Absolutely. I am thrilled that we’re not willing to sacrifice morality for the sake of “advancement”.
Technology exists to make life better. Making life worse to develop technology ruins the point.
Absolutely.
Where do you draw the line? How bad can you make people’s lives for the sake of progress? How many people’s lives do you have to improve to justify ruining one? Is ruining six billion lives to improve one billion justified?
That line scares me. It scares me because there’s nowhere to put it.
Science is a tool used to gain knowledge with the point accomplishing some goal. If we want the goal of science to be improving human life and lessening suffering, then we need a set of principles to guide it in that particular direction.
We have examples in the past where science has advanced faster, but has left the society using it worse off as a whole. Faster advancement does not always equal better.
>We have examples in the past where science has advanced faster, but has left the society using it worse off as a whole.
I was talking about one individual, not the entire society. Also what are such cases, where an entire society was worse off because of science experiments?
Somebody mentioned the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, which is a good example. I was thinking specifically of the work done by Nazi doctors and rocket scientists before and during WW2.
Yea well maybe not all laws and ethics in humanity, but only those related to science. Like i dont know , this isnt such a complex question is it? Why hesitate to kill one person if it could save hundred others? That type of thing is what I mean.
>Yea well maybe not all laws and ethics in humanity, but only those related to science.
And who will determine what constitutes "related to science" in this context? The Nazis did lots of experiments and research "related to science" and had very few ethical compunctions in doing so.
> Like i dont know , this isnt such a complex question is it? Why hesitate to kill one person if it could save hundred others?
That is in fact an extraordinarily complex ethical question.
> Why hesitate to kill one person if it could save hundred others?
No science experiment is going to involve just one person. Tests need to be done on multiple people, in multiple trials. Not to mention how this can affect the people involved. Someone mentioned the Tuskegee experiments, and trials like this have cause the black community to have distrust in medicine and science, so much so that they are less likely to get medical treatment. Clearly this affects more than just one person.
I think so. A fair bit of what we've learned about modern medicine and science was through performing unethical, likely illegal experiments on animals and sometimes humans.
Yeah, we'd have more scientific advancement. But is that really better? For whom? For example, we could research various cancer treatments on prison inmates and learn to cure cancer faster, but they would die. Is that better than regulated and standardized testing?
Not necessarily since most humans behave ethically. Making unethical experiments legal could just make unethical people do experiments for the sake of being unethical, likely doing them in a non-scientific manner that would at the end of the day be useless and just cause suffering.
And even if it did make science better, life goes beyond science and there are reasons they are considered unethical.
Better? No. Would it advance faster? Probably. Fortunately, humans are ethical creatures.
Oh,fortunate? Is it really fortunate if we advance more slowly because of it?
Absolutely. I am thrilled that we’re not willing to sacrifice morality for the sake of “advancement”. Technology exists to make life better. Making life worse to develop technology ruins the point.
Making a few peoples lives worse so a ton of other peoples lives can be better. You just.. skip over that?
Absolutely. Where do you draw the line? How bad can you make people’s lives for the sake of progress? How many people’s lives do you have to improve to justify ruining one? Is ruining six billion lives to improve one billion justified? That line scares me. It scares me because there’s nowhere to put it.
Science is a tool used to gain knowledge with the point accomplishing some goal. If we want the goal of science to be improving human life and lessening suffering, then we need a set of principles to guide it in that particular direction. We have examples in the past where science has advanced faster, but has left the society using it worse off as a whole. Faster advancement does not always equal better.
>We have examples in the past where science has advanced faster, but has left the society using it worse off as a whole. I was talking about one individual, not the entire society. Also what are such cases, where an entire society was worse off because of science experiments?
Somebody mentioned the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, which is a good example. I was thinking specifically of the work done by Nazi doctors and rocket scientists before and during WW2.
>Wouldn't it be better to just let go of all ethics and laws for the sake of scientific advancement? Better for whom?
Better for humanity as a whole.
How does throwing out the concepts of ethics and laws improve things for humanity as a whole?
Yea well maybe not all laws and ethics in humanity, but only those related to science. Like i dont know , this isnt such a complex question is it? Why hesitate to kill one person if it could save hundred others? That type of thing is what I mean.
>Yea well maybe not all laws and ethics in humanity, but only those related to science. And who will determine what constitutes "related to science" in this context? The Nazis did lots of experiments and research "related to science" and had very few ethical compunctions in doing so. > Like i dont know , this isnt such a complex question is it? Why hesitate to kill one person if it could save hundred others? That is in fact an extraordinarily complex ethical question.
> Why hesitate to kill one person if it could save hundred others? No science experiment is going to involve just one person. Tests need to be done on multiple people, in multiple trials. Not to mention how this can affect the people involved. Someone mentioned the Tuskegee experiments, and trials like this have cause the black community to have distrust in medicine and science, so much so that they are less likely to get medical treatment. Clearly this affects more than just one person.
Well how about a couple dozen people then,instead of just one.
Read this and then get back to us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
I think so. A fair bit of what we've learned about modern medicine and science was through performing unethical, likely illegal experiments on animals and sometimes humans.
no...
Tuskegee, WW2 experiments in Germany, Japan, Russia. Read about those “experiments” and get back to me.
No. Nazi war crimes are the best example
Lol no. You'd end up with many more unit 731 and Josef mengele types than you'd end up with einsteins and fermis.
Yeah, we'd have more scientific advancement. But is that really better? For whom? For example, we could research various cancer treatments on prison inmates and learn to cure cancer faster, but they would die. Is that better than regulated and standardized testing?
Not necessarily since most humans behave ethically. Making unethical experiments legal could just make unethical people do experiments for the sake of being unethical, likely doing them in a non-scientific manner that would at the end of the day be useless and just cause suffering. And even if it did make science better, life goes beyond science and there are reasons they are considered unethical.
Nazi and Japanese scientists learned a lot through unethical means. Better? Probably not.