Dombrowski p. 81-121

Should it make any difference to us as communicators how a particular body of information that we might communicate was obtained? How are ethics and values reflected in our language and in the format of our technical documents? Should the uses to which our information will likely be put influence our ethical judgment about the communication of that information?

• similar issues surround recent revelations about US research on the effects of radiation on humans in the decades just after WWII. The US EPA dealt with similar issues just recently.
• Talking point: how could anyone really determine what is ethical for others to do? is the US really justified in being the moral compass for other nations when we too have committed moral atrocities?
• The lesson of these examples is that an excessive emphasis on the values of technical objectivity (as well as scientific), technical excellence, or technical expediency can sometimes mask vital ethical issues. Some of the values embedded in the scientific frame of mind can be carried to extremes-with terrible consequences.
• Of particular concern are the emotional disengagement of the researcher from the human research subject, the great power and control differential between them, and the implicit superiority of the researcher by which the subject is deliberately kept in the dark about what is really going on.
• Technical communicators and the technical documents we produce are not as ethically neutral as we might think.
• All too easily the narrow, instrumental values of technical expediency or technical excellence can rise to the forefront and be taken as the only relevant values in a given situation.
• There is a need to examine how information originated in order to fully understand all its ethical dimensions.

Origination, Dissemination, and Use of Information: ethical considerations apply not only to the document itself or its content but also to how the informational content was obtained and how it likely will be used.

• objectivizatoin (the excessive and inappropriate treatment of people as objects), impersonalness, and emotional disengagement are key values in Nazi medical science. These values are commonly attribution to modern technology too.

Nazi Past: scientific study in Europe and America has been closely scrutinized to prevent anything remotely like the Nazi pseudo-research from ever happening again. For that reason, in our universities today all scientific research involving people as research subjects has to be reviewed by "human subjects" panels.

Controversy in the Present: In recent years, a new outcry has arisen in several different forms about Nazi "scientific" information and other information collected unethically. This controversy has to do with medical specimens of human organs and with the dissemination and use of information obtained from unethical "research".

Medical Specimens: In the first form of recent ethical concerns that we will consider, scandals have arisen over human anatomical samples used in medical education.

• no informed consent, no possibilty of choosing otherwise, no legitimate reason for the execution, no possibility of protest-none of the familiar criteria that we consider basic human rights applied in these cases.
• for these critics, the means by which the samples were obtained taints them completely and should prevent them from being used for any purposes, regardless of any informative value they might hold.
• Talking point: would using the samples (and information) give the people's suffering some sort of purpose?

"Research" Information: publishing information from Nazi hypothermia experiments could be used in our own times to improve survival equipment.

• information should be used precisely in order to give some purpose to the victims' suffering as well as to relieve the suffering of those who might benefit from the information.
• however, the hypothermia research is entirely unscientific.
• one good result of the debate has been to force an open discussion in the medical journals about the relation of knowledge to the means by which it was obtained and the ends for which it might be used.
• New England Journal of Medicine won't publish reports of unethcial research, regardless of their scientific merit. Even consenting subjects must not be exposed to appreciable risks without the possibility of commensurate benefits.
• Jeremiah Barondess critiques the collusion of medical doctors and the entire German medical institution of the time in this "research". Assigning responsibility not just to individual "researchers" but to the whole medical establishment.
• Making them seem medically necessary and scientifically justified seemed to make them acceptable.

Values in Nazi Medical "Science":

Traditional View: many of these historical treatments take a sociological perspective.

• the glut of medical school graduates and their unemployment in society, the depressed economy, and the need for the Nazi regime to legitimate its racial policies were all important factors at work to medicalize the mistreatment of prisoners and patients.
• put simply, the healer became the killer, and healing became killing.
• Such a stark and absurd reversal of meaning, driven by contextual circumstances, has appeared in other situations revelant to technical communication. Rather than accept technical facts and factual statements as absolutely true, unalterable and incontrovertible, we should be aware of how readily they can be transformed by social circumstances.
• masked langauge also played an important role in communications about the medical killings in many ways, both externally to the public and internally to bureaucrats, military officers and doctors. allowed a broad range of interpretations that could conveniently serve one's own interests to try to demonstrate that one did not know what was really going on. examples-euthanasia and special treatment.
• In the Nazi regime, euthanasia was reinterpreted as putting someone to death in a way that was perceived as humane and on the basis of his or her unworthiness to live, according to the perceptions of the regime.
• Special treatment referred to medical killing, special in the sense of lying outside the mainstream of medicine as traditionally understood.

Nazi Antiscience: for some critics, these horrible activities done in the name of medical science are explained on the basis of the intrinsic inhumaneness and unethicalness of science itself.

• these actions thus show science to be essentially unethical and an enemy of basic human values. apparent indifference of science and technology to traditional values and social goals.
• because it is funadmentally dehumanizing, objectivization is potentially dangerous and should be restrained by traditional humanistic interests, which insist on open criticism and ethical appraisal.
• "objectivity run amok"-perverse fidelity to an obscene objectivity that ultimately found it possible to see all activities through the lens of expediency, scientific interest and efficiency.
• Talking point: how can this be rectified and prevented in today's world?
• many medical researchers, and a good deal of the general populace in Nazi Germany, were disenchanted with traditional empirical science, so disenchanted as to deliberately, specifically oppose traditional science.
• the regime could assert the primacy of racial purity and "Aryan" superiority over the disinterestedness of traditional science. the sick should die, and the strong and healthy should prevail and flourish, according to this perspective, and it was the duty of the new "science" to make the strong, healthy, and dominant even more so.
• attributing Nazi crimes to the nature of science itself is a serious mistake.

Research in the United States: though generally in this book ethics has been kept distinct from the law, the Nazi "scientific" information is one ethical dilemma in which legal principles have direct bearing.

• the inadmissability principle of criminal proceedings should be analogous to the Nazi "medical research" dilemma. It would be deemed inadmissable were it to be used in a criminal proceeding and therefore it should be deemd inadmissable in the scientific community as well.
• some critics disagree-scientific knowledge is valuable in its own right for its own sake, they say, with a worthiness that transcends squabbles over what is right or wrong, good or bad.
• scientific knowledge can be tainted by the means by which it was obtained even when human suffering is not involved-animal suffering.
• some of us will likely be involved in situations in which the means and ends could ethically taint technical information we are dealing with. this taint can be so strong as to warrant considering how, and even whether, the information should be communicated.
• Kant is relevant in a surprising way-the categorical imperative of ethics applies not only to all humans but also to any and all "sentient" beings, that is, all those capable of reasoned thought.

Nazi Technical Memorandum: technological values such as expediency and efficiency have come to completely dominate our society and reshape its entire value system. As a result technology becomes a goal or end in itself. it takes on an importance that is desirable in its own rights.

• the glaring absence of key words (the technical term for this is "ellipsis," words and thoughts evoked but not expressed).
• the document is "technically" excellent.
• Are we ethically obligated also to consider the context from which this technical information sprang and the uses to which this will be put? If we answer yes, we must consider the uses to which this will be put, then should we not also feel obligated to raise the same question for any and all other technical documentation we encounter?
• we need to consider the social, political, and cultural context in which this document appeared. cultural context was a very strong desire for technical excellence, for doing anything as well as it could possibly be done.
• in Nazi Germany, the distinction between means and ends became so blurred that what was technically possible came to be sought almost for its own sake.

Graphical Images: another way that underlying values found expression in technical and scientific information and documents was through Nazi race laws.

• part of the supposed rationale behind these anti-Semitic laws that institutionalized hatred of Jews was a science of heredity that asserted the superiority of one race over all others.
• science was made to serve politics.
• education and research in biological and medical areas came to be controlled by political leaders who would allow only politically correct theories to be taught and practiced and who would not tolerate opposition.
• religion, faith, and culture were made to appear to be biologically determined.
• the technician can think, "I am only following the chart," without thinking about the findings will be used, what purposes they are serving, or what will happen to the person being examined.

Ethical Appraisal:

• Aristotle: ethical condemnation of the Nazi regime. Some critics have expressed serious concern about the pragmatic thrust of Aristotle's ethics and politics, which emphasize expediency, technial excellence, and practical utility. On the question of whether technical information already on hand should be communicated and used, an Aristotelian perspective would likley urge that it be used.
• Kant: we should treat all other people as we would wish they would treat us under the same universal ethical rules therefore the persecution and execution of any other people, such as the Nazi regime is noted for, would be entirely unethical.
• Utilitarianism: no utilitarian theorist supposed such a radical difference in worth among people. though no one can say for certain whether the great theorists of the utilitarian perspective would ever have approved of the Nazi institutionalization of mass murder, it is highly unlikely. A utilitarian would be in favor of communicating and using the information from this time.
• Feminist and Ethics of Care: authoritarianism in pratically any form is criticized throughout the feminist literature. the Nazi regime, of course, is the prime example of authoritarianism. The feminist perspective therefore would find the Nazi regime and its activities to be completely unethical. The Nazis showed an absolutely uncaring attitude toward their victims and absolutely refused to maintain any relationship with them. This is shown in their treating people not as persons but as objects. Their actions were therefore utterly unethical. A caring concern for those now living would require us to communicate and use this information.

Conclusion:

• The ethical burden does not lie solely with us, of course, instead of with subject matter experts and end users. It only means that the ethical involvement of these others does not entirely relieve us of an ethical burden, too.
• The manner in which information is communicated has significant ethical implications too. This includes not only the language but also the absence of language, the voice, the organization, the purpose and the values at work behind the scene in a communication.
• The objectivity, impersonalness, and emotional distance that we often find in technical and scientific investigations can at times be carried to extremes with devastating consequences.