Nicky Taylor is a journalist for the BBC, a job that has made her take her body and health to their limits. She uses different methods of research to the usual journalist, subjecting her body to various extremes, using it for experimentation. The outcomes of her research are very interesting, but is it ethical to use her body so loosely?
Nicky has gone from not cleaning herself in any way for six weeks to binge drinking five nights a week and smoking cannabis everyday for a month, and all this just for a documentary. In the case of the latter two, the body is not made to undergo such episodes, and it is no surprise that they will have detrimental effects on the body. As a mother of three, is it not irresponsible to put herself at such risk? How does the BBC justify allowing such documentaries to go ahead?
During Nicky’s “soapless experiment” it got to a point where her children refused to cuddle with her, and other parents would pull their children away from her, during “the face of a binge drinker” she had to go home to her children and take care of them whilst hung over. These self-experiments have a direct effect on her children not to mention the effects to her health.
Yet who are we to say that such self-experimentations are unethical? Yes, they go against the Belmont report in that there is no benefit to Nicky, and no positive outcome will come of her experiments. However she chose to participate in theses experiments, and her documentaries will make the public more aware of pertinent issues such as binge drinking and smoking cannabis. But is this public awareness of such issues worth the risk that she puts herself through?
Sources:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-372102/Face-binge-drinker.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-477378/Six-weeks-wash-The-soapless-experiment.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-545408/Superskunk-What-happened-woman-smoked-dope-daily-month-BBC-documentary.html
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3 comments:
People voluntarily engage in self-destructive behaviors all the time. What they do with their bodies is their business. People binge drink (we see plenty of this…), smoke marijuana, practice poor personal hygiene, the list goes on. Is this irresponsible and unhealthy? Absolutely. But unethical? How can it be, as long as the only person they are hurting is themselves? For instance, no reasonable individual would label obesity “unethical.” They might judge a morbidly obese person for putting his or her life to waste, but an ethical criticism is simply not appropriate here.
Ethics comes into play when a person’s actions have the potential to negatively impact another party. If a morbidly obese mother raises her children with the poor eating habits to which she is accustomed, she has set them on the path towards a brief life wrought with health problems. Young children are at the mercy of their parents. If parents’ unhealthy lifestyles harm not only them but also their impressionable children, the issue is elevated from one of poor personal choices to one of ethical transgression.
Nicky Taylor has chosen to put her body through the wringer, and in a free society, she has every right to make that decision. It is not these “self-experiments” in and of themselves that are unethical. Where her conduct becomes morally objectionable is its effect on her family. How humiliating it must have been for her children to go to school and have all of their classmates know that their mother is an obsessive drinker and pot smoker who stews in her own filth for months at a time. I doubt there were many play dates or sleepovers at that house.
In journalism as well as in biomedical research, the desire to satisfy one’s curiosity should never be taken to an extreme that creates a negative externality. This should be particularly obvious when the wellbeing of one’s own children is at stake. *Sigh* What would we do without the psychos of the world…
There is something that is disconcerting about Nicky Taylor’s “self-experiments.” As Sara pointed out, it certainly is wrong that Taylor’s children are affected by her poor hygiene and abusive alcohol consumption, but that seems disconnected from the fact that these are self-experiments, as any behavior that puts children in needless harm can be labeled wrong.
You posed an important question at the end of your entry: does the knowledge gained by the public as a result of her experiments validate her self-imposed detriment? Surely, we would not be able to employ a parallel study on other individuals—we are morally forbidden from putting others at risk for public access to knowledge. Self-consent, however, critically shifts the frame of reference: Nicky Taylor is merely a scientist exploring something she and the public wishes to learn more about. The “harm” she incurs is merely the sacrifice any researcher makes when pursuing study. Take for example a radiologist investigating the effects of X-ray technology on lab rats. Over the course of his research, he is unduly exposed to radiation and develops cancer as a result. Or the scores of chemists exposed to unknown carcinogens on their lab bench while studying the reactions of such compounds. We do not deem these cases unethical and thus, it is not simply that the researcher is harmed in the pursuit of valuable knowledge that we are stirred by these self-experiments.
What is really suspicious about these self-experiments is their lack of credibility. My confidence in the results of these self-imposed, self-enforced regimens is thin. In other words, the ethical issue in Taylor’s documentaries is her revelation of the results as ‘truths’ for the public when her conduct may not qualify as true scientific experiments, with controlled set-ups and elimination of confounding variables. It also seems that her results may simply be built on existing social preconceived notions that are perpetuated by her results. I am disconcerted about these questionable results, even if they are intuitively satisfying (binge drinking leads to abusive parenting). Thus, self-experiments can not only cause harm to both the individual and those around him but also yield results that cannot truly be trusted by the public. This ‘knowledge pollution’ garnered from such rogue studies is not publicly enlightening and thus certainly cannot warrant any sort of sacrifice from any individual.
In general, we wouldn't say that a drug addict is in the right to negatively affect his or her family, but to do so for the sake of seeking knowledge raises an interesting concern. If she was alone, what she wants to do with herself is her call, no matter how unquestionably "unethical" it is. Now consider Jesse Gelsinger; it could be argued that his leaving of his family to be experimented on (and subsequent death) negatively affected his family in some way. Was it right for him to make such a decision? Most would probably say yes, but I contend that his situation is simply one of a lesser degree than Taylor's (or perhaps greater degree, given that he died). Like when a family doesn't permit a family member to undergo a experimental trial, Taylor's family has every right to say no to her experimenting.
About the notion of credibility Jia brought up, I don't think that's a significant issue here. What airs on TV is usually taken with at least a subconscious grain of salt; there is bias in reporting, hands down, and people recognize this. "Supersize Me," the documentary where some guy ate McDonald's for a month, might have opened eyes, but nobody would content that it had the same investigative force as a reputable scientific experiment. And I think that's what the point of these self-documentaries are anyway: shock factor. It's not like she's jotting down numbers or anything anyway.
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