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Diane's email: "can" vs. "must"
Posted By: Issachar, on host 206.138.46.254
Date: Friday, October 2, 1998, at 08:13:08

In her email posted in today's Site Journal, regarding the "social effects of the microwave", Diane made one statement which should be said far more often than it usually is:

"The moral of the story is...just because we can do a thing, doesn't mean we must."

This principle lies at the heart of our lives in a world experiencing rapid technological advance. The issue was raised last year when scientists began to successfully clone complex living things such as sheep. It has long been raised in regards to the development of nuclear weaponry.

The question could be restated as, "is technology susceptible to moral restraint and control?" The usual reply, from one sector or another, is that it matters little whether or not we try to impose ethical and moral restrictions on the development and use of technology, simply because somebody, somewhere, will do "it", and once that happens, a snowball effect will ensue. Inevitably, that is, whatever can be done, *will* be done, whether or not it "should".

To oversimplify matters somewhat, a large part of the problem is that as technologists we are trained to focus only upon the goal of realizing the new technology itself, a task which is carried out in a vacuum as it were, insulated from societal or moral considerations. It is assumed that the right or wrong application of a new technology properly belongs in the province of other members of society, such as ministers, politicians, concerned citizens, etc.

This insulation of the workman from the effects and the moral content of his work is easy to accomplish and produces disastrous results. To choose one of our century's most heinous examples, it was the means whereby doctors and scientists under the Nazi regime were able to justify their experiments upon living and dead Jewish prisoners. In the post-war trials, they defended themselves via the justification that they were merely trying to benefit society as a whole, and their subjects were condemned to die anyway. Why pick on the technologist who is only trying to do his job, they pleaded.

Is this a relevant example? Few of us are faced with the prospect of pursuing technological goals at the cost of destroying human lives, after all ... or so we think. What will be the experience of our children and their children over the next century? They are very likely to inherit a world depleted of its natural resources, an unstable economy, and a poorer standard of living than we have enjoyed. This is because we seldom take into account the long-term effects of our pursuit of things that will make our lives easier today. We are responsible not only for our own lives and those of our already-living descendants; we are responsible for the well-being of generations that will arise after we have already passed away. What we "can", "should", and "did in fact do" today will make a monumental difference to them.

I am not opposed to technological progress. Rather, I am for the process of reaching maturity as a society the way we mature as individuals, and come to understand the need to make personal sacrifices in order to benefit others and ourselves, both now and in the future. And I'm for applying this maturity carefully to our pursuit of technological advances, which so commonly suffers from a tunnel-vision approach.

The issue is very complex, and what I have posted is somewhat disjointed, a survey rather than a tightly focused argument. But multiple points must first be introduced into a discussion, and then receive fuller treatment and elaboration. Diane's simple "can" vs. "must" is more crucial a statement than we usually realize. I wish more people echoed her sentiment, and more often.

David "Issachar" D.

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