The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [137]
There are other doctrines, interests and concerns that also worry about what science will find out. Perhaps, they suggest, it’s better not to know. If men and women turn out to have different hereditary propensities, won’t this be used as an excuse for the former to suppress the latter? If there’s a genetic component of violence, might this justify repression of one ethnic group by another, or even precautionary incarceration? If mental illness is just brain chemistry, doesn’t this unravel our efforts to keep a grasp on reality or to be responsible for our actions? If we are not the special handiwork of the Creator of the Universe, if our basic moral laws are merely invented by fallible lawgivers, isn’t our struggle to maintain an orderly society undermined?
I suggest that in every one of these cases, religious or secular, we are much better off if we know the best available approximation to the truth, and if we keep before us a keen apprehension of the errors our interest group or belief system has committed in the past. In every case the imagined dire consequences of the truth being generally known are exaggerated. And again, we are not wise enough to know which lies, or even which shadings of the facts, can competently serve some higher social purpose, especially in the long run.
16
When Scientists Know Sin
The mind of man - how far will it advance? Where will its daring impudence find limits? If human villainy and human life shall wax in due proportion, if the son shall always grow in wickedness past his father, the gods must add another world to this that all the sinners may have space enough.
Euripides, Hippolytus (428 BC)
In a post-war meeting with President Harry S Truman, J. Robert Oppenheimer - the scientific director of the Manhattan nuclear weapons project - mournfully commented that scientists had bloody hands; they had now known sin. Afterwards, Truman instructed his aides that he never wished to see Oppenheimer again. Sometimes scientists are castigated for doing evil, and sometimes for warning about the evil uses to which science may be put.
More often, science is taken to task because it and its products are said to be morally neutral, ethically ambiguous, as readily employed in the service of evil as of good. This is an old indictment. It goes back probably to the flaking of stone tools and the domestication of fire. Since technology has been with our ancestral line from before the first human, since we are a technological species, this problem is not so much one of science as of human nature. By this I don’t mean that science has no responsibility for the misuse of its findings. It has profound responsibility, and the more powerful its products the greater its responsibility.
Like assault weapons and market derivatives, the technologies that allow us to alter the global environment that sustains us should mandate caution and prudence. Yes, it’s the same old humans who have made it so far. Yes, we’re developing new technologies as we always have. But when the weaknesses we’ve always had join forces with a capacity to do harm on an unprecedented planetary scale, something more is required of us - an emerging ethic that also must be established on an unprecedented planetary scale.
Sometimes scientists try to have it both ways: to take credit for those applications of science that enrich our lives, but to distance themselves from the instruments of death, intentional and inadvertent, that also trace back to scientific research. The Australian philosopher John Passmore writes in his book Science and Its Critics:
The Spanish Inquisition sought to avoid direct responsibility for the burning of heretics by handing them over