocaust to address the present-day ethical debate they create, that being whether it is ethical or not to use findings that result from the incredible suffering of victims, despite how helpful the information could be in the medical field. I argue that it is unethical to use medical evidence that is gained from terrible atrocities and human rights violations for patient benefit due to ethical principles, scientific validity, short and long term consequences, and threshold for unacceptable behaviour. Medical practice has four crucial ethical principles: autonomy, benefice, non-maleficence, and justice. These principles help doctors make decisions when moral issues arise to act in the patient’s and society’s best interest (Gillion, 2015, 111). However, in the context of using Nazi medical texts, ethical concerns need to be considered. One of the main concerns with the Nazi medical texts is the ethical history of the experimental conduction. In other words, the underlying goal in regard to the historical context of the period that influenced the nature of these experiments. The purpose behind the experiments performed by the Nazi’s was to advance their political agenda: the genocide of thousands of discriminated individuals put through inhumane suffering and torture. For instance, poison experiments with intravenous injections of phenol gasoline and cyanide were conducted with no purpose for scientific inquiry but for individual execution. The purpose of the experiment
was to see how fast the subjects would die (Cohen, n.). Therefore, it can be argued that the use of Nazi experimental data suggests that the underlying historical context which resulted in targeted inhumane acts is permissible. However, in present day health care ethics, condoning the use of the Nazi medical texts goes against the principles of non-maleficence and justice. The principle of nonmaleficence regards the obligation of not harming others, which is violated in the Nazi experiments, such as injecting poison into victims for torturing reasons. Likewise, the principle of justice is the fair and equitable distribution of health resources, which is infracted by conducting poison experiments in the hopes of genocide, which is not fair to the discriminated groups since the use of these texts can cause harm to individuals who have experienced the lived ramification of these experiments and the holocaust. Additionally, the perpetuation of injustice occurs, as the use of these texts imply that there is a tolerance for horrific behavior. As a result, continues to promote the anti-semetic attitudes of the past, straying away from achieving justice for those who continue to live with these consequences; implying that there is nothing unjust about these behaviors. On the contrary, potential benefits of using the Nazi medical texts may be argued to outweigh some of the ethical concerns. Possible valuable information in the texts could provide a solution in medical care or medical research. If the information is not utilized, there can be limitations in the medical field and deprivation of the best possible care to patients. For example, a surgeon used the Pernkopf’s atlas, originating from the Nazi experiments, to decompress the saphenous nerve due to intraoperative difficulty to help the patient become free of pain (Yee et al., 2019, 860-867). A utilitarian viewpoint advocates for happiness and no harm to others. From a simple utilitarian viewpoint, the surgeon made the correct decision since the sacrifice of the Pernkopf’s atlas’ origin, an anatomy book created from Nazi research, has resulted in patient benefit. Due to patient benefit, this also satisfies the ethical principle of benefice, the obligation to act in favor of people’s benefit. However, a more
humans, causing scientific results from immorally conducted experiments to be tainted with possibly fraudulent or inaccurate data. The scientific competence of the doctors must be evaluated to determine how trustworthy the data is, since an incompetent doctor is likely to produce inadequate results. A Nazi doctor, Doctor Heissmeyer, performed tuberculosis experiments despite his complete ignorance in the field of immunology, particularly bacteriology. Such an experiment demands crucial expertise regarding tuberculosis diseases, which Doctor Heissmeyer did not possess. According to his own admission, Doctor Heissmeyer was not concerned with curing the patients from tuberculosis and did not believe his experiments would produce therapeutic results; Doctor Heissmeyer hoped for fatal outcomes in his patients (Cohen, n.). The tuberculosis experiment is the complete opposite of utilitarianism, due to the intentions of causing the greatest amount of harm to humans. Experiments conducted in such an unethical manner and with incompetent medical expertise should not be considered scientifically valid for future use. Similarly, the Nazi Dachau hypothermia experiments are controversial in their scientific validity. Generally, some people believe that the evidence is useful, arguing that it is useful due to the inability for the same results to be produced using an ethical method. However, the experiment was conducted without proper experimental protocol, entailing the use of inadequate methods and inconsistent execution, leading to scientifically invalid data. After thorough review of the Dachau data, the data is scattered with inconsistencies, evidence of data falsification, and indications of fabrication, prompting the conclusion to be unsupported by the presented facts. The director of the experiment is also the perfect example of ad hominem, which is when an argument is rejected due to doubts in competence because of a person’s personal attributes, such as the director’s well known traits of dishonesty and deception in his professional and personal life (Berger, 1990, 1439-1440). Moreover, the Dachau hypothermia experiments contain all the aspects of scientific fraud, thus, making the data scientifically invalid. Even
putting the ethical issues aside, the data is invalid based purely on scientific grounds as well. Due to breaching experimental data collection protocols, the Nazi data obtained can not serve a useful purpose in saving human lives or advancements in medicine. The physical state of the experiment victims is also an important consideration when analyzing the data since the victims are not a true representation of the population. Many of the victims do not represent the true population since they were malnourished, usually sick, and performed tests on young children who most likely had undeveloped immune systems. The group of people tested on were also usually from the same racial group, thus, a researcher cannot experiment on one group of people and expect universal results (Dyal, 2001, 13). An important component of experiments is the ability to recreate them. Based on the physical states the victims were in, it is almost impossible to replicate the conditions, rendering the experiments invalid. Using results from a population that is in such inhumane physical condition is not representative of the majority of the human population, causing complications when using the data to treat adequately healthy humans. In conclusion, the unethical collection of data in the Nazi experiments resulted in scientifically invalid data due to scientific incompetence, scientific fraud, and unrepresentative population. The use of scientific material originating from the Nazi experiments can cause a series of short and long term consequences in healthcare and society. Short term consequences occur soon after an event occurs while long term consequences accumulate over time. By using the Nazi’s medical data, a possible consequence is an increase in future unethical experiments on humans becoming more common. For example, in 1932, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis began in the United States, but continued even after the Nazi experiments stopped. The Tuskegee experiment violates the ethical principles of autonomy, non-maleficence, and justice by withholding information to make autonomous decisions, harming participants by withholding treatment, and testing only on African Americans.
to its use. In conclusion, the use of material originating from the Holocaust can cause short and long term consequences, such as promotion of unethical experiments, negative effects on victims and medical credibility, and guilty conscience. When conducting experiments, a threshold for unacceptable behavior must be set to prevent unethical atrocities, such as the Nazi experiments. When there is no threshold for unacceptable behavior, physicians may think they are allowed to perform extremely unethical studies. A clear example is the Nazi experiments. Prior to the Nazi experiments, there were no explicit guidelines for ethical experiments. This led to atrocious crimes against humanity, such as infecting prisoners with infectious diseases to observe the progression on the human body including typhus, tuberculosis, and syphilis. Some of the experiments were not even conducted with the purpose of gaining scientific knowledge, but purely for the purpose of torturing and killing the victims (Wilson, 2011, 4-5). The Nazi experiments highly violate Kantian ethics by treating prisoners in the concentration camps as things, not humans. By not using the data, it supports the usage of experimental conducts as a threshold for unacceptable behavior. In addition, the aims of research are promoted, such as knowledge, honesty, and error avoidance, when there is a threshold for unacceptable behavior when conducting experiments. For example, forbidding fabrication, falsification, or misrepresentation of data reduces error and promotes honesty. In addition, respected human rights helps data better represent the human population (Erol, 2017, 97). Thus, having a code of ethical conduct to prevent unacceptable behavior produces more reliable results without inhumane treatment to participants. Thirdly, ethical standards of research promote moral and social values in individuals and society, as “ethical standards promote values such as social responsibility, human rights, animal welfare, compliance with the law, and public health and safety” (Erol 2017, 97-98). Promotion of such morals allow for ethical experiments and scientific valid evidence for future use, without causing controversy over its use. In conclusion, there is a
threshold of unacceptable behavior that is already evident by the creation of ethical experimental conducts to prevent further unethical experiments while creating scientifically valid data. Overall, the use of medical evidence obtained from terrible atrocities and human rights violations, such as those from the Holocaust, is unethical due to violation of ethical principles, short and long term consequences, scientific validity, and threshold for unacceptable behavior. The use of unethical evidence causes distrust in doctors and medical research, both of these serving as a proxy for trust, expertise and hope when people are in need. If trust is lost, hope is lost in people as well. Thus, it is unethical to use evidence from inhumane experiments, for the sake of the future of society.
Post, S. G. (1991, September 1). The echo of Nuremberg: Nazi data and ethics. Journal of
Medical Ethics, 17 , 42-44. 10.1136/jme.17.3-a
Wilson, S. (2011). The nazi research data: Should we use it? CedarEthics Online, 12.
digitalcommons.cedarville/cedar_ethics_online/ Yee, A., Zubovic, E., Yu, J., Ray, S., Hildebrandt, S., Seidelman, W. E., Park, R. J. A., Grodin, M. A., Coert, H., Brown, D., Kodner, I. J., & Mackinnon, S. E. (2019, May). Ethical considerations in the use of Pernkopf's Atlas of Anatomy: A surgical case study. Science Direct, 165 (5), 860-867. doi/10.1016/j.surg.2018.07.
Ethics Essay (84%)
Course: Ethics in Health Science (2610)
University: The University of Western Ontario
This is a preview
Access to all documents
Get Unlimited Downloads
Improve your grades
