Zusammenfassung

This chapter discusses "philosophically" on the subject of human experimentation and describes hesitation natural to a layman in the face of matters on which experts of the highest competence have had their say and carry on their dialogue. The question is inherently philosophical as it concerns not merely pragmatic difficulties and their arbitration, but a genuine conflict of values involving principles of a high order. The philosophical rule, once it has admitted into itself the idea of a sliding scale, cannot really specify its own application. Experimentation was originally sanctioned by natural science. Human experimentation must sharpen the issue as it involves ultimate questions of personal dignity and sacrosanctity. One difference between the human experiments and the physical is this: The physical experiment employs small-scale, artificially devised substitutes for that about which knowledge is to be obtained, and the experimenter extrapolates from these models and simulated conditions to nature at large.

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