06-05-2019, 09:14 AM
I mean, if we ask that question, we might ask what the ethics are of civilizations that have been built on slavery and prejudice. Basically, every society has benefited from the exploitation of others. You look at India to Africa, and closer to home--here in the United States--you find that the path toward the comforts of a lot of our now-modern civilisation are built along a path laden with examples of man's inhumanity to man.
Some bits of medical knowledge only became known because--and this is true, though I can't remember the specific example--the Japanese performed vivisection on certain prisoners of war that were held during the Second World War. The Nazis were but one stone in a larger narrative that paints a very ugly picture of humanity. I mean, the very land on which the United States and other counties in the Americas were built was just out-and-out stolen from the Native American after the Spanish and other Europeans caused a mass extinction and then actively took to slaughtering them.
None of it is ethical. Not a single bit of it. We just have to learn to live with certain societal guilt about these sorts of things. It is a sort of ill-gotten-gains where the people who might have protested the sacrifice forced upon them are dead. I would say that it isn't ethical--not for me--to use the medical advances that were brought about by Nazis experimentation. I wonder if it's like the "fruit from a poisonous tree" analogy.
Or maybe the good that has been wroght by these awful experiments are HaShem's way of turning evil into good and working to repair the world in some measure. I can only pray that this latter is so.
Some bits of medical knowledge only became known because--and this is true, though I can't remember the specific example--the Japanese performed vivisection on certain prisoners of war that were held during the Second World War. The Nazis were but one stone in a larger narrative that paints a very ugly picture of humanity. I mean, the very land on which the United States and other counties in the Americas were built was just out-and-out stolen from the Native American after the Spanish and other Europeans caused a mass extinction and then actively took to slaughtering them.
None of it is ethical. Not a single bit of it. We just have to learn to live with certain societal guilt about these sorts of things. It is a sort of ill-gotten-gains where the people who might have protested the sacrifice forced upon them are dead. I would say that it isn't ethical--not for me--to use the medical advances that were brought about by Nazis experimentation. I wonder if it's like the "fruit from a poisonous tree" analogy.
Or maybe the good that has been wroght by these awful experiments are HaShem's way of turning evil into good and working to repair the world in some measure. I can only pray that this latter is so.