Gottesstrafe said:
Thanks for quoting me out of context. I was saying that experimentation wouldn't/shouldn't necessarily be limited to purely medical testing. Nowhere have I explicitly said that these test would be used to determine why that particular crop of subjects were driven/predisposed to criminal activity, just that there were other types of experiments that they could consent to outside the realm of testing the latest vaccine or experimental gene therapy.
You've missed my point, that they're not a good sample for
anything which requires more than a warm body to pump drugs into.
Let me take a mild example. The Kinsey reports. Back when Kinsey was writing gay sex was considered a symptom of psychiatric disorder. Any trace of a gay community was either incredibly underground or limited to homophile groups who could get away with it because they tended to be socially elite people. The result, Kinsey took most of his sample of 'gay' men from mental asylums.
Result, when it comes to any discussion of sexual orientation beyond the purely theory the kinsey report is kind of toilet paper nowadays because anyone can see that there were many other factors (race, social class, self-selection) which determined whether someone would be in a mental asylum as a homosexual. I'm not saying he was a bad researcher, in all likelihood he didn't have a whole lot of choice, but it has utterly compromised the validity of a big chunk of his research.
Sampling isn't so hard, you draw the most representative sample you can based on the prime variable you wish to study. That should be your only consideration. Unless the prime variable is 'whether or not a person has ended up on death row' a sample drawn from people in that position is methodologically unsound.
Gottesstrafe said:
On the side, I was under the impression that 19th century criminology put more stock in the size of hands, height of foreheads, and protrusiveness of brow ridges than hair (as if all criminals were merely the descendants of some Cro-Magnon ancestor).
I was actually referring to scientific racism.
You're on the right track, but the 19th century ideas of what constituted a 'primitive' human being were a little different, to say the least.
Although, to be fair, it's not quite as revolting as screening women's vaginas for similarities to an extremely crude picture of what a black woman's vagina was 'supposed' to look like in order to tell if they were potential prostitutes or not. That happened to.
Gottesstrafe said:
... Which is clearly infringing on the CIA and U.S. Army's turf when it comes to unethical medical testing on prisoners, right?
I'm not a great fan of either of those organizations, but the one thing you can say about them is that they're only as bad as the political administration allows them to be.
Something about selling human lives for cold, hard cash also leaves a bad taste in mouth, above anything else.
TacticalAssassin1 said:
That man did not care whether consent was given.
And you evidently don't care about the conditions under which consent is given.
Don't hide behind consent like it's a defence, certainly not unless you're willing to countenance the other kinds of situations that same logic might apply to.
TacticalAssassin1 said:
He did not care if you were innocent or not.
Innocent of what?
Innocent of a crime which warrants the death penalty under the national law of the occupied nation they were currently in? Because if so, he and his colleagues were on pretty good information that they weren't.
TacticalAssassin1 said:
He did nothing to dull the pain.
Yes, and he justified it on the very good scientific grounds that it would effect the result of the experiment.
Do you give laboratory mice anaesthetic? No, you don't introduce more variables than you need. Otherwise, you may as well toss out the idea of getting useful results.
Why experiment on human subjects at all if you could get better results on animals and tissue samples?
TacticalAssassin1 said:
He did not care at all for his subjects whatsoever.
And the pharmaceutical companies who would be performing these experiments on convicts would?
If you care about them, why experiment on them at all? Face it, you want to experiment on convicts because you don't care about them and they're disposable.
TacticalAssassin1 said:
It's insulting to tell somebody that they have the morals of that man.
As it was meant to be.
TacticalAssassin1 said:
..and profit.