Why Is Tuskegee Experiment Wrong

The student's video about says that the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was wrong and I agree. It violated the patient's rights because the government violated the trust people had ensued in it. According to many of the ethical theories, we have studied so far in class, this action was extremely wrong. Kant's Ethical theory says that the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was wrong because it violated the two main principles Kant's ethical theory is based on. The first principle is, "Act only on that maxim which you can will to be a universal law" (page 911). Similarly, Kant's second principle is, "Always act so as to treat humanity, either in yourself or in others, always as an end and never only as a means" (page 912).
Furthermore, the Tuskegee

Syphilis Experiment violates the first principle of Kant's Ethical Principle because the Public Health Service did not act on a maximum that could be universal. For example, if every physician violated a patients rights by saying they had bad blood and give false treatment no one would go to the doctor. In other words, the Public Health Service acted on special conditions that could not apply to everyone. Kant's ethical theory states that an action is wrong if is not accepted universally, as a rule, anyone can follow.
Not only does the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment violate Kant's first principle it also violated the second, do not treat people as a tool but instead as an end. The 399 African-American men that were part of the experiment were not told their diagnosis but instead were told they contained "bad blood" and were given aspirin even after penicillin was discovered in the mid-1940s (Pages 746-749). These men were not treated as men but instead were treated as, "laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone" (Henry Reasoner form student video). For this reason, Kant would argue that the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was not ethical because it was based on a maximum that was not universal, and it treated men as tools in an experiment, not as an end goal.