zlacker

>>babelf+(OP)
> Lot of people critiquing this, but you can't deny the success.

You could say that about literally any shady business. Imagine seeing a PDF proving tobacco leaders knew for decades that it caused cancer and saying what you did.

Being monetarily successful does not mean you’re good or shouldn’t be criticised.

>>latexr+im
Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?

If you think that this is an entirely artificial example, consider the fact that the same man designed the V-2 rockets which were hitting London during WWII, and the Saturn-5 rockets which brought astronauts to Moon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

>>nine_k+0T
Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?

I think the idea being debated here is that it’s impossible to know whether the business practices would work without the lack of ethics. It might not be a good case study or a direction you want people going in as it might put them in some of the ethically compromising positions, or even worse require people to put themselves in those positions to work

>>barrel+PU
If we're going this way, the next question - and a real one, this time - is whether we should study and use the medical data they acquired doing very unethical things to prisoners.

>>TeMPOr+4W
I’m not going to pretend to have an answer to that question, it’s above my pay grade.

But I would be comfortable pushing back on the idea that we should structure and operate our medical clinics like theirs because they made scientific breakthroughs.

>>barrel+sW
It's above my paygrade too, but what I remember from occasional discussions of that case is that:

- The obvious take is, the evil deed's already been done, the knowledge it produced can save lives and can't realistically be re-gathered any other way, so why not use it?

- The counter to that is, using it legitimizes and encourages similar acts in the future.

(Personally, I can see the encouragement angle; disagree with legitimization.)

- There's often a side thread going on about how the atrocities and those who committed them were not Up To Scientific Standards, therefore all their data is invalid, so there's no reason to use it anyway.

(Personally, I think this is a lame cop-out, used when one feels the ethical argument is too weak to stand on its own.)