During Friday’s lecture, I began to revisit a question I have been pondering ever since I learned about the holocaust and the horrific medical experiments that they performed. As I was researching the experiments, I focused primarily on the work of Doctor Josef Mengele, who was nicknamed “the angel of death.”
Mengele, who was only 32 years old at the time, was the top provider when it came to supplying people for the crematoria and gas chambers. He was notorious for sending blocks of people to be gassed for reasons like lice.
Auschwitz gave him a full license to kill his subjects and Mengele took full advantage of this. He performed experimental surgeries that were not performed with anesthesia, sex change operations, removal of limbs and organs and much more. He focused on identical twins so he would be able to compare results. However, and what I find to be the leading argument against using his research, his work was specifically aimed to demonstrate the inferiority or Jews and Roma biologically.
He would also document physical oddities, and harvest them (tissues and body parts). This proved to be lethal, and if it was not, the victim was murdered in the name of post-mortem examination. All of Mengele’s work has not been published and many were kept in secret meaning that we do not know everything that has happened to his victims other than the accounts from the survivors.
After learning about this, I wondered whether it would be ethical to use his work knowing that it was performed in horrific ways to unwilling subjects. But if we did use it, the research would contribute to the progress of medical research. Do we not use the information because of the way in which it was gained, or do we use it because if we did not, these people went through these traumas in vain?
The same ideas were brought up when Steintrager lectured about Kant and his personal life. Similarly, Kant was very intelligent and was able to contribute to the community in ways that people had not been able to before he shared his ideas. At the same time, however, he was also a product of his time period. He sprinkled his works with racism and sexism along with general hypocrisy. But can we dismiss his brilliance due to a collection of negative traits?
To answer my long-pondered question, I do not think we can dismiss any of the information. With the good, we must take the bad. When reading Kant or when reviewing the works of Josef Mengele, I believe that we must approach with caution. We must understand that the sexism in Kant’s work and the true horror in Mengele’s work is unacceptable. At the same time, however, we can gain from their research and positive thoughts.
letsgettothecore 
That is a very interesting thought, one that I’ve been contemplating recently, since hearing that Milo Yiannopoulos is coming to UCI tomorrow to promote cultural appropriation and to offend the dignity of everyone who is not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male. Although I vehemently oppose everything Milo stands for, he does have every right to express his opinion, as do all the people who are going to the event. The ability to at least acknowledge and understand others’ ideas and their approaches, even if you don’t agree, is something we must all learn in order to be educated. If we ignored the opinions we didn’t like, we would be stuck in a perpetual loop of ignorance. As Kant said, we must have the freedom to discern for ourselves what we want to believe about the world, and part of that is by understanding.
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While I was listening to Steintrager’s lecture on Kant, the same thing stood out to me. I’m sure everyone in that room was having an inner-battle between right and wrong, and how we should approach such a situation. I like the comparison between Kant’s clear-cut sexism and Mengele’s unethical medical procedures, and it leads me to ponder the lengths that humans will go in order to attain information and make use of it, acquired ethically or not. I agree that those who decide to pursue this information should indeed proceed with caution and try to take all mindsets (especially those of the era) into consideration. With this in mind, it’s only so often that we acquire information that is impartial to the author and it’s readers, which is an issue that won’t be resolved until the “bad” is placed on the back-burner and we begin to focus on the useful.
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Ethics versus Science… In one of my favorite books, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, the main character is an author recording stories and information on a (fictional) scientist who created the atomic bomb that completely wiped Japan. In a letter from the son of the scientist to the main character, it read: “After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America
could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to
Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what
Father said? He said, ‘What is Sin?'”
“Science has now known sin” with the response “what is sin?” has resonated in me since I read the book my junior year in high school. Unfortunately, I do not have any answers. Of course I find any inhumane treatment against a human being, even for the name of science, to be inexcusable. Then there’s the rebuttal of “But what if this… but what if that…” and then it no longer is black and white, and the whole issue that pains me becomes gray and requires so much more consideration. This is still a question I battle with during my internal monologues. I don’t think I’ll ever have a definite answer, and I don’t think we’re supposed to. Removing discrimination and hate as motives (WHICH ARE IMPORTANT FACTORS TO CONSIDER WHEN TALKING ABOUT MORALS AND SCIENCE), it seems as science advances, our humanity begins to fade.
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