BF2S Forums The Ethics of Unethical Information

Dilbert_X wrote:

Not just set aside, wiped off the face of the Earth.  Rendered unusable.  Whatever.  There is no scientific advance that can't be gotten morally and ethically if given enough time to find the right method.

But if its already been done why repeat it by another means?
By all means dissolve the perpetrators slowly in acid, but accept the data and publish where it has come from.

Ok, I can go with that.

One condition - NO resulting product, service, or work of art based in whole or in part of that data shall EVER be used to create profit for the user.

GorillaTicTacs wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

Not just set aside, wiped off the face of the Earth.  Rendered unusable.  Whatever.  There is no scientific advance that can't be gotten morally and ethically if given enough time to find the right method.

But if its already been done why repeat it by another means?
By all means dissolve the perpetrators slowly in acid, but accept the data and publish where it has come from.

Ok, I can go with that.

One condition - NO resulting product, service, or work of art based in whole or in part of that data shall EVER be used to create profit for the user.

Do you know what the ultimate irony to that is?

The very journal that publishes articles citing such data turns a profit.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Journals don't make a lot of money, after paying costs and staff salaries theres usually not much left.

In the case where the journal publisher is part of a larger publishing company, they do turn a profit.  I am not addressing not-for-profit publishers.

This topic is silly. If anything you would be honoring the victims by giving their suffering meaning.

That was an act of war conducted by one sovereign nation on another,

I disagree, it was an unnecessary act in the closing moments of the war, when Japan was already finished.
To drop one bomb was very nearly justifiable, but not quite. To drop two was totally unjustified and unforgivable.
The US was achieving much the same effect with saturation bombing - it was an experiment to see the effect the bombs would have and to scare the Russians.

and the fallout was an unintended consequence.

It was well known beforehand there would be significant radiological effects and there would inevitably be severe consequences, there was no way of knowing exactly what they would be until they tried it.
Its easy to argue the whole thing was an open air experiment on civilians - men, women and children - conducted by the US Army.

The Nazi's did their studies intentionally against prisoners.

The first two nukes were intentionally dropped on many thousands of civilians. Pot-Kettle?
Its possible to argue, the Nazis subjects were lined up for a horrible death anyway, why not use their deaths for the betterment of mankind?
The US ideology was it was better for two hundred thousand Japanese civilians to die than the same number of American soldiers (when actually they probably wouldn't have).
I wouldn't support either ideology when there are better alternatives.

I don't know.
Knowingly condemning 100,000 civilians to agonising deaths which will take months and years seems pretty sadistic to me.

I mean that the main purpose of the bomb was not to produce fallout, but was to save American lives.

The main purpose of the Nazis research was not to kill people but hopefully save good Aryan lives.

And if a nation doesn't want to get bombed in a war, they shouldn't start a war.

Correct, but when they started the war they wouldn't have reasonably expected to have their citizens used in gruseome experiments, or vapourised to send a political message to the Russians.

SenorToenails wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

I don't know.
Knowingly condemning 100,000 civilians to agonising deaths which will take months and years seems pretty sadistic to me.

I mean that the main purpose of the bomb was not to produce fallout, but was to save American lives.

The main purpose of the Nazis research was not to kill people but hopefully save good Aryan lives.

And if a nation doesn't want to get bombed in a war, they shouldn't start a war.

Correct, but when they started the war they wouldn't have reasonably expected to have their citizens used in gruseome experiments, or vapourised to send a political message to the Russians.

Experimenting on Jews would stop direct Aryan combat deaths?  I see what you are getting at, and I reject it.  I don't think the US military has even exhausted the supply of purple hearts they ordered in preparation for the ground war in Japan, the number of casualties expected was so enormous.  And judging from the Japanese stubbornness in island hopping, there would have been massive casualties on both sides.  Sure, the atomic bombs were terrible ways to die, but the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities was almost if, not as, bad. 

And I maintain that the usage of atomic weapons was not a giant human experiment.

This "historical urban legend" about the a-bomb forcing Japanese surrender needs to die a slow and torturous death.

In a 1986 study, historian and journalist Edwin P. Hoyt nailed the "great myth, perpetuated by well-meaning people throughout the world," that "the atomic bomb caused the surrender of Japan." In Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict (p. 420), he explained:

The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving 15 million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Hirohito's realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve "unconditional surrender" that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan's surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day.

In a trenchant new book, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Praeger, 1996), historian Dennis D. Wainstock concludes that the bombings were not only unnecessary, but were based on a vengeful policy that actually harmed American interests. He writes (pp. 124, 132):

... By April 1945, Japan's leaders realized that the war was lost. Their main stumbling block to surrender was the United States' insistence on unconditional surrender. They specifically needed to know whether the United States would allow Hirohito to remain on the throne. They feared that the United States would depose him, try him as a war criminal, or even execute him ...

Unconditional surrender was a policy of revenge, and it hurt America's national self-interest. It prolonged the war in both Europe and East Asia, and it helped to expand Soviet power in those areas.

General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific, stated on numerous occasions before his death that the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view: "My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender."

General Curtis LeMay, who had pioneered precision bombing of Germany and Japan (and who later headed the Strategic Air Command and served as Air Force chief of staff), put it most succinctly: "The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war."

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

The atomic bomb was tested in the presence of US military personnel. I guess we should chuck that data too.

Not the same

Dilbert_X wrote:

The main purpose of the Nazis research was not to kill people but hopefully save good Aryan lives.

Actually, it was the exact opposite.

The Jews that were tested on were considered lower on the cognitive ladder than rats. The only reason they were not gassed, shot, raped, and mutilated like the other million or so captives was that they were either lucky (and I use that term very loosely) enough to be a dwarf, a twin, or a woman between 20 and 40 so they can tested for sterility.

For all intents and purposes, the Nazi's main goal was to kill people. The research was merely an after thought of convenience.

TicTacs makes some excellent points, but after seeing what the Japanese did to China, Korea, and the Philippines, I'd say they more than earned our firebombings and the nukes.  They behaved even more brutally than the Nazies and experimented on our POWs.  They were absolute monsters, and while their civilians weren't personally involved in the actions of their military, they were still fair game because everyone else's were.

To be frank, the Japanese should consider themselves lucky we didn't wipe them from the face of the earth, because we easily could have done so via firebombing.  We called off those attacks eventually because they had very little air defense, and the fires were killing more people than we really intended to.

In short, we showed the Japanese mercy at a time when they had shown it to no one else.