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...
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?
In fact, the reality is that an issue like atomic weapons development has a moral complexity that goes beyond traditional methods for assessing ethics. Can one really assess the moral rightness or wrongness of an action after it has occurred? In fact, can one really judge the good or bad consequences of an action after it has occurred, when doing so involves predicting a future that did not occur? After all, the victors get to write the histories; the people who develop and use vastly superior weapons will always be portrayed as morally superior at the conclusion of a war. What is clear is that atomic weapons were not the game-changer that scientists thought they would be. They did not reduce the number of wars, world-wide, or decrease the violence used in those wars. Therefore, to even ask questions about a post-atomic world seems to make assumptions that atomic weapons changed the world, when the sad reality is that they really did not.
