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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

>rationale to this decision

They probably argued that the test was more like surveying defenses than an experiment. i.e. "we need to try it because we need to know if we should be concerned about the Soviets doing it with seriously harmful bacteria."

Additionally, when you do anything involving a group that large there's bound to be an few outliers. Winning the lottery, getting bitten by a shark and dying from complications caused by normally harmless bacteria are all incredibly uncommon but they still happen.

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Are you attempting to justify this? If I ran a "harmless" experiment over a population of 100M that happened to kill 10 or 20 "outliers" should I be exempt from consequences as well?

I understand the vitriol, and I'm not even sure where I stand on the issue, but this quickly gets into a philosophical debate. This is something akin to the "railroad switch" question. Do you pull the level and divert a railroad car killing one person, but saving five or do you let the runaway care run its course and kill the 5.

If the impetus for the experiment was to test some potential attack vector as the grandparent post suggests, would you rather they didn't risk some catastrophic attack? It's the notion of "the greater good" and all that.

In writing this, I seem to have discovered my own answer. This is largely similar to the NSA going beserk as it has done because, "What if?". So do you want to risk & sacrifice for ostensibly better security?

Your "philosophical debate" is about an impending, unintended catastrophe. These were conscious actions by people who could have (to use situation in your debate) replaced the live, innocent human beings with straw dummies.

They shouldn't have done it at all. But even if in some twisted world they needed to, they could have warned everyone and come up with ways to protect hospitals.

They did not believe it would have any effect and believed that in good faith. It's easy 60 years later with dramatically advanced science to say "well of course it would and should" but that misses the point.

That they experimented on people at all without their consent is reason enough to be outraged.

Agreed. This isn't a hypothetical, unavoidable event. This was an act that required an affirmative decision to initiate. Call me a Nuremberg protocol hardliner.

> This is something akin to the "railroad switch" question. Do you pull the level and divert a railroad car killing one person, but saving five or do you let the runaway care run its course and kill the 5.

In the railway scenario, you know you'll save 5. In this case, they were just experimenting to see if a certain attack was possible. Avoiding the experiment would not have resulted in any deaths.

Avoiding the experiment would make an attack more effective and hence more likely to take place. It's not identical to the simple philosophical construction, but it's not wholly unlike it, either.

>Are you attempting to justify this?

>They probably argued

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