First, the knowledge in question has to have value. ("How could I destroy all life on the planet?" does not strike me as a useful or interesting question...)
"What might threaten all life on the planet? How can I prevent these?"
I've been from time to time very curious about those experiments you mention. Particularly, how much are they integrated into current theories of psychology, and how comfortable are people with considering them when creating theories? It seems to me that valid data, once discovered, should be used whenever productive. At the same time, people are uncomfortable with this sort of data.
Your criteria seem to establish to me that there may exist a category of information which cannot be obtained by ethical means. However, is it possible that this information has a sufficiently important value that it should be obtained, even unethically?
One of the arguments against torture is that it is inherently unreliable, that prisoners being tortured will lie or invent stories in order to please their interregators. It would certainly be abhorrent to create a study which tortured people in order to test if this is a valid objection. At the same time, going off of my above statement that existing data should be retained regardless of origin, it seems you could do a study based off of some historically documented example of torture (the Algerian campaign seems reasonable, as depicted in "The Battle of Algiers"). You could examine transcripts of interregations, and compare the information gathered to what we now know of the resistance movement, etc. Now, is this information that ought to be discovered, given it doesn't involve any currently unethical actions?
no subject
"What might threaten all life on the planet? How can I prevent these?"
I've been from time to time very curious about those experiments you mention. Particularly, how much are they integrated into current theories of psychology, and how comfortable are people with considering them when creating theories? It seems to me that valid data, once discovered, should be used whenever productive. At the same time, people are uncomfortable with this sort of data.
Your criteria seem to establish to me that there may exist a category of information which cannot be obtained by ethical means. However, is it possible that this information has a sufficiently important value that it should be obtained, even unethically?
One of the arguments against torture is that it is inherently unreliable, that prisoners being tortured will lie or invent stories in order to please their interregators. It would certainly be abhorrent to create a study which tortured people in order to test if this is a valid objection. At the same time, going off of my above statement that existing data should be retained regardless of origin, it seems you could do a study based off of some historically documented example of torture (the Algerian campaign seems reasonable, as depicted in "The Battle of Algiers"). You could examine transcripts of interregations, and compare the information gathered to what we now know of the resistance movement, etc. Now, is this information that ought to be discovered, given it doesn't involve any currently unethical actions?