| (Please note that what I'm trying to do here is to discuss the "higher concept" of good/evil relatavism by examining the example presented - I think the Nazis are the poster boys for Bad Behavior, and it's one of the few times when warfare was justified and necessary. Those folks needed to be stopped by any means necessary and at whatever cost required)
What makes this particular set of medical experiments "evil" compared to other medical experiments?
- Performed without consent of the participants
- Carried out without compassion
- Caused unnecessary pain and suffering
- Violated the accepted medical ethics codes of the majority of the human population
Most of these points can be related to animal experiments that are still going on now: does that make pharmecutecal companies "evil"?
If the same experiments were performed on willing volunteers (changing the context of the act), would that have made it "not evil"?
The issue with the Nazis and their treatment of their victims was that they no longer treated a group of people as people - they were treated like animals, and not very well liked animals at that.
And guess what? The Nazis who performed these experiments did not think that they were evil, or even amoral. They thought they were doing something good, that benefitted themselves, or they wouldn't have done it. The rest of the world, however, had a different moral outlook, and said "this is wrong, and we cannot sit by and allow it to continue" and had to make war to stop them (however, the rest of the world didn't get outraged right away - it was when the Nazis started attacking other groups outside their borders that started all the fighting).
|