> Was working on the Manhattan project unethical because it furnished the ability for us to kill humans on an even more vast industrial scale than we previously could have imagined? Perhaps, but it's hard to square this with the reality that the capability of mutually assured destruction has ushered in the longest period of relative peace and global stability in recorded history
Ah, consequentialist versus deontological ethics: neither camp can even hear the other. Some people just pattern-match making thing X (weapons, profits, patents, non-free software, whatever) against individual behavior and condemn individuals doing these things regardless of the actual effects on the real world. Sure, invading Japan instead of bombing it would have killed a million Americans and who knows how many Japanese (real WW2 allied estimate), but ATOM BOMB BAD and PEOPLE WHO DO BAD, and so we get people who treat Los Alamos as some kind of moral black hole.
The world makes sense only when we judge actions by their consequences. The strident and brittle deontological rules that writers of articles that feature the wor d"ethics" in the headline invariably promote are poor approximations of the behaviors that lead to good consequences in the world.
Ah, consequentialist versus deontological ethics: neither camp can even hear the other. Some people just pattern-match making thing X (weapons, profits, patents, non-free software, whatever) against individual behavior and condemn individuals doing these things regardless of the actual effects on the real world. Sure, invading Japan instead of bombing it would have killed a million Americans and who knows how many Japanese (real WW2 allied estimate), but ATOM BOMB BAD and PEOPLE WHO DO BAD, and so we get people who treat Los Alamos as some kind of moral black hole.
The world makes sense only when we judge actions by their consequences. The strident and brittle deontological rules that writers of articles that feature the wor d"ethics" in the headline invariably promote are poor approximations of the behaviors that lead to good consequences in the world.