Nazi: Morality and Data Essay

During World War II, leading Nazi doctors performed sadistic human experiments and committed crimes against humanity. These doctors preformed medical experiments on prisoners against their will. These doctors were disguising these heinous crimes as research. The experiments were inhumane acts against all humans. They were morally wrong, but the data received is useful and is the only “good”(Moe 7) that has come out of these horrific crimes. Though the experiments were so horrific and immoral, the data gathered is still used to help advance medicine and has given us valuable information about the human species. How could these experiments be against human nature if they have benefited all humans at the expense of only a few? “Doctors from hell” (Appelbaum) is the commonly used epithet for the Nazi doctors to condemn them for their actions. But what is being said about the data they collected? Innovative, life saving, groundbreaking, these are words that are used to describe the data collected from the Nazi experiments. The same data that is commonly used as a stepping-stone in most research conducted in modern medicine. When is it convenient to view the data as morally justifiable? And when is it proper to use data that was collected from victims of Nazism? Does the use of the Nazi medical data support the actual experiments? This paper discusses the morality or immorality of the Nazi experiments and the data gathered from it. What dictates whether something is moral or immoral? Steven Pinker addresses this conundrum in his article “The Moral Instinct”. Pinker argues that “reassigning an activity to a different sphere, or taking it out of the moral spheres altogether, isn’t easy. People think that a behavior belongs in its sphere as a matter of sacred necessity and that the very act of questioning an assignment is a moral outrage” (Pinker p.52). Pinker argues that by examining our different moral thinking through the lens of these five moral spheres (harm, fairness, community, authority, purity), it may allow us not only to understand each other better, but also achieve more rational solutions to problems. Pinker’s argument relates back to the idea of the Nazi Medical experiments. The experiments seem to go against the five moral spheres and by trying to give them an assignment to a sphere will disrupt the balances of morality and will lead to ”moral outrage”. Unlike the medical experiments, the data is placed in the sphere of community and harm. Taking the data from those spheres would mean that you are endangering the benefit of the community and no longer helping prevent harm. The use of the data is seen as moral because it doesn’t hurt people but rather saves people. But by assigning the data to spheres that ultimately assigns the experiments as well. From Pinker’s argument about the spheres of morality, there doesn’t seem to be a way to moralize the data that derives from such immoral experiments without justifying and eventually moralizing the experiments themselves. The Nazi medical data is justified as being moral Pinker’s spheres of community and harm, but where is the morality of the experiments? The Nazi medical experiments are deemed unethical and immoral because they were conducted on unwilling participants. Though many were sacrificed, many more were saved. Many people during the time of the experiments supported the “follow-the -crowd” ethics and moralized the acts of the Nazis. Peter Singer outlined this “follow-the-crowd” ethics in his article “The Singer Solution to World Poverty”. He states “the kind of ethics [follow-the-crowd] that lead many Germans to look away when the Nazi atrocities were being committed. We do not excuse them because others were behaving no better” (Singer). During the morality of the experiments before was based on what everyone was doing, so it is safe to say that depending on the time period it was once safe to call the experiments moral. The experiments were in three

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