The Blaatschapen wrote:Yes, and of course there can be the evil third option for those that enabled capital punishment. "We should redo the research ourselves, we should just speed up the time prisoners spend on death row. Why don't we perform this research on them afterwards. For Science!" ----> side effect, judges get incentives to send more people to the death penalty, to enable scientific research.
I... really don't see the point of that. If you're evil and don't see any problems with how the research was gathered the first time around, why would you redo it? That's no longer science, not even evil science, just random cruelty.
Of course an evil nation could use similar methods to gather
further data that wasn't in the original book, but that feels like it's moving beyond the actual subject being discussed. Plus, the entire point is that this book really is a pretty impressively complete reference on its subject matter, which is why people want to use it so much.
For
good nations there could be an option of "Let's try to re-gather the same data using more ethical means.", but really, that would probably follow automatically from refusing to use the existing book - scientists don't like
not knowing stuff. This could lead to some uncomfortable conclusions if it turns out the data really
is very hard to gather ethically.
I'd put it in the issue's validity that it's only assigned to nations that aren't inclined to do this kind of research themselves (although I don't think we actually have that as a flag, unfortunately), since it's a pretty trivial dilemma for the ones that are. It could work fine as a two-option issue, emphasizing the unconfortable situation with few choices because the biggest choice (to produce the book in the first place) has already been made without you, but a third compromise option could be something along the lines of "Allow doctors to use the book, but mandate that they lecture their patients about its origins each time they do." (which would have the implicit side effects of (A) doctors only resorting to the book in the most serious medical cases where they really need it, to avoid the hassle of giving that lecture, and (B) giving the patient the opportunity to make an informed decision to refuse the treatment).