Bioethical Issues: Miss Evers' Boys
Introduction
Miss Ever’s Boys is a docudrama film that was produced by the HBO cable network. The movie explores ethical and social issues involved in the infamous Tuskegee Study. The study was about untreated black men with syphilis. The U.S. Public Health Service is said to have conducted a study among 600 black Americans from the years 1932 to 1972. This study was done in Macon County. This paper will exclusively explore the critique the Miss Ever’s Boys film using ethical frameworks. The ethical framework includes beneficence, justice, and respect for persons, duty-based ethics, virtue-based ethics, and the right’s-based ethics. The paper will identify how the above listed ethical principles were…show more content… However, the U.S. Public Health Service had an obligation to meet which was to find the cure of the disease without necessarily having to put people through so much pain for 40 years. One thing that was very sad was the fact that even after discovering that penicillin could cure syphilis; the U.S. Public Health Service did not give the sick black men. This led to the death of 160 people (B. Miss Evers Boys and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 2013).
Virtue-based ethics helps us in deciding the necessary actions to take depending on the kind of person we want to be. Here, the recognition of human dignity is very important. All humans have a right which is either positive or negative. The positive right means are those given to human beings while the negative rights are those human beings have and cannot be taken away from them. Human dignity was not considered in the movie “Miss Ever’s Boys”. The black men had a positive right which was respect of their lives. This positive right was taken away from them by the U.S. Public Health Service (Houser, 2012). It will be right to, therefore, say that the virtue-based ethics principle was not met in this movie.
Summary
There are certain roles healthcare professionals have in maintaining ethical vigilance. This includes devoting their time and resources to preparedness, reading the code of conduct to make sure that
