Hello nerdaphiles! How is it? Splendid.
This week, we’re going to discuss ethics! Woo…
Once upon a time there was a group of nasty people called the ‘nazis’. Among other things, these ‘nazis’ conducted inhumane experiments on the prisoners of their concentration camps; leading to death, disfigurement and disability.
I’m aware this is a touchy subject but never fear, the nazis are gone…mostly. So here’s a picture of a cat to make everyone feel better.
Anyway, the goodies won and the nazis that committed these atrocities were put to trial, but what’s the point? These events led to the formulation of the Nuremberg Code (1947). Before then there had simply not been a discernible code of conduct for experimenting on humans. The Nuremberg Code particularly enunciated the need for voluntary informed consent, the need to weigh the pros of experimentation against the cons and the avoidance of suffering. This moulding of the post-World War II era was instrumental in balancing human rights and scientific endeavour. The Declaration of Helsinki (1974) built on the foundations of the Nuremberg Code to further refine the rules and most importantly to me (as a psychology student) has led to the formulation of the five general ethical principles of psychology, from which all other ethical rules sprout from. This is all well and good, there SHOULD be rules, especially in a field where someone fiddles with your brain. However, to me the ethical principles are not ALL sensible; they lead to problems and have the potential to hinder science. For the purposes of this blog I’m going to focus on principle A as, to be fair, I just find many of the other general principles to be too darn sensible to debate in an interesting way.
Lets have a look:
Principle A: Beneficience and Nonmaleficience
- Psychologists must safeguard the welfare and rights of both humans and animals
Beginning with humans, how far can we go with our research before we break rights and damage the welfare of a person?
In the world of medicine the boundaries of how far you can push a person are perhaps more apparent, but in the new world of psychology, such boundaries seem blurred. Can you tell when you’ve upset someone? How about when you’ve upset someone too much? How about when you’ve upset someone to the lengths of being unethical? Do these lines apply to everyone? Psychological processes are a tough enough thing to establish and measure without having ambiguous rules over how much harm you can dish out to a willing patient.
Could the safeguarding of people and animals be sciences loss?
Milgram’s experiment would not have happened had he wanted to do the experiment today, this would have denied us all the knowledge that under certain conditions people can be coerced into being killers. Naysayers may suggest that this would have come out anyway, however, Milgram found through a poll that senior psychology-majors thought that 1.2% of ‘teachers’ would inflict maximum voltage. So why would anyone do the research? Even if someone did decide to research this area no thought experiment is quite as good as pressing the KILL button. I should point out that several of the ‘teachers’ did endure psychological and in some cases physical damage, but follow-ups indicated these were not long-lasting.
SO should this experiment never have happened? The ‘participants’ at the time may have felt so, but have we as a scientific community gained from knowing that 65% on average (YES I KNOW IT’S ONLY ONE STUDY BUT IT’S STILL INTERESTING AND PERHAPS EVEN INDICATIVE) have the capability to kill when instructed. You may think that research like this is not useful to us as a society, nothing more than fancy trivia. But think how experiments like these expand our understanding of things, certain ‘unethical’ behaviourist experiments have led us to treatments which may not have been apparent had the research not been conducted in a world that thought all psychology was biological.
NOW animal rights, a hot topic with lots of potential for losing friends. Is it ethical to cut up a kitten? From a deontological point of you, no. But without animal research where would we be? Animal research has led us to countless discoveries, which have benefitted a huge amount of people. Here’s a pretty timeline to show you the scale of how much animals have helped us:
http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/your_health/timeline
We can all agree that in terms of psychological research animals already have less rights than us, seeing as humans are never (usually) imprisoned and killed. But does the fact that animals have no way to consent mean that we should automatically discount them as an experimental resource and should all testing be performed in vitro? Bateson formed the ‘decision cube’ to deal with the issue of pain versus certainty of scientific benefit, which really gets to the crux of the matter. Balances like this lead to less trials and less trials can only lead to decreased certainty, so is there any practical value in saying that animal pain is acceptable if you’re SURE that drug X will work? Deontologists among you readers may believe that animals have the same inherent value as humans, but ask yourselves:
Would you kill/psychologically damage 5000 animals to save 5000 humans?
Would you kill/psychologically damage 5000 animals to save 100 humans? (Yes, I realise that the amount of humans may actually be greater if we assume that drug X cures some kind of horrible disease, which would mean the ‘saving’ of unborn lives but stay with me!)
Would you maim/destroy your kitten to save your life?
Would you maim/destroy a fly to save your life?
These kinds of questions are fun and really test your moral fibre!
The fact is that animal research is very well controlled and that the ‘lowest life-forms’ are the ones to bite the bullet. Instinctively it is wrong to kill, but maybe it is just as wrong to passively allow people to die.
This is the longest blog ever and I’m deeply sorry about that, but ethics just riles me up so much that I want to vomit every thought in my little head on to the interweb.
Feel free to hate me.
Until the next time dedicated nerd-lingers!
psychopolemic 