Engineering concepts and applications

Science and Morality

After the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, many people began to question the morality of that type of weapons development. Many scientists hide behind the neutrality of technology in order to evade responsibility for their creations. After all, nuclear technology is not, in and of itself, a negative thing. In fact, nuclear technology can be used to provide a relatively clean source of energy and has many positive medical applications. However, the head engineers of the Manhattan Project were not developing nuclear capabilities for those purposes; they were developing the atomic bomb with the purpose of developing a weapon that would end a war that seemed interminable against an enemy that seemed unstoppable. It is also important to keep in mind that those engineers did not fully understand the implications of the weaponry that they were developing. At the testing sites in New Mexico and Nevada, the head engineers were within close-range as they practiced detonations of nuclear weapons. They sent soldiers into testing areas, with the belief that they would be protected by minimal levels of coverage, which are currently known to offer no protection against atomic fallout. In fact, it was not until the Americans actually detonated the first atomic bombs in Japan that those same engineers could begin to fully understand the impact of the atomic bomb when used as a weapon. Moreover, the problems developed by downwinders, those people downwind from the Nevada testing sites, and the long-term problems experienced by the Japanese who were not killed in the initial blasts, were not yet discovered. It was impossible for scientists to do more than hypothesize about the long-term impact of using an atomic weapon until one was actually used on a populated area.

However, should their ignorance excuse the Manhattan Project engineers from culpability? How broad is the scope of social responsibility that the technicians of scientific advancement have to the public? Humans are a violent species and it is difficult to imagine a scientific advancement that could not be used for weapons application. Is a scientist who develops a technology with full knowledge that it can and will be used as a weapon more culpable than other scientists? At least one such scientist would answer that question in the affirmative. Before the Manhattan Project, it is arguable that Alfred Nobel developed the weapon cable of the largest amount of mass destruction. He regretted that invention and developed the Nobel Peace Prize as a way of trying to make amends for technology that he helped usher into the world. This was despite the fact that Nobel's invention, TNT, had a number of very practical and useful non-weapons applications.

In fact, many people believe that the idea that inventions can have so many different practical applications means that scientists should be able to engage in pure science without regards to morality. If one takes the position that increased knowledge is always a positive, then the pursuit of pure science becomes ethically and morally worthy as a goal. However, to make that assumption, one has to imagine a scenario in which scientists are not driven by their own moral and ethical codes. As soon as they are, then the idea of the pursuit of pure science becomes a fiction. For example, Oppenheimer and the other engineers of the Manhattan Project were not unaware of their role in weapons creation. On the contrary, they were very aware that their project could determine the fate of the war. Moreover, the Americans were not isolated in their pursuit of atomic weaponry; the Germans were also trying to develop nuclear technology. In fact, the Soviets were able to use German scientific advances to develop their own nuclear weapons program within years of the war. Therefore, the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project had two arguments that were not based on scientific neutrality. The first argument was that they were creating a weapon for a side that they believed was morally superior in the war. The second argument was that the advent of nuclear technology was unavoidable, and the United States was in a better position having developed and used the technology before any other world powers.

That is not to say that theory and application cannot be separated into ethical categories. They can be, but those categorizations are always going to be somewhat skewed by the researcher, because no human being is capable of perfect neutrality. To assume that one can research for the sake of purse science really does involve imaging that scientists are not human beings with their own personal motivations. Moreover, this is not an issue that developed in the post-atomic world. Even before the use of the atomic bomb, scientists were motivated by personal motivations that kept them from being completely neutral. Therefore, it might be better to consider the ethics of scientific discovery from a viewpoint that includes the inherent morality of a discovery. For example, chemotherapy could be used as a weapon with very disastrous results, because its side-effects are devastating and can even be fatal. However, chemotherapies are developed with the goal of saving lives. It would be ridiculous to prohibit or discourage the development of new chemotherapies on the grounds that they could be used as weapons. On the other hand, while it may seem responsible to discourage something like the advent of nuclear weaponry, the fact that its invention led to the creation of nuclear energy and might actually be indirectly responsible for saving a number of lives cannot be discounted.

The ethics surrounding the issue of weapons development are so complicated that it is difficult to label my position on them as either inherently deontological or consequential. From a deontological perspective, this activity would be ethical as long as the researchers' motives were good. However, deciding whether a motive is good is so inherently biased that it seems impossible to apply that perspective to weapons development. After all, it was good for Americans to be the first ones to develop nuclear technology, and the use of atomic weaponry may have reduced the total number of deaths during World War II (though there is considerable debate over that fact). However, it is highly unlikely that the Japanese victims of Fat Man and Little Boy would think that the Manhattan Project engineers had good motives. Unfortunately, it is equally difficult to judge the morality of atomic weapons development from a consequentialist perspective. Consequentialists believe that the morality of an action is to be determined by its consequences, not by the motives of the people committing the actions. However, how does one determine the scope of the consequences? For example, the U.S. government maintained that the use of atomic bombs shortened the duration of World War II and saved American lives, an assertion that cannot be proven true or false. Moreover, the fact that third and fourth generation Japanese victims are still suffering the impact of the use of those atomic weapons is something that was not fully understood at the time that the weapons were used. As a result, how can one possibly assess the development and use of atomic weaponry from a consequentialist perspective?