- Opening
- People are reluctant to make moral judgements about particular individuals in the past.
- It may be said that what the individuals did was wrong, or the institutions in which they operated were unjust, but no individual blame is cast.
- Retrospective moral judgements are made, but some people claim that it is wrong to do so.
- Why is it wrong?
- We cannot allow arguments for compensation if those arguments are grounded on the assumption that rights were violated.
- The position we take on retrospective judgement will effect what we do now.
- Moral progress is at stake.
- If we cannot judge the moral past by present standards, then we cannot say that there has or had not been moral progress.
- The Task of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experimentation
- The investigation of radiation experiments provides focus for the problem of retrospective moral judgment.
- The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was asked to evaluate the ethics of these experiments, and how to avoid abuses in the future.
- Some of the board members stated that we should not pass blame, but should instead learn from past mistakes.
- There is no problem regarding the validity of moral judgements.
- Refraining from making retrospective moral judgements does not come from the passage of time; the judgement is still valid.
- Cultural Ethical Relativism
- Skepticism about retrospective moral judgments is more generally known as cultural ethical relativism.
- The validity of moral judgments is relative.
- Moral judgments about the past are invalid if applied across cultural boundaries.
- Cultural ethical relativism denies that there are any human rights
- Human rights are rights we have simply by virtue of our humanity, regardless of differences in culture, and regardless of when or where we live.
- This denial invalidates contemporary, as well as retrospective, moral judgments.
- It is implausible to assume that there are no basic values that are shared across
otherwise quite different cultures.
- The Fernald School's "science club"
- The parents and the children were treated as mere means for other's ends.
- The parents and the children were exploited because their powerlessness made them vulnerable.
- There were general moral principles that were violated and, at the same time, accepted during the human radiation experiments.
- Prohibitions against:
- deceit
- harming innocent persons without their consent
- exploiting the vulnerable
- treating persons as mere means
- Some might say that, since the human radiation experiments occurred during the Cold War, otherwise compelling moral restraints may be relaxed.
- The "national security exception" was not invoked; instead it was the need to avoid legal liability and public outrage that the participants invoked to justify their deceptions and manipulations.
- Even if national security was a concern, there is little reason to conclude that this cultural difference removes blame for what was done.
- Culturally Induced Ignorance
- If the culturally induced ignorance is nonculpable ignorance, it can invalidate moral judgements made about the behavior of persons in another cultural setting.
- Culturally induced ignorance exists when enculturated beliefs and concepts prevent individuals from discerning what they ought to do.
- The ignorance is nonculpable when the individuals can not be blamed for not escaping the effects of such ignorance.
- When individuals are prevented from discerning what they ought to do due to such ignorance, it is then wrong to blame them for the actions they perform as a result of it.
- There are two distinct ways a person's ability to discern what he ought to do can be impaired by his enculturated beliefs/concepts.
- Morally relevant factual information may not be available in the culture.
- An individual may be morally ignorant.
- Culturally induced ignorance can undercut a valid retrospective moral judgment.
- Persons should not be subjected to extremely risky medical experiments without a reasonable prospect of significant benefit to themselves.
- Scientists working in the 1940's subscribed to this idea, but believed that the experiment involved only a minimal risk.
- The level of risk is false, but supported by the best scientific evidence of the time.
- Under such conditions, patients' rights were violated, but the scientists were not at fault.
- Given what they know, and all they could have known at the time, they acted responsibly, but their ignorance was nonculpable.
- In at least four groups of experiments, the advisory committee found no basis for arguing that factual error, culturally induced or otherwise, mitigates blame for wrongdoing.
- Children in the Fernald School Experiments were treated wrongly, regardless if their "science club breakfast" posed no significant risk of physical injury.
- The same holds true in plutonium injection experiments conducted at the University of Rochester, and University of California between 1947-1950 and total body irradiation experiments conducted at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
- In experiments at Rochester and California, sick individuals were subjected to radioactive substances without being informed of the nature of the procedure and without being told that the procedure was expected to yield no therapeutic benefit.
- In total body irradiation experiments, researchers were aware that the doses given were extremely risky, and knew that it brought a 1 in 4 risk of death. In none of these experiments can it be argued that factual errors that were widespread or uncorrectable at the time invalidated judgments of wrongdoing.
- Because false beliefs are prevalent in a culture does not mean that they are not remediable. If they are, we may be blamed for mainstreaming them. Culpable moral ignorance cannot exculpate one of the wrongs that result from it.
- The Evolving Requirement of Consent
- The most plausible argument for not blaming physicians involved in the experiments is that informed consent was not an accepted standard at that time.
- Informed consent is an institutional product, not a general moral.
- None of the four groups of experimenters even had bare consent, so the standard of consent is irrelevant.
- There are two modes of moral progress: compliance and emergence.
- The Hippocratic Tenet
- "First do no harm"
- Physicians may cause harm when it is expected to be of therapeutic value.
- The physicians that were part of the experiments knew that the patients would receive no therapeutic benefits, and so they caused harm (violating a medical ethic).
- The physicians are blameworthy.
- Why We Should Make Retrospective Moral Judgments
- Judgments of liability and prevention go together.
- Persons will know that they are going to be held accountable for their actions; and will deter wrongdoing.
- We should make judgments of individual responsibility about past actions, only if there is sufficient evidence.