Wow. I was initially surprised that Dombrowski chose Nazi documents to use as examples in this chapter, but they certainly make a good case for being ethical in technical communication. I appreciated his early reasoning on why such arguments are made, and I read the chapter without offense. I like this quote especially: “ …Some of the values embedded in the scientific frame of mind can be carried to extremes—with terrible consequences” (Dombrowski 82). The scientific frame of mind he refers to is something I can relate to, as I’ve been struggling to adopt a different writing style in this class.
Origination, Dissemination, and Use of Information
Nazi Past
- Nuremburg trials—Nazi leaders put on trial for war crimes against civilians and soldiers
o Shocking revelations—institutionalized abuse of people in the name of scientific/medical research
o Emotional distance—victims of abuse not human
- Genocide—term created for the Nazi crimes against humanity and Jewish people
Controversy in the Present
Through their research, the Nazi’s actually did acquire useful scientific and medical information. Is it ethical to use their studies?
- Medical Specimens
o Skeletons and other medical specimens came from Nazi prison camps—quite obviously no consent
o Israelis vs. Germans—1989
- “Research” Information
o Nazi hypothermia experiments
o The New England Journal of Medicine (1990)—it doesn’t matter what they learned, they didn’t use scientific methods to obtain their results, the ethics issue can be ignored because the lack of science fails the experiment before it is to be called into question
Values in Nazi Medical “Science”
- Traditional View
o “The healer became the killer, and healing became killing”—what I take from this is that the Nazi’s lied their heads off and passed it off as truth, and that was okay
o Justified killing—It was legitimate because the establishment says it was? It seems to me that human life is not something governed by a regime, but absolute and concrete laws of humanity (Dombrowski does a smart thing here—he keeps saying “Lifton says” to reinforce that this is not his view)
o Euthanasia—“mercy killing”
o Inversion and evasion
- Nazi Antiscience
o Intrinsic inhumaneness and unethicalness of science—critics who perceive that Nazi’s took underlying issues in medical field to an extreme
§ Is science an enemy of basic human values? Uh-oh!
Research in the United States
- Nazi dilemma of ethics + law
- Inadmissibility principle—Nazi medical experiments, African-American patients in US in 1940s
Nazi Technical Memorandum
- Wow—chilling! Dombrowski asks some good questions on page 100—When do you first realize what the subject of the document is?
- I’d like to go over these in class and see what everyone thinks—talk about misleading!
Ethical Appraisal
Aristotle
Kant
Utilitarianism
Feminist and Ethics of Care
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