Welcome to Book Down, ladies and gentlemen, we're Book Down!
So my name is Associate Professor Justin Oakley and I'm the Deputy Director of the
Sense of the Human Bioethics at Monash University. I've been teaching bioethics
at Monash for the last 20 years and most of my students are senior health
professionals who are very interested in learning more about ethical theories and
frameworks to understand the kind of dilemmas that they encounter in their
work.
Well the Milgram experiment is a notorious example of an unethical
experiment on humans, particularly because of the sort of trauma that a lot
of the subjects in the experiment suffered and the lack of informed
consent beforehand to what was going to happen to them, what they were going to
be doing. It's also notorious as the beginning of a whole series of
experiments that have been done to try to understand more about how much your
character influences whether you do the right thing or the wrong thing and how
much of it is really just minor details about the situation.
Really one of the main ethical concerns is that the experimenters, so Stanley
Milgram in particular, used a lot of deception in order to get the subjects
involved to get them to do what he wanted them to do and so the subjects who
went into the experiment thought that they were doing a test on experiments
that looked at the effects of punishment on learning and they didn't
realize that they themselves would become the subjects, they were the focus of
the study rather than the person that they were trying to encourage to learn
these word association tests and so really one of the main concerns about
it was first of all you know at the level of deception involved but also the
fact that they suffered so much afterwards at the thought of what they
had done to another person. In some cases they thought they had killed another
person and they had no warning that they were to become the subjects of the
experiment and they might suffer this trauma afterwards.
No definitely not, since the Milgram experiments there's been a series of
research ethics guidelines that most countries have now which would prohibit
an experiment being done like this and although of course the aims are very
worthwhile to learn more about how much humans are obedient to authority the
concern these days with such an experiment would be first of all the
kind of deception that was involved where they weren't the subjects were not
told exactly what was being studied and what the purposes of the study were
and secondly the fact that as a result of what they did in the experiment the
subjects suffered you know much distress down the track and these days those
sort of experiments although sometimes they can be uncomfortable the subjects
are required to be warned that they might suffer distress afterwards.
I mean it's kind of interesting to look at the timing of the Milgram
experiments because by that stage there was in place what's known as the
Nuremberg Code after the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi doctors during World
War II and one of the pillars of that code is the importance of obtaining the
voluntary and informed consent from subjects and what that means is that if
you are asking someone to participate in an experiment that you need to tell them
about what the experiment involves and that you need to seek their consent on
the basis of that information to actually participating in the study that
doesn't completely prohibit the use of deception but again the subjects need to
be told what the study is for and the sort of role they are likely to play
and again be warned about any risks that they might suffer of harm or even
actually discomfort down the track.
Well I guess I'm a great fan of 2001 Arthur C. Clarke it's something that
already in high school and I love the movie. Also other science books I just
love books that tell the story of scientists really discovering something
important and so you know whether it be perhaps in medical science say the
discovery of things like penicillin or perhaps in social science as well for
example Gina Perry's book on the Milgram experiments it's just fascinating to
read the journey that the author takes when they actually discover something
for themselves or a writing a biography of a famous scientist who has come
across a ground breaking discovery.
