When Ethics Limits What We Can Know

1. In the human sciences, knowledge is cut off in three ways:
   1. Method restrictions: some techniques are banned because they cause harm.
   2. Topic taboos: some questions can’t be studied at all.
   3. Participant protections: strict rules about consent and treatment.
2. These limits shape the scope, methods, and reliability of knowledge itself.

Method Restrictions Block Powerful Experiments

1. Method restrictions force researchers to use less effective approaches.
2. Sleep deprivation research is a great example of this.
3. We desperately need to understand how extreme fatigue affects critical decision-making, surgeons work for days straight, pilots fly exhausted, military personnel make life-or-death choices while sleep-deprived.
4. The ideal study would keep people awake for five days and test their judgment under pressure.
5. But of course, ethics boards allow only mild sleep loss studies of 24-48 hours maximum.
6. These are known as topic taboos, which emerge when any method to study a question would be inherently unethical.

Topic Taboos Remove Entire Questions

1. Sometimes the barrier is not the method but the question itself.
2. Some questions can never be tested ethically, no matter how creative researchers are.
3. These are known as topic taboos, and often involve situations where knowledge could be valuable but the human cost would be unacceptable.

Participant Protections Reshape Data

1. Even when studies go ahead, ethical rules about protecting participants influence the kind of data collected.
2. This is most visible in medicine, where clinical trials require informed consent, meaning only those who agree can participate.
3. While this protects autonomy, it also excludes children, prisoners, and the critically ill, which are groups who are often the most affected.
4. This creates a paradox where knowledge is safe, but less representative.
5. The people most in need of medical advances may be underrepresented in the research that produces those advances.

The Stanford Prison Experiment Cannot Be Replicated

1. The Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 revealed how quickly ordinary people adopt abusive behaviors when given authority.
2. College students randomly assigned as "guards" became increasingly cruel to those assigned as "prisoners" within days.
3. The study provided insights about situational power and human behavior, but violated every principle of informed consent and participant protection.
4. Today's ethical standards make replicating or extending these findings impossible.
5. So even though we understand authority dynamics better because of this study, we can't study extreme power situations directly anymore.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study Created Modern Consent Rules

1. From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service studied the natural course of syphilis in African American men without their informed consent.
2. Even after penicillin was discovered, treatment was deliberately withheld.
3. Researchers gained knowledge about long-term disease progression, but at immense human cost.
4. The scandal forced the global adoption of informed consent rules in medical research.
5. This case shows how unethical research can permanently change the boundaries of what later research is allowed to do.

Ethical Rules Create Systematic Knowledge Gaps in The Human Sciences

1. Ethics shapes human sciences at three levels:
   1. Scope: whole areas of human behavior, such as extreme deprivation or abuse, cannot be studied.
   2. Methods: the most realistic and ecologically valid experiments are banned.
   3. Reliability: participant protections bias data toward safer, less representative groups.
2. These effects explain why human sciences often rely on case studies, simulations, and correlations rather than the kind of controlled experiments seen in the natural sciences.