The development of the atomic and hydrogen bomb can be seen as a kind of Campbellian hero's journey(see 1.1.1) taken by a large group of scientists and engineers, each of whom made a unique contribution and reflected differently on its meaning. As this story illustrates, in the course of this journey, the hero will be forced to decide whether she or he is a moral agent, capable of making ethical decisions, or just someone carried along by the lure of the quest.
The scientists discussed above were expert practitioners in their fields. To be an ethical practitioner, one must both be a virtuous person and be capable of moral reasoning. I will skirt the long arguments about what constitutes virtue and simply argue that a virtuous scientist or inventor is one who wants to make the world a better place. One can have this virtuous goal, and have no idea how to accomplish it--the same way that one could have the goal of inventing a new technology and have no idea how to proceed. For example, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, felt he was working to create a better world by making war impossibly horrible. He was wrong. Many designers of nuclear weapons used similar reasoning. Let us hope they are right.
Therefore, it is not sufficient to be virtuous--the ethical practitioner must also be capable of moral reasoning. If I am a scientist or an engineer and I want to make the world a better place, I have to be able to think about what that means.
This book is not the place for an extended discussion of moral theory (Werhane, 1994). However, we can consider simplified versions of two moral perspectives as examples. Do I want to adopt a utilitarian perspective, promoting the greatest good for the greatest number? Or do I want to take a respect-for-persons (RP) view, holding paramount the individual's right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' (Harris, Pritchard, & Rabins, 1995)?
These two perspectives can come into conflict. For example, consider the bombing of Hiroshima. Szilard's utilitarian scientists could make a good case that this terrible weapon actually saved lives in the long run using cost-benefit analysis. The cost of bombing Hiroshima was negligible in terms of American lives, though terrible in terms of Japanese--it killed about 100,000 people. If one assumes that the alternative was the invasion of Japan, the cost of not bombing Hiroshima might have been half-a-million American lives and perhaps four times as many Japanese. Szilard and a group of scientists proposed another alternative--a demonstration on an area with virtually no population, to warn the Japanese that we had a weapon of immense power and persuade them to surrender. The cost of this alternative was using one of the two bombs in existence, and the benefit was uncertain, in the eyes of scientists like Oppenheimer.
From an RP perspective, one could argue that it is never permissible to launch a weapon that is so indiscriminate it kills tens of thousands of civilians outright and leaves thousands of others to die slowly and horribly from radiation sickness.
The dropping of the bomb illustrates another problem in moral reasoning, often referred to as the slippery slope. In the beginning, Allied bomb raids were directed primarily at military targets, though it was often hard to distinguish between military and civilian. Gradually, the scope of bombing was broadened until Curtis Lemay invented fire-bombing, a devastating tactic that allowed him to burn large parts of Japanese cities, killing thousands. It is a huge step from targeting military installations to dropping an atomic bomb; it is a smaller step from destroying cities with conventional bombs to destroying them with a new weapon. Once the U.S. and its allies decided that Japanese civilians were integral to the war effort and had to be targeted, they started down a slippery slope that made additional decisions easier and more obvious. One participant in the final discussions on dropping the bomb argued that the "number of people that would be killed by the bomb would not be greater in general magnitude than the number already killed in fire raids."(Rhodes, 1986, p.648)
Lise Meitner, the physicist who co-discovered fission with Otto Frisch, observed this slippery slope first-hand as Germany drifted into Nazism. There were good Germans in the physics community who were not Nazis, like her collaborator Otto Hahn. As the Nazis gradually took more and more control and started to oppress the Jews, he became focused on saving his institute and asked Meitner, a Jew, not to appear at work any more. "He has, in essence, thrown me out" (Sime, 1996, p.185).
Hahn later helped Meitner emigrate to Sweden, sent some of her things along and tried to keep her in touch with the ongoing research; however, in the end, he denigrated her work in favor of his own and scarcely mentioned her critical work in his Nobel acceptance speech. Even worse, in Meitner's view, was the way the German physics community, with the exception of Max Planck and one or two others, refused to accept any responsibility for the Nazi horrors and even developed the fiction that German physicists had not developed an atomic bomb because they were more ethical than the Allied scientists! In a letter to Hahn right after the war, she wrote:
You all worked for Nazi Germany and you did not even try passive resistance. Granted to absolve your consciences you helped some oppressed person here and there, but millions of innocent people were murdered and there was no protest. I must write this to you, as so much depends upon your understanding of what you have permitted to take place...I and many others are of the opinion that one path for you would be to deliver an open statement that you are aware that through your passivity you share responsibility for what has happened, and that you have the need to work for whatever can be done to make amends....In the last few days one has heard of the unbelievable gruesome things in the concentration camps; it overwhelms everything one previously feared. When I heard on English radio a very detailed report by the English and Americans about Belsen and Buchenwald, I began to cry out loud and lay awake all night. And if you had seen those people who were brought here from the camps. One should take a man like Heisenberg [prominent German physicist] and millions like him, and force them to look at these camps and the martyred people. (Sime, 1996, p. 310)
Another element that enters into moral decisions is whether one should take the position that the end justifies the means, or whether the means is the end (Krishnamurti, 1970). The ring in J.R.R. Tolkien's classic Lord of the Rings is the archetypal example. The heroes in this story were tempted to take this ring and use it, for it could give the right hero enough power to overthrow the Dark Lord, Sauron--but that hero would him or herself be corrupted by the ring and turned into an evil as great as Sauron. This ring has been used to create and control other rings; this set of rings represents a powerful technology which the heroes have to reject because it is a means that can only produce evil, regardless of the initial ends of those who use it.
Consider another example. Abraham Lincoln came to the White House in 1861 on a platform which called for allowing slavery to continue in those states where it was currently legal, but not be allowed to expand to any new territories. When the states of the South seceded and then fired on Fort Sumter, he decided that the preservation of the United States was worth going to war. He was careful to preserve the right to slavery in border states he wanted to keep in the Union; even the Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves in the rebellious states.
Lincoln was therefore willing both to go to war and preserve slavery in order to restore the Union. Furthermore, along the way, he suspended or violated aspects of the bill of rights, including habeas corpus. Clearly, here was a man who felt that the end, preserving the Union, was worth almost any means. Furthermore, he made a utilitarian calculation: in the short term, thousands of Americans might be killed, but in the long term, "government by the people, of the people and for the people" would not "perish from the earth".
Even Lincoln did not anticipate the horrible butcher's bill that resulted from this war, but although it caused him great anguish, he never flinched. He initiated a draft, supported generals who fought long and bloody campaigns and refused to discuss any peace terms that recognized the Confederacy's right to exist. Furthermore, he spent a great deal of his time with inventors who claimed to have developed new technologies for killing including repeating rifles, machine guns and breech-loading cannons (Bruce, 1956). Without Lincoln's intervention, the North's tardy adoption of mortar flotillas and repeating rifles would have been delayed even more.
While Lincoln had no atomic weapons at his disposal, he embraced the idea of using a new kind of incendiary shell on Charleston, a precursor to the fire-bombings perfected by Curtis LeMay in World War II.
But Lincoln would not stoop to any means. He might have postponed or even canceled the 1864 election, on the grounds that it was a condition of national emergency. However, this means would have destroyed the end of preserving a democratic union. For Lincoln, the 'bottom line' was that democracy depended on a covenant among all parties to settle their disagreements at the ballot box--not by seceding whenever they felt they did not like a decision made by the majority (Wills, 1992).
Even the issue of slavery was subordinate to preserving the democratic union. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freed only the slaves in the southern states that were rebelling and he couched emancipation as a military necessity, arguing that the slaves were benefiting the southern cause. He also felt he had no constitutional right to abolish slavery; he still regarded himself as President of all the states, and it was these states and the Congress that had the right to amend the constitution. As Oppenheimer put it: "In order to preserve the Union Lincoln had to subordinate the immediate problem of the eradication of slavery..." (Rhodes, 1986, p.763).
We can continue to argue whether in Lincoln's case, the end really justified the means--destroying much of the South in order to save the Union, suspending rights like habeas corpus in order to defend democracy. The point is, he adopted an explicit moral stance, defended it articulately, tried to anticipate its consequences and, when the consequences were worse than he or anyone had anticipated, continued to assume responsibility. Lincoln combined virtue--a deep concern with making the world a better place for others, not just or even primarily for himself--with moral reasoning, mostly from a utilitarian standpoint--what current actions would produce maximum long-term benefits.
Similarly, Einstein acted against his own principles when he drafted the letter to Roosevelt, because he believed the end--countering a possible Nazi bomb--justified the means--building our own bomb. Einstein later regretted writing the letter. Lincoln certainly had qualms, but there is no evidence that, given a chance to do everything over, he would have decided not to prosecute the war.
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