...knew full well that what they were doing was wrong, and that they'd be punished for their actions if fond out. Wirths hanged himself when it looked like he might be captured, and Mengele took great pains to try and hide himself, succeeding so well that he was never found alive, as his friends and relatives conspired to conceal his whereabouts.

Horst Schumann, another of the Nazi doctors, was hidden for many years by Nazi sympathisers in the Middle East and Africa, served a relatively short prison sentence, and was released for "compassionate reasons," dying eleven years later. Carl Clauberg was captured by the Soviets, and imprisoned for a time, but was released in a prisoner exchange and set free by German authorities. Only after protests were lodged did the Germans re-arrest him, but he died in his cell of a heart attack before coming to trial.

Twenty-three other doctors who participated in human experimentation were tried at Nuremberg. Seven received death sentences, the rest were either acquitted or imprisoned.

The one who fell into Allied custody were examined by psychologists and found to be well-adjusted, perfectly normal men who loved their wives and children, were respected members of their communities, culturally literate and kind to small animals.

Hannah Arendt, a German Jew, attended the Nuremberg trials, and was surprised to discover the ordinariness of these "monsters." She coined a phrase, "the banality of evil" to express this feeling. These men, in a very real sense, are "us."

The Yale "Milgram Experiment" conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo's infamous "Stanford Prison Experiment" essentially proved this, as the "experiments" quickly went out of control, with simulated or real cruelty and abuse appearing very rapidly in a large number of subjects, and acquiescence by many more.

In particular, a third of perfectly well-adjusted male college students in the Stanford study, which required physical contact with real "prisoners," turned out to have a sadistic streak in them just waiting to appear when given "permission" to exercise it. In the Yale study, two thirds of the men were willing to inflict the most painful and dangerous shocks to the simulated subject, despite the fact that the last switch was labelled "Fatal." Only one refused to take the simulated voltage beyond "dangerous" levels, although the victim, a trained actor, was screaming and begging for mercy.

As long as there's an authority figure present who gives a respectable veneer and lends plausibility to even the most dubious undertakings, human beings will "go along," even further what may seem to outsiders like perfectly monstrous purposes, because we're social beings who like to "fit in," to "obey the rules," and to behave like the people around us.

Cheers,

Puddin'

Discussions of ethics almost inevitably lead to examining differences between typical male and typical female ethical world-views.They are different, and consider differing data sets and definitions.

In short, what a typical woman might consider ethical may differ from what a typical man might, at least in detail.

Cheers,

Puddin'