Art Caplan has an editorial in the July 22 Science, reprinted at AJOB/blog.bioethics.net, in which he criticizes the misuse of “Nazi-doctor” analogies in bioethics debates. (For better or worse, he manages the whole thing without ever once mentioning Godwin’s Law.)

His take on the issue is not quite the standard line that such analogies are overblown or offensive. Instead, Caplan focuses specifically on analogies to Nazi medical research, too-often invoked by opponents of research underway today (especially as related to embryos or birth control technology). Caplan identifies the defining features of the Nazi program:

A key component of Nazi thought was to rid Germany and the lands under German control of those deemed economic drains on the state—the mentally ill, alcoholics, the “feeble-minded,” and the demented elderly. They were seen as direct threats to the economic viability of the state, a fear rooted in the bitter economic experience after the First World War. The public health of the nation also had to be protected against threats to its genetic health. These were created when people of “inferior” races intermarried with those of Aryan stock. Threats to genetic health also included, by their very existence, genetic degenerates— Jews and Roma. Theories of race hygiene had gained prominence in mainstream German scientific and medical circles as early as the 1920s.

What is important to keep in mind about these underlying themes that provided the underpinning for Nazi euthanasia and eugenic practices is that they have little to do with contemporary ethical debates about science, medicine, or technology.

Caplan goes on to conclude that what makes research analogous to the Nazi research is that it shares these ideological motivations. The implication seems to be that controversial technologies or research methods that are not aimed at the destruction of “inferior races” are not properly analogous to Nazi research.

[T]he decision [to terminate treatment for Terri Schiavo] had nothing to do with the belief that her continued existence posed a threat to the economic integrity of the United States or that her racial background posed a threat to America’s genetic health. . . .

Concentration camp prisoners [unlike IVF embryos] were used in lethal experiments because they were seen as doomed to die anyway, were seen as racial inferiors, and, given the conditions of total war that prevailed, they were considered completely expendable in the service of the national security of the Third Reich.

(Actually, the “doomed to die anyway” argument is one used by proponents of research on excess IVF embryos, but the other factors are disanalogous, as Caplan says.)

Caplan seems to be making a somewhat technical argument that it is the particular racial ideology of Nazism that defines abusive Nazi research - that is, that to be analogous to Nazi research a project must not merely be abusive but be justified by reference to discriminatory racial theories or a designation of some moral persons as unworthy of moral respect. While he is certainly right that many Nazi analogies are overblown, and, even more to the point, that many accusations of “Nazism” are leveled at people who by no stretch of the imagination could be called Nazis, I’m not sure the distinctions he is making are the most important ones.

The problem with Nazi research is not that it was motivated by bogus racial theories, but that it was unconscionably abusive. (Today, we more or less ignore neo-Nazis who spout similar theories, but pay detailed attention to the conditions and practices of human research. It is the practices, not the ideas, that worry us - and the ideas worry us, to the extent they do, because they may lead to bad practices.) The practices and transgressions that characterized Nazi research are themselves distinctive - that is to say, Nazi abuses were in many ways unique for reasons not having to do only with the ideologies behind them, but because of the bizarrely sadistic ways in which people were treated. Nazi research was not just “ordinary bad research” with black leather trench coats - it included unprecedented inhumanities and distortions of medical/scientific practice seen nowhere else in history. So “Nazi research” can be characterized or defined in various ways: by its motivating ideology, by its practices and patterns of abuse, and by the peculiarly sadistic ways in which the abusive practices were conducted.

To literally be a Nazi, one must presumably espouse the ideology and program of the Nazis - but one may be like a Nazi simply by behaving in analogous ways, even if for different reasons. I take it that the “Nazi” accusations leveled by opponents of stem cell research, abortion, and the other sex-panicky hot buttons of the right wing are by way of being analogies, not similes. Conservatives do not literally claim that contemporary scientists are themselves Nazis, but that they behave in some way analogous enough to Nazi practices as to be equally as guilty as the Nazis.

Whether that claim makes sense (I don’t think it does) depends on the particular points of analogy elucidated by the protesters, and whether the claimed analogies hold up. Looking at the arguments made by these protesters, it seems apparent that only some of them have to do with ideology; others focus on the practical effects of the research.

The ideological analogies are the ones Caplan objects to, and his objections have some weight: it is true that embryonic stem cell research is implicitly predicated on a view of the embryo as not being a moral person, and it is also true that Nazi extermination policies defined Jews and others as not holding moral rights, but it is a far cry from the one to the other. Caplan is right that calling the treatment of these embryos the equivalent of the Holocaust “diminishes the horror done by Nazi scientists and doctors to their victims” - partly by absurdly analogizing the citizens of Europe to frozen IVF embryos, partly by ignoring the larger context and nefarious purpose of the Nazi killings. Research on IVF embryos is no “Holocaust” even if we grant the premise that the embryos are moral persons. However, we might still acknowledge that the treatment of the embryos - their “dismemberment” (as Tom Delay put it), the use of their parts to create tissues for transplant into other persons, their storage in hypothermic stasis and casual discard when no longer “needed” - would be regarded as horrendous if practiced on actual moral persons. If we did to Jews, gays, Communists, and Roma what we do to IVF embryos, the Nazi analogies would not seem so far-fetched even if there was no genocidal policy accompanying it and no half-baked racial ideologies justifying it. In this, at least, the right wing has a point. Since IVF embryos are not Jews, gays, Communists, Roma, or any other form of moral person, it’s not a problem, but we can at least acknowledge the meaning of protests to the contrary: that to those who believe embryos are moral persons, this treatment of them is shocking no matter what its justification.

The reason the Nazi analogy does not hold in these cases is that the embryo does not have the same moral standing as the victims of the Nazis - or indeed any at all. But this is not the same as saying that the researchers do not hold to Nazi ideology or goals. I think Caplan makes his argument by defining valid Nazi analogies in very narrow terms (those of ideology and goals), and ignoring a kind of analogy (to practices and effects) that can make sense even if it is in fact almost always wrongly used. He thus misses the chance to say why these latter analogies are wrong.