Ethics has long been a stage for debate and contestation. Ethical guidelines have to be followed closely or the results could be disastrous, as in the Tuskegee study where Syphilis was allowed to spread and 128 men died. The purpose of this study was to see what would happen is Syphilis was allowed to spread. While this study is obviously 
unethical and would not be allowed to take place today, it raises the question of whether ethics can hinder a scientific study. The results of this study wouldn't necessarily have been found through other experiments. Even if there was a safe study that could be conducted that doesn't guarantee that there is an alternative for other unethical studies. For example, there are many studies involving fear and how people react under extremely stressful situations. It is very difficult to conduct studies that provide accurate results because most are considered immoral or unethical. I am not condoning unethical experiments and studies but simply voicing the idea that ethics can be a hindering factor in the scientific field. Some known unethical experiments such as the one conducted by Milgram have provided very useful knowledge and information. I am simply curious if a whole field of information isn't being discovered because of our ethical guidelines and principles.
The Dark Side of Ethics
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In my own opinion, I think we are obligated to hold ethics to an extremely high standard. Of course, I would love to see the scientific results and benefits from what we could learn, but I think it would damage society in too many other ways. Ethics could be a very slippery slope. If we loosen the restraints on scientific study now, I think unethical studies that outweigh the benefit of their research would begin to show up everywhere.
I completely agree with your observation that ethics may hinder scientific results. It is easy to say when you are not in the situation that you would pick the ethical decision over the scientrific result, but when the time came would you still? For me this would be hard to answer. I do think ethics should be followed. Maybe a way for scietific results to be found in an ethical manner is to plainly have people willing to put themselves in danger. There is some hard questions that need to be answered and possibly if one person risked their life willingly than millions could be saved. I don't want to come off as a criminally insance person it is just an idea that came to mind.
Being ethical and making ethical decisions is very important in today's society. The Tuskegee study was obviously unethical and wrong, but it did raise more awareness for protecting human subjects' rights. I agree that using unethical guidelines when testing may produce results, but the consequences of the results definitely weigh more than the benefits.
I think ethics is extremely fascinating in the science world. We want to do so much, but what is going too far? And also, what is ethics holding us back from finding out? Clearly psychology and other sciences can't answer the questions of ethics, and it's constantly a huge debate among our political leaders (like stem cell research). Your entry brings up some really interesting points on how to test human fear. I'm curious as to what other types of experiments are also under ethical debate. Is it a large issue in the psychology science? Otherwise, great entry.
Your post raises an interesting question at the end. It seems as though our country is always trying to progress and further itself. Because of this fact, I think it is important to look at the possibility that we are not gaining all the knowledge that we could because of ethics. That being said, I believe that most people would want to abide by ethical procedures and I find that the tradeoff between learning more and being ethical is an easy one. If we were to start doing unethical experiments there is no saying what possible horrible experiments could be thought up.
I believe that the controversy over ethics lies in where to draw the line. Just about every reasonable person knows that experiments that cause more harm than good should not be conducted. Ethics definitely hinders scientific knowledge because certain experiments are unable to be performed ethically. However, the cost of attaining such knowledge is too high to be worth it.
I always find it interesting to see how psychology as a field has forgiven the ethical transgressions of the past. Seligman and Zimbardo became famous, respectively, for electrocuting dogs and subjecting humans to severe psychological degradation. Both became APA presidents in the last two decades.
I myself have always found ethics as a very interesting and touchy subject. The possibility that we are passing up many important discoveries in order to maintain proper ethics is a scary idea and brings up weighing the good against the bad. If we could save the lives of hundreds of people, would it be worth putting several through pain and suffering? There is no right answer to this question and is something I constantly think about when reading about scientific studies.
This was a very interesting perspective on ethics, and one that is not heard of very often. While I am not saying you are wrong by any means, it poses an interesting question of which is more important - ethics or scientific research. Personally, I think ethics and morals are of the utmost importance, but maybe that's just how I was raised. Also, I have never been a huge science person and have always been more of a business guy, so it is hard for me to conceptualize forgoing ethics. But nonetheless, this was a very interesting perspective and blog post!
This reminds me of my old Science and Ethics class I took back in high school where we got onto the topic of the Nazi experiments that often involved very cruel torture and disfigurement of the body and such. Most of these experiments resulted in death, but there were good things that came out of this horrible research and so after WWII, there was this huge ethical debate as to whether or not the information obtained during these experiments should be used or not. Personally, I think that using the information for good is a good thing, because if not, then they would have died for much worse of a reason.
This debate raises an interesting question. Many questions could potentially be answered through unethical studies, however this isn't to say that ethics are not important. Many things would be easier if ethical guidelines weren't followed, but the results would probably be disastrous. I think ethics are one of the most important aspects of science today, but this begs the question of how ethical one should be at the expense of scientific knowledge.