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Beneficence In The Film 'Miss Evers' Boys

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An Analyzation of Beneficence Throughout world history, many immoral research studies have been performed on human subjects. The film, Miss Evers’ Boys, does an outstanding job of portraying a study that was implemented in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1932 (Benedetti, Fishburne, & Sargent, 1997). Miss Evers’ Boys creatively depicts the Tuskegee Experiment, of which studied the natural course of syphilis in African American men. Although penicillin became known as a treatment for syphilis during the 1940’s, the subjects remained deliberately untreated by researchers for decades (Burns, Gray, & Groves, 2014). The striking unethical acts performed in this study helped pave the way towards the founding of The Belmont Report, a set of regulations written to protect human research subjects in 1974 (Burns et al., 2014). The purpose of this paper is to analyze beneficence, one of the ethical principles identified in The Belmont Report, and how it was violated in the film Miss Evers’ Boys. Before one can analyze the violation of beneficence in …show more content…

Not only did the researchers break the rule to do no harm by allowing the men to fall subject to the greatest harm possible, but they broke the rule to maximize benefits and minimize harm as well. In order to prevent ethical breaches under the principle of beneficence from occurring again, there are two steps that all researchers should take. The first step that should be taken is to assess of the justifiability of your research. What is the exact reason as to why this experiment should be done and is it really necessary? The next step is to assess the scope of risks and benefits. Are the risks that you’re putting your human subjects in worth the benefits that will be created in the end? With the help of these two steps, and by really critically thinking about the outcomes of your research, minimal breaches of beneficence should

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This study was referred to as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis

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