Accounting for the Dearth of Ex Ante Ethical Reasoning with Regard to Technology

 

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”—J. Robert Oppenheimer

I found this remark quoted in Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice (2009): 211. See: In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: USAEC Transcript of the Hearing before Personnel Security Board (Washington, DC: Government Publishing Office, 1954).

Consider: [….]

NEWTON: Möbius. What about the—the Principle of Universal Discovery.

MÖBIUS: Yes, something on those lines, too. I did it out of curiosity, as a practical corollary to my theoretical investigations. Why play the innocent? We have to face the consequences of our scientific thinking. It was my duty to work out the effects that would be produced by my Unitary Theory of Elementary Particles and by my discoveries in the field of gravitation. The result is—devastating. New and inconceivable forces would be unleashed, making possible a technical advance that would transcend the wildest flights of fancy if my findings were to fall into the hands of mankind.

EINSTEIN: And that can scarcely be avoided.

NEWTON: The only question is: who’s going to get at them first?

    MÖBIUS laughs.

MÖBIUS: You’d like that for your own Intelligence Service, wouldn’t you, Kilton, and the military machine behind it?

NEWTON: And why not? It seems to me, if it can restore the greatest physicist of all time to the confraternity of the physical sciences, any military machine is a sacred instrument. It’s nothing more nor less than a question of the freedom of scientific knowledge. It doesn’t matter who guarantees that freedom. I give my services to any system, providing that system leaves me alone. I know there’s a lot of talk nowadays about physicists’ moral responsibilities. We suddenly find ourselves confronted with our own fears and we have a fit of morality. This is nonsense. We have far-reaching, pioneering work to do and that’s all that should concern us. Whether or not humanity has the wit to follow the new trails that we are blazing is its own look-out, not ours.

[….]

MÖBIUS: Extraordinary. Each of you is trying to palm off a different theory, yet the reality you offer me is the same in both cases: a prison. I’d prefer the madhouse. Here at least I feel safe from the exactions of power politicians.

EINSTEIN: But after all, one must take certain risks.

MÖBIUS: There are certain risks that one may not take: the destruction of humanity is one. We know what the world has done with the weapons it already possesses; we can imagine what it would do with those that my researches make possible, and it is these considerations that governed my conduct. I was poor. I had a wife and three children. Fame beckoned from the university; industry tempted me with money. Both courses were too dangerous. I should have had to publish my researches, and the consequences would have been the overthrow of all scientific knowledge and the breakdown of the economic structure of our society. A sense of responsibility compelled me to choose another course. I threw up my academic career, said no to industry, and abandoned my family to its fate. I took on the fool’s cap and bells. I let it be known that King Solomon kept appearing to me, and before long, I was clapped into a madhouse.

NEWTON: But that couldn’t solve anything.

[….]

MÖBIUS: You must stay with me here in the madhouse.

NEWTON: What! Us?

MÖBIUS: Both of you.

    Silence.

[….]

MÖBIUS: You inform your superiors that you have made a mistake, that I really am mad.

EINSTEIN: Then we’d be stuck here for the rest of our lives. Nobody’s going to lose any sleep over a broken-down spy.

MÖBIUS: But it’s the one chance I have to remain undetected. Only in the madhouse can we be free. Only in the madhouse can we think our own thoughts. Outside they would be dynamite.

NEWTON: But damn it all, we’re not mad.

MÖBIUS: But we are murderers.

    They stare at him in perplexity.

NEWTON: I resent that!

MÖBIUS: Anyone who takes life is a murderer, and we have taken life. [….]

From Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play (Act Two), The Physicists (James Kirkup, tr.) (New York: Grove Press, 1964 [1962]).

Comments

[Jimbino]

You ought to take a page from Sasha Volokh's recent post at www.volokh.com where, as an exercise, he presents the case for liberalism (i.e. our American democrat socialism). Why don't you try to present a case for the rights of atheists and agnostics in our religious society?

Though famous atheists like Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot have tortured and killed millions in this century, they did not do so in the name of atheism and there is no atheist manifesto that I know of that promotes torturing religious people. Humanists, one kind of atheist, refudiate such behavior, of course.

But in this century, in the name of religion, the world has endured untold misery, mostly at the hands of Muslims. I don't know about you, but I find that genocide, honor killings, subjugation and enslavement of women, killing of apostates and atheists wherever found and other disgusting acts derive directly from teachings in the Koran. While the Bible OT also countenanced such abominations, they mostly died out with the RC Grand Inquisition, except for the continuing enslavement, maltreatment and conversion of native Latin Americans (as in Brazil).

You may not think it important that atheists have no representation in chaplaincies, Congress, White House or the Supreme Court, that we still endure blue laws and crucifixes hanging in our hospital rooms, that we are forced to tolerate god on our coins and pledges, and that we are presented exclusively with judges, prosecutors, juries and even defense attorneys that have compromised any possibility of justice by affirming belief in a Supreme Being.

Wars of liberation of slaves and women have been fought over less onerous persecutions than these, and if you want a war over my right to be free of your religion, I will join it! You will find that I am no Luther, Bruno, Hus, or Wykliffe whom you can threaten and burn without repercussions. I will take thousands of you oppressive religion practitioners with me, as did Sampson.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Let me know when a religion is formed as a result of a play.

When I think of "torment" in the 2oth and 21st centuries, religion does not quickly come to mind, although the Belgian Congo, World Wars I and II (including aerial bombing of civilians...), the Holocaust, fascism, Stalinist gulags, the Great Chinese Famine (1958-191), aerial bombing of civilians in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam, genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia...; persistent poverty, hunger and starvation, etc., etc.

There's "dirty hands" everywhere, and not only or mainly among religious folks.

Please have the last word.

[Jimbino]

It's play all right. But the problem is that folks form entire religions out of fictional works like the Bible, Book of Mormon, L. Ron Hubbard's and Heinlein's, then go on to torment us for ages.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Incidentally, should you be interested in my general views on science, a taste of same is found here: http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/08/science-technology-basic-bibliography.html

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

It's a play, you might want to read it in that light....

[Jimbino]

There's some nonsense here.

First of all, there are lots of us out here who are anti-natalist, have chosen not to breed ourselves and who gladly contemplate the termination of the human race (as do Christians, by the way). I just hope not to be condemned to spend eternity with Baptists or listening to Hail Marys.

The millions of other species on earth would rejoice, and these characters, if they were real scientists, would understand. Furthermore, a fantastic new scientific discovery in no way would lead to an "overthrow of all scientific knowledge" any more than Newton was overthrown by Einstein.

[Steven Shiffrin]

Wonderful. Thanks Patrick.