The Pebble and the Avalanche

Thu, 2006-Dec-28, 08:16

As a free citizen of the United States, I expect the government to respect my basic human rights; and one of them is to ask my consent if they want me to participate in an experiment that may harm me.

That's not the case, however. According to a front-page article in today's Wall Street Journal [subscription required], the US public finds itself engaged in an experiment to determine if moving poverty-stricken families to ordinary non-poverty neighborhoods will improve the lives of those family members.

What could possibly be wrong? Consider the fate of the adolescent males who participated, involuntarily, in this program:

School participation deteriorated and property-crime rates, mental distress, and smoking all increased among those who moved with the vouchers, compared with teenage boys in families who didn't move. For property crime, there were 58 arrests for every 100 boys who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods, compared with 22 arrests for every 100 boys in the control group.

Two groups of victims emerge. The first are the adolescents themselves, who fared poorly and will suffer the twin life-long consequences of criminal records and lack of schooling. And the second group are the neighbors of these adolescents — presumeably victims of these crimes. The neighbors are also involuntary participants in this social experiment.

When an ordinary scientist performs an experiment on human beings, the scientist must seek approval from an Institutional Review Board to make certain that the experiment is well designed and unlikely to inflict unnecessary harm. Participants must give informed consent. But the government doesn't need consent; and apparently ours decided to blur the line between citizen and lab rat.

Topics: · government · society

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Shimon wrote at 2006-12-28 12:38:

Hmm. I don't know this particular story, but you raise an interesting question wrt scientific ethics.
Government is, by nature, a social experimenter. The form of government is a social experiment; its policies (anything from economic policies to social assistance) are experiments... even governmental inaction (vis a vis the libertarian ideal) is an experiment.
Social scientists can learn a lot from the results of such experiments, yet it is certainly true that the experimental 'subjects' had little say in their participation. Does that make the gleaning of such information unethical?
I am not sure as to the answer; on the one hand, *some* sort of social experimentation is going to happen regardless of consent. Furthermore, in a democratic society, one could argue that the experimental subjects have at least limited control over their participation (at least those of voting age). Yet it is still an intriguing ethical question.
(Of course, if the experiment is deliberately set up as an experiment - as your post suggests - that is a wholly more serious matter. But either way, it provides food for thought.)

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