I am familiar with MIT (the CMU of Massachusetts!) and what the Media Lab does. They do some cool things, and some good things, and some things that are both. Nothing that they are doing is sufficiently good, to my way of thinking, to warrant a bunch of "Nazi hypothermia study" or trolleyology comparisons. I think Mount Sinai at the least is a more complex issue, but perhaps not very. In any case, elsewhere you bring up the fact that it is 0.3% of the Media Lab's budget, so it's hard to imagine it having a massive positive effect (I'll get to the obvious negative effect later).

But your definition of the question is utterly, flagrantly wrong. You've worked over the question until it bears no resemblance to the actual moral decision that confronted the Media Lab in 2008.

We could discuss the question "Can you take money from an evil person to do good things?" in several alternate timelines.

In one timeline, Epstein sits down in his office at some point in 2008, writes the media lab a huge cheque, then (rather admirably, compared to the real Epstein) puts a beautifully hand-tooled pistol in his mouth and decorates the back wall with his brains. In another, the Media Lab receives an enormous payment from Epstein in 1998, and is confronting the issue of what to do with the money in 2006 when Epstein's crimes are revealed.

In both of these timelines, we could indeed struggle with your "only question" legitimately and all stroke our beards wisely and ponder the age-old "fruit of a poisonous tree" questions and self-congratulate about how nuanced we are and attempt to Google up impressive sounding concepts from half-remembered philosophy courses.

However, back in this, the most absurd timeline and the one we're actually living in, Epstein is alive and well and the Media Lab has to decide what to do with the offer of money from an already rich convicted pedophile who is clearly attempting to create legitimacy for themselves and gain access to influential people.

The first order effect of accepting this money - the consequence - is to rehabilitate Epstein. It declares to the world that this person is not beyond the pale; he is, in fact, a legitimate person who should still have a role a the highest of tables. It is not just a moral decision in terms of moral absolutism; it's a decision very much rooted in terms of consequences. It is baffling to me the extent to which you don't understand this and resort to falsely characterising my position as moral absolutism.

The Nazi medical experiments create a much more complex issue in that the evil is done already - although there is a reasonable argument to say that such things should be deleted from all thought and never legitimised by use - but if you are weighing potential saved lives you might fold on moral absolutism in that case. One can make similar arguments about taking Epstein's money in my alternate timelines.

Finally, let's not sneer at "optics". From a pragmatic perspective, taking money from convicted pedophiles after they've been convicted is bad optics for a good reason. It sends a clear message to everyone - abusers and abused alike - that it's pretty easy to bounce back after being an abuser and it's No Big Deal. It was an amazingly stupid move. It was 2008, not 1958. It's not like we all just suddenly learned "hey, don't rape 14-year-olds" last year from a hashtag.