The fact that human beings are termed as participants in a study and animals subjects demonstrates a lot. First, it indicates that human beings participate in the activities going on during the study and therefore willing to do the research. This alone warrants their fair treatment. Animals, on the other hand, are involved in the research whether they are willing or not. There is, therefore, a thick line between how human beings are treated and how animals are treated — this paper discusses two historical studies and how unethical they were with regards to Belmont's principles.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama. The subjects of this study were six hundred poor and illiterate African Americans who were suffering from syphilis. During the examination, subjects were diagnosed, and the reports from the diagnosis kept away from them. Later on, a cure for the infection was found, but the study still went on. Unfortunately, the participants were denied appropriate treatment and given fake ones instead. To make this worse, in some cases when participants were diagnosed with syphilis, researchers prevented their treatment, causing many of the participants to die of this controllable disease during the study. This is inhumane treatment and is against human rights. This study violated two of Belmont's principles. First, it failed to honor respect for persons since the medical researchers were required to obtain consent from the participants which they were unable to do. Secondly, the principle of beneficence was violated as the participants were not even informed of their results after diagnosis (Freimuth et al., 2001)
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Belmont's principle of justice is a double-edged sword. Individual justice implies that a physician or researcher is not allowed to administer a potentially beneficial treatment to a certain group of participants and offer a more harmful treatment to the group which seems abandoned. Furthermore, according to societal justice, study participants of any research should be selected randomly and fairly without considering gender, economic and social class.
Milgram experiment was carried out by Stanley Milgram of Yale University. The study focused on the conflict between obedience to prevailing authorities and personal conscience. During the study, the primary focus was on the Second World War and Nuremberg war criminal trials. Milgram's study is considered to be unethical since the participants might be harmed psychologically in case, they believe they are hurting other people. Beneficence in the context of this study would demand that the researcher should aim at minimizing harm to participants while maximizing the benefits. A significant part of the research violated this principle since it had marginal benefits to the society and many participants of the study were harmed. The harms exposed to participants included physical harm, psychological stress, and loss of confidentiality (Blass, 1991).
Human beings are accustomed to fair trial and treatment by both government authorities and their fellow human beings. This is well stipulated in the bill of rights in any constitution in the world. Cases of unfair or unethical treatment of human subjects during research are non-exceptional. Furthermore, the fact that participants of the research are doing so voluntarily to make the research a success makes it worse. For this reason, there is no justification for unethical treatment of human subjects during research or study. In most cases, research exposes participants to high health, psychological and physical risks which requires much attention by researchers.
References
Freimuth, V. S., Quinn, S. C., Thomas, S. B., Cole, G., Zook, E., & Duncan, T. (2001). African Americans’ views on research and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Social science & medicine , 52 (5), 797-808.
Blass, T. (1991). Understanding behavior in the Milgram obedience experiment: The role of personality, situations, and their interactions. Journal of personality and social psychology , 60 (3), 398.
