At 3 Quarks Daily, Gerald Dworkin asks, “When does the fact that our current understandings and commitments were not historically present in an earlier period get people off the hook for behavior that, today, would be universally viewed as outrageous?”
It is easy enough to look back to the beginning of the century and see many ethical views that we now believe to be profoundly mistaken. Views about the rights of women, about who should vote, about separate but equal, about the rights of children to work in oppressive conditions, about the rights of patients in medical experimentation. To take only the latter, in 1963 researchers injected live cancer cells into nursing home residents, some of whom were Holocaust survivors, to determine whether the immune systems of sick individuals could identify and eliminate foreign cancer tissue as those of healthy people. Although the researchers were correct in thinking that no harm could come to their patients from the injection the fact remains that no consent was asked for.
It is much harder to look at out contemporary views and try to predict which of them will seem as mistaken 100 years from now as those above. Possible candidates include—eating meat, thinking of homosexuality as in some ways sinful or immoral, allowing the extremes of inequality of income and wealth that exist in contemporary America, allowing receipt of medical care to depend on income.
Read the full piece here.