The Tuskegee Study Was Ethically Objectionable Because Informed Consent Was

The Tuskegee study was ethically objectionable because informed consent was flawed, an available treatment was not provided, and deception was practiced. If informed consent had been properly administered and research participants informed of the availability of penicillin when it became available, why would this still represent an ethically objectionable study?

A) The researcher has an obligation to actively do good for the research participants; merely informing them of the availability of penicillin would not have been sufficient to meet this obligation.
B) The research took place in one state of the Union and so had limited generalizability.
C) Some of the research participants were illiterate and could not provide consent.
D) There was no need for the study to be performed, in the first place, since enough was known about syphilis at the time.
E) Since black men in Alabama were in an inferior social position, they constituted an underrepresented and potentially vulnerable population; every effort should have been made to include participants from other ethnic groups.