Another thought-provoking discussion topic, however I have to say I think this would be a very bad idea indeed. And this is not because I'm a "bleeding heart" who loves people who commit hideous crimes. Absolutely not. It's because once you allow such things, you are on the slippery slope to torture and all kinds of atrocities. It is humans who would judge who would deserve to be tested on – and the judgement of humans in these matters is generally flawed.
I've been listening to a fantastic podcast about the Salem witch trials ("Unobscured", recommended by @ethandsmith), where 200 people were hanged for witchcraft. It's fascinating and horrifying, because those people genuinely believed that the accused – one of whom was just four years old – were committing heinous acts, sometimes right in front of them.
The Nazis of course did use medical experimentation on people they despised. What was their philosophy? Why did they allow such horrors? Some say it happened because the Jews were blamed for the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the Bolshevik revolution and in some of the Eastern European communist revolutions, eg Hungary. If so it was a horrendous distortion of logic. I wouldn't want to allow that door to be opened again.
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That is all terrible and hopefully will never be repeated but I would not compare medical experiments done by Nazis on good people who did not ask or deserve it with those done to criminals who would need to give their consent to it. I am not saying this is the perfect solution but in my opinion is better when compared to killing a criminal and using him or rehabilitating him in any way.
Your post certainly made me think more about this issue. A couple of weeks ago, for some reason I started thinking a lot about a particularly nasty murder case where the murderer was convicted. I was thinking about the people who will have to deal with him in prison. If I was in that position I would just want to stab him in the guts. I think these people must be traumatised just from having to interact with this man. And I don't really know what the answer is in cases like this. I just worry that if medical experimentation was allowed in such cases, it could be extended to be allowed for criminals who have committed much lesser crimes. Where would the line be drawn, and who would draw it? I don't like animal experimentation either, yet so much scientific research is done using rats. It's such a difficult moral dilemma.