Notes: Nazi Records pages 81-121

Notes “Nazi Records” (pgs. 81-121)
-deals with ethical issues about how technical information is obtained and how it will be used
-Nazi examples are used because they are stark examples and make seem important and less obscure because of the dire circumstances
-Scientific term used by Nazi researchers really meant racial abuse and mass killing
-It was not science for the sake of science but science for sake of racial supremacy

Organization, Dissemination, and Use of Information
-First view Nazi regime as historical fact
-Next review recent controversies about scientific and pseudoscientific information from the Nazi regime
-Then review the traditional view about the values behind Nazi medical sciences as an ethic of sorts driving its research
-Nazi key values are objectification of people, impersonalness, and emotional disengagement. Are these values of contemporary technology?

Nazi Past
-Nuremberg trial for the Nazi war crimes; these trials termed the mass killings of the Jews genocide
-To Nazis Aryan race was supreme
-Concentration camps were used to isolates the undesirables from the general populace.
-Trials revealed the horrendous institutionalized abuse of people in the name of scientific and medical research
-Today before humans can be used as research subjects, the research and testing has to be reviewed by human subjects panel.
-Panels include non-scientists who are in no ways connected with research or its uses.

Controversy in the Present
Medical Specimens
-Issue with use of human anatomical samples (tissues, organs, etc.) for research
-In Nazi regime, people put to death just because they were Jews and also sometimes just to acquire a particular sort of tissue sample.
-Protests come not with informative value of the samples but instead with the circumstances under which they were attained.
-No consent, no possibility of choosing otherwise, no legitimate reason for the execution, no possibility of protest
-Therefore these samples should not be used in German universities due to the way they were obtained.

Research Information
-Similar situation in the United States
-Wanted to use information from Nazi hypothermia experiments in which prisoners were exposed to cold to point of death in some cases
-Wanted to use this info to improve survival equipment, etc. but some opposed due to how information was obtained.
-Two arguments: Information should not be used for any purpose, and the other side is that the information should be used precisely in order to give some purpose to the victims’ suffering as well as to relieve the suffering of those who might benefit form the information .
-Some critics claimed that Germans used medicine fro killing rather than healing.
-This view abandons the Hippocratic oath with its pledge against doing harm and abandonment of the tradition of supporting health of the patient above all else.
-Scientists tried to give scientific legitimacy to the notion that the Aryan race was superior. They presided over executions.
-EPA of USA was considering using Nazi information about subjecting prisoners to phosgene, a poisonous gas.
-This gas can be used in industrial processes and the EPA was developing new standards for pollution regulation of this gas. The EPA did not end up using the information. It was not even scientifically qualified for use.

Values in Nazi Medical “Science”
Traditional View
-Physicians were the most represented profession of the Nazis.
-Healer becomes the killer-paradoxical inversion.
-Be aware of accepting technical facts as absolute truths, you have to be aware of how they can be transformed by social circumstances.
-Killing of mass amount of Jews was justified as necessary for the sake of racial health and purity.
-Also since there was a war there was a need to conserve food, water, etc for soldiers so killing was economically sanctioned as well.
-Doctors controlled killings. At first killed mental/physical disabled children.
-At camps separated by doctors on who should be gassed immediately and who should be retained for slave labor. People selected were termed “already dead.”
-Used masked language. Euthanasia historically means mercy killing of someone with a sound mind who is terminally ill in misery. Nazi interpreted as putting to death someone in a humane way and on the basis of his or her unworthiness to live.
-Children gassed were happy deaths b/c not violent.
-Also the term “special treatment” normally means treatment for special, severe, dangerous, medical problems. However, Nazis used special treatment to refer to medical killing, special in the sense of lying outside of the mainstream as medicine as it is traditionally understood.

Nazi Antiscience
-Nazis’ science was racism with an underlying inhumanness and unethicalness.
-They did reflect the impersonalness that is supposed to underlie all science but to the extreme.
-They also show sciences to be unethical and an enemy of human values.
-It had objectification of humans.
-Dehumanizing seems to go along with modern science and technology in the sense that it is typically practiced on the disadvantaged and less powerful- sick, weak, poor, and powerless.
- Nazi pseudoresearch in terms of science or technology requires some serious assumptions about the nature of science and technology. It assumes science and technology are indifferent
-Indifference equals unethical principles.
-Nazis were actually opposed to traditional science. They believed in the assertion of aesthetic and political values over mechanistic reductivism of traditional science.


Research in the United States
-If information is obtained illegally then it does not exist and cannot be used as evidence.
-The Tuskegee syphilis incidents (1920-40s), where African American patients were told that they were being treated when they weren’t. The doctors did this to conduct a scientifically detailed, long term study of the unimpeded progress of the disease.
-Many died.
-Not a coincidence that they were African Americans.
-Kant would be against Aryan race because he believed that any reasoning specimen would outweigh any argument based on racial identity. To him Jews, etc. should have been treated as ethical peers by virtue of their mind.

Nazi Technical Memorandum
-article on page 99
-technical expediency can mask goals for which technology is being used.
-People referred to as capacity, etc. The load is active and fear used can realized that it is people.
-Technically excellent document. Disguised the intense personal nature.
-Another document page 104.
-Document is explicit and scientific.
-Uses a scientific institute for collection place of skulls (like point of honor).
-“Induced death”
-Flat tone that is factual.
-Another document page 106.
-No compassion for castration and sterilization of people.
-Science valued over rights.
-Only talks about research not about ethics.

Graphical Images
-Darwin survival of the fittest.
-Science made to serve politics
-Illustrations to determine blood purity
-Subject like a lab animal in chart on page 110.
-Escapes values because just following along a formatted chart
-Page 111 image shows the measuring of the ear; images of the face rather than blood/marriage used here to display racism
-makes racism appear scientific and technical
-Distancing between technician and subject

Ethical Appraisal
Aristotle
-Would condemn the Nazis based on virtue and attitudes. Goodness/doing right thing
-he would use technical information already on hand. It could benefit others.

Kant
-Equivalence of all people, who are all rational beings.
-Treat as want to be treated
-Unclear on information already on hand

Utilitarianism
-Greatest good for greatest number
-Good done to Aryan group which is seen as more important, but no utilitarianists would see a radical difference in human worth.
-Would use the information already on hand because would be more useful than just sitting there.

Feminist and Ethics of Care
-Feminists find Nazis completely unethical
-Ethics of Care want caring relationships not value for this relationship so not in support of treating humans like objects (Nazis).
-Would use information already on hand.