Introduction
Miss Ever’s Boys is a docudrama film that was produced by the HBO cable network. The movie explores ethical and social issues involved in the infamous Tuskegee Study. The study was about untreated black men with syphilis. The U.S. Public Health Service is said to have conducted a study among 600 black Americans from the years 1932 to 1972. This study was done in Macon County. This paper will exclusively explore the critique the Miss Ever’s Boys film using ethical frameworks. The ethical framework includes beneficence, justice, and respect for persons, duty-based ethics, virtue-based ethics, and the right’s-based ethics. The paper will identify how the above listed ethical principles were or were not portrayed in the film.
Analysis of the ethical frameworks
The concept of beneficence states that the welfare of the participants should be every researcher’s goal of any clinical trial. The movie “Miss Ever’s Boys”, the U.S. Public Health Service did not mind the welfare of the participants. To start with, this study was to study a sexually transmitted disease called syphilis but not to provide its cure. Before involving anyone in this study, the U.S. Public Health Service should have sought people consent with full explanation of the study to the participants. If U.S. Public Health Service minded the welfare of the people at all, they could have explained the study to the participants in order for them to choose whether they will be involved or not. However since they knew the consequences of the study, the U.S. Public Health Service was afraid that the people will not participate since the study was not offering any cure at all. This is against the bioethics of medical practice that requires the beneficence concept to be respected in any clinical research. So basically, it will be right to say that beneficence ethical principle was not met in this film (Stripling, 2005).
The concept of justice in research ethics
References: B. Miss Evers Boys and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study - Page 14. (n.d.). Home - Race, Racism and the Law. Retrieved September 8, 2013, from http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1634:tuskegeesylliusstudy01&catid=103&Itemid=269&showall=&limitstart=13 Houser, J. (2012). Nursing research: reading, using, and creating evidence. (2nd ed.). Boston: Jones & Bartlett. Stripling, M. Y. (2005). Bioethics and medical issues in literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.