Fred: Just a note of clarification. The question isn't whether the research being proposed is like that of Nazis. It's whether data obtained in unethical ways can be used to an ethical end, or (to draw on my Law & Order knowledge), it represents the fruit of a poisonous tree. I think you could say that in kind, human experimentation on high-altitude or vivisections are a different animal than illegal computer intrusion and theft of data (though criminal penalties in the US would likely be pretty similar). Nonetheless, the basic question is pretty parallel, I think: http://bioethics.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/30171/Steinberg.HumanResearch.pdf https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/naziexp.html - Alex (Ronin in training.) On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 9:56 PM, Fred Fuchs <fred@firesabre.com> wrote:
On 10/7/2015 10:06 PM, Charles Ess wrote:
Dear all, what a great question, and what helpful responses!
In the Stine Lomborg example: her taking the more demanding ethical step of asking for informed consent has the advantage of not only going further to ensure basic rights protections - and this, I'm pretty sure, on both deontological and feminist grounds; in addition, had this been an international project, the stronger ethical approach here would have simultaneously met the comparatively weaker demands of a consequentialist approach.
For discussion, to what extent would requiring informed consent affect sampling? Are there effective ways to deal with this?
Lastly, I'm wondering if anyone has developed analogies from biomedical ethics, i.e., of using medical data drawn from clearly illegal and unethical work (most notoriously, Nazi and Japanese experiments, but certainly also the infamous Tuskeegee Institute work - when they can be legitimately called that)?
The analogy using the Nazi case isn't a good one. The Nazi were not doing anything close to good science even by the standards of the day.
The discussion here presupposes that those using data obtained through hacking would be doing good science.
So, ultimately, this is not a proper or useful comparison.
Fred
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