Read the following case carefully. In this case, if the research subjects had been notified of the plans to infect them and they had given their consent, would this research have been ethically justifiable? Defend your position with either Bentham’s moral theory or Kant’s moral theory. write around 1600 words.

From 1946 to 1948, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted research in Guatemala on sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) on 5,500 prison inmates, orphans, school children, soldiers, psychiatric patients, and commercial sex workers. In 2010, information was revealed that 1,300 of these research subjects were intentionally exposed and infected to STDs without their consent. At least 83 of the subjects died. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues conducted a thorough investigation of this episode, including a review of 125,000 pages of original documents, a fact-finding trip to Guatemala, and meetings with that country’s own investigative committee.

In September 2011, the commission released its own report, titled Ethically Impossible STD Research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948, which it posted on the commission’s website at http://www.bioethics.gov. The commission discovered that the U.S. researchers in Guatemala were given great latitude in their conduct of the experiments and little oversight from the PHS. They also went to great lengths to keep their activities secret. Even though some of the researchers, when they worked in the United States, had previously sought consent on experiments with human subjects, they knowingly skipped this procedure in Guatemala, in a “double standard” that the commission found “shocking”. The behavior of the researchers, in the words of the commission report, “shows an understanding of, and disregard for generally accepted moral principles such as respect for human dignity in the course of their work in Guatemala”.

According to the historical records, the idea for conducting the research in Guatemala came from a Guatemalan physician who was in the United States for a study program with the government. The United States already had in place an extensive program of medical assistance to Guatemala, and funding for the research was reviewed and approved by a panel at the National Institutes of Health. Agreements were signed with several governmental officials in Guatemala for wide-ranging research on STDs. The U.S. researchers provided extensive assistance with the provision of scarce medicines and other benefits to ensure the continued cooperation of the Guatemalan officials.

The chair of the commission, Amy Gutmann, is President of the University of Pennsylvania and a distinguished political philosopher and ethicist. In her statement accompanying the release of the report, she said, “A civilization cannot be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable individuals. It is our moral responsibility to care for those who cannot protect themselves and clearly in this dark chapter of our medical history we grievously failed to keep that covenant”.