How can you easily quantify the aggregate when it may take from one victim to hundreds to achieve a positive outcome.
The usual paradigm of utility-maximisation seems to not apply here, or at least only apply very messily.Of course, the entire point of experimentation is the discovery of previously unknown information. Given that constraint, it doesn't seem to be the case that my usual model of thinking about moral questions is all that useful. Which implies I either need to alter the model of come up with a sufficiently reductionist account of my argument that it is internally consistent. [. . .]If your moral basis is rational (as opposed to super-rational, such as religious modes of thinking), then it stands to reason that more information ultimately leads to a superior decision-making process. Therefore, on the margin, human experimentation is almost a necessary bug of advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
Guess who decides that.
>implying we can't say anything objective about well-being
Human success/flourishing/well-being/whatever is non-arbitrary.
Well maybe not.
Quote from: eggsalad on January 27, 2016, 03:47:26 PMAre you implying that the world today would be better off without the forced and rapid individualization of Russia?This is a myth. Prior to the removal of Nicholas II, Russia had been following a relatively liberal course towards agricultural and commercial reform under the watch of ministers like Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin. The idea that the Soviets had a meaningfully positive impact on the Russian economy is largely false; almost all of the growth throughout that period is due to an increase in both available capital (and the replacement of that capital following the War) and the labour supply, with very little growth .
Are you implying that the world today would be better off without the forced and rapid individualization of Russia?
but rather that without them Russia wouldn't have been able to contest the Reich and history would be dramatically different as a result.
Quote from: eggsalad on January 27, 2016, 05:09:59 PMbut rather that without them Russia wouldn't have been able to contest the Reich and history would be dramatically different as a result.Soviet military strategy wasn't that different from Tsarist military strategy. It was basically composed of seeing individual soldiers as expendable, and victory through numbers. It was very much in the German interest in ~1916 to see the Leninists and Soviets take over Russia, and we of course have to remember that much of Hitler's early success was based on a non-aggression pact with Russia which was preserved until 1941.
Quote from: Fuddy Duddy II on January 27, 2016, 06:24:01 PMHere's my very perfunctory and not-well-fleshed-out opinion: Consent can be violated if the outcome is a guaranteed net positive. Testing people or animals for scientific purposes is almost always for the greater good. Therefore, I'd say yes, in 99% of cases.That's hypocritical of you.
Here's my very perfunctory and not-well-fleshed-out opinion: Consent can be violated if the outcome is a guaranteed net positive. Testing people or animals for scientific purposes is almost always for the greater good. Therefore, I'd say yes, in 99% of cases.
Quote from: Poopo No Pico on January 27, 2016, 04:37:54 PMWell maybe not.If it were non-arbitrary, it stands to reason that we cannot say anything epistemically meaningful about the state of human well-being.
Are we talking Nazi gas chamber stuff or innocuous traffic surveys? Clearly there's a spectrum that can't be answered with a yes or no. The only reason utilitarianism works for the military is because it's dealing with a volunteer service fighting enemy combatants; experiments on citizens a la MKULTRA are certainly unethical, and with no exceptions I'm aware of, largely fruitless.
How would you like to have the experiments the Nazi's were doing done to you or someone you care about?
But, it seems to me, if we're willing to accept some margin of error in pretty much any routine government function it's not particularly rational to consider how I would personally like it if I fell into the group poorly done-by due to said errors.
Quote from: BerzerkCommando on January 28, 2016, 04:40:47 AMHow would you like to have the experiments the Nazi's were doing done to you or someone you care about?QuoteBut, it seems to me, if we're willing to accept some margin of error in pretty much any routine government function it's not particularly rational to consider how I would personally like it if I fell into the group poorly done-by due to said errors.
Why are you equating adverse effects of these hypothetical experiments to 'some margin of error'?
pursue something designed to facilitate our making better-informed decision
Quote from: Meta Cognition on January 28, 2016, 11:10:49 AMpursue something designed to facilitate our making better-informed decisionScience isn't about getting as much information as possible
Quote from: Turkey Sanders on January 28, 2016, 09:46:24 AMWhy are you equating adverse effects of these hypothetical experiments to 'some margin of error'?I'm equating our mis-selection of individuals to be experimented upon as a margin of error. If we agree convicts should be the ones experimented on (originally Salad's point, I don't agree with it) then there has to be some flexibility when people are wrongly prosecuted. It doesn't seem particularly convincing that we should not pursue something designed to facilitate our making better-informed decision on the chance that just one wrongly-convicted individual could be subject to such experiments, and if you agree with that then the conversation changes to regard what margin of error is acceptable. The wider point regarding Commando's "How would you like it?" argument is that I don't find it particularly convincing; there will be people mistreated in any kind of society, and I think basing our values and political prescriptions from behind some Rawlsian veil of ignorance isn't particularly enlightening.
Quote from: Turkey Sanders on January 28, 2016, 11:20:53 AMQuote from: Meta Cognition on January 28, 2016, 11:10:49 AMpursue something designed to facilitate our making better-informed decisionScience isn't about getting as much information as possibleI would argue that that is the only purpose of science; hypothesis -> evidence -> theory -> repeat.Why would you think science was anything but that?
Quote from: Cadenza on January 28, 2016, 01:04:30 PMQuote from: Turkey Sanders on January 28, 2016, 11:20:53 AMQuote from: Meta Cognition on January 28, 2016, 11:10:49 AMpursue something designed to facilitate our making better-informed decisionScience isn't about getting as much information as possibleI would argue that that is the only purpose of science; hypothesis -> evidence -> theory -> repeat.Why would you think science was anything but that?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_ethics
Quote from: Cadenza on January 28, 2016, 01:04:30 PMQuote from: Turkey Sanders on January 28, 2016, 11:20:53 AMQuote from: Meta Cognition on January 28, 2016, 11:10:49 AMpursue something designed to facilitate our making better-informed decisionScience isn't about getting as much information as possibleI would argue that that is the only purpose of science; hypothesis -> evidence -> theory -> repeat.Why would you think science was anything but that?Because it just isn't. No reputable scientist designs an experiment to just gather as much data as possible; extraneous data is a hindrance to the scientific method, not an aid. A proper study or experiment should be focused, controlled for bias, and within the scope of a specific hypothesis. We see this from investment strategy to systems engineering -- more data is not at all correlated with higher success, and is often entirely unnecessary. Probability distributions exist because systems can be modeled very accurately without being perfectly analyzed (for instance, a random sample of 2,000 people is far more than is necessary to model the entire country).
Ethics is a question of philosophy/morality, not science. The very first sentence of the wiki article makes that clear; "applying ethics to science" not "applying science to science"
It really should go without saying, given that I'm talking about science, that I'm not referring to junk data, but useful statistically and scientifically valid information.But to make things crystal clear: Science is only about acquiring valid data that can confirm/disprove hypotheses so as to inform theories that allow for the collection of more data, repeat ad infinitum.
Modern, Eurocentric science is not that. Ethics may as well be a prerequisite.
Quote from: Poopo No Pico on January 28, 2016, 01:36:12 PMModern, Eurocentric science is not that. Ethics may as well be a prerequisite.Nobody said "Modern Eurocentric", the claim is that Science is not concerned with questions of ethics because the scientific method makes it very clear that that kind of thinking is optional. Presenting a case where that option was taken is just answering a question that wasn't asked.
But to make things crystal clear: Science is only about acquiring valid data that can confirm/disprove hypotheses so as to inform theories that allow for the collection of more data, repeat ad infinitum.
Quote from: Cadenza on January 28, 2016, 01:26:44 PMBut to make things crystal clear: Science is only about acquiring valid data that can confirm/disprove hypotheses so as to inform theories that allow for the collection of more data, repeat ad infinitum.This is a very odd and incomplete way of describing science, and I think you'd find that not many scientists agree with it.
Quote from: Cadenza on January 28, 2016, 01:45:23 PMQuote from: Poopo No Pico on January 28, 2016, 01:36:12 PMModern, Eurocentric science is not that. Ethics may as well be a prerequisite.Nobody said "Modern Eurocentric", the claim is that Science is not concerned with questions of ethics because the scientific method makes it very clear that that kind of thinking is optional. Presenting a case where that option was taken is just answering a question that wasn't asked.And I'm telling you that science has evolved from that old-fashioned definition.
1. defining a new term doesn't change the meaning of the old definition2. science does not give a damn about the age of an idea, only it's validity proven by experiment, that's what makes it science3. Dysgenic evolution is technically evolution, but you're bordering on misusing that world completely.
That is the very definition of the scientific method.
Is classified experimentation on humans morally permissible?
