Video Information

Lookup the video on YouTube using the following information-

Title: The Deadly Deception

Run Time: 56:27

Content Provider: YouTube; MNK HIST

Ideas have Consequences:

Deception in Research Writing Assignment. (15 pts)

Due: MWF (Mon. 2/12/18, by at the beginning of class) or TR (Tues. 2/13/18 at the beginning of class)

Length: Minimum 1-1 1/2 pages typed. Double Spaced.

Any outside sources must be included in an APA style reference page. Points will be deducted for lack of citation/reference of sources.

Option 1: Turn in a Typed, Double-spaced, response to the original option questions regarding research ethics and the video “The Deadly Deception”

Option 2: Turn in a Typed, Double-spaced, summary of the film “The Deadly Deception”. I.E., who, what, where, etc.

Option 1 Questions:

1) What did you think about the film? Why?

2) Do ethics (morals in professional fields) matter? Why or Why not?

3) In your own words, what is the Eugenics movement?

4) Do you think the methods of Eugenics are still practiced today? Why or Why not?

5) Do you think the assumptions (presuppositions), behind the beliefs, methods, and theories, about some races/classes of individuals being “lesser” people influenced the methods of deception in the Tuskegee Experiments? Why or why not?

6) Was the view that these were “lesser” people just about racism? Why or Why not?

7) Should deception be used in experimental research? Why or Why not?

8) Can ideas (scientific, unscientific, etc.) be neutral (Neither good nor bad, right nor wrong)? Why or Why not?

Quotes to prompt your writing (disregard or use as you see fit):

About the prominent assumptions in logic and theory used by researchers involved in the Tuskegee Experiments and movements like Eugenics:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871 edition, J. Murray, London), Part I, Chapter VI, p. 201

“The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

—Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race (1920), Chapter V, “The Wickedness of Creating Large Families,” available at http://www.bartleby.com/1013/5.html.

“Natural selection’s death rate of the jungle helped to purify the primitive race by destroying the weak and permitting only the strong to live and reproduce. Eugenicists hope to arrive at the same result by the selective birth rate.”

— Lena K. Sadler, “Is the Abnormal to Become Normal?” in A Decade of Progress in Eugenics, Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics(Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Co., 1934), p. 198.

“The life of a newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”

—Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 122-123

About the connection between the assumptions behind certain components of Darwinian Theory and methods of Eugenics seen in the Nazi Regime.

– “Anytime one wants to come to… the ideology of the Nazis and say ‘Where does it come from? What gave these people these ideas?’ that’s already crossing into a forbidden zone. Nobody really wants to talk about it unless it can be discussed in terms that are completely inoffensive, innocuous, and uninteresting. [However], if one wants to say, ‘look the Nazis may have been fairly primitive in their thinking’, I think that’s true, these were not profound sophisticated intellects. [One might ask], ‘just where did they take their ideas from?’ and one place that’s obvious for anyone who reads the German sources and knows that whole milieu in Germany is that they were profoundly influenced by events taking place fifty, sixty, seventy years ago in England and then with the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. This does not mean, of course, it does not mean that Darwin was a member of the SS or that Hitler had Origin of the Species at his bedside table. It could well be that Hitler’s ignorance of the details of evolutionary biology was profound. [When] we talk about the association between the Darwinian idea of evolution and the development of Nazi and Communist ideologies, we don’t have a direct connection in mind. We have necessary, but not necessarily sufficient conditions.” Dr. David Berlinski, What Hath Darwin Wrought?