From an ACX book review, highlights mine, that I read today:
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Beecher’s activism, Shannon’s CRCs, and the mounting level of Tuskegee-style scandals came together in a demand for the the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to create some official ethics report. Most ethicists demurred to dirty their hands with something as worldly as medicine; after some searching, they finally tapped Hans Jonas, a philosopher of Gnosticism. In retrospect, of course bioethics derives from a religion that believes the material world is evil and death is the only escape. I’m barely even joking here:
In his most compelling passage, Jonas attacked the belief that we must pursue cures for the diseases that ravage us, that we cannot afford to forego continued medical advances. To the contrary, he wrote, we must accept what we cannot avoid, and that includes disease, suffering, and death. What society genuinely cannot afford is “a single miscarriage of justice, a single inequity in the dispensation of its laws, the violation of the rights of even the tiniest minority, because these undermine the moral basis on which society’s existence rests.” He concluded that “progress is an optional goal.”
What miscarriages of justice was Jonas worried about? He was uncertain that people could ever truly consent to studies; there was too much they didn’t understand, and you could never prove the consent wasn’t forced. Even studies with no possible risk were dangerous because they “risked” treating the patient as an object rather than a subject. As for double-blind placebo-controlled trials, they were based on deceiving patients, and he was unsure if anyone could ethically consent to one.
…so, while occasionally I do wonder about the plausibility of the sheer quantity of low-hanging fruit available to be plucked by researchers operating on the Resplendent Exponential Vector model of ethical research (“we assume that anyone who can hold a citizen-shareholdership is eo ipso not a goddamn moron and that yes means yes”), occasionally does not seem to be today.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with an army of mantis-men.