Science and morality

[inocente]

I don’t believe that all the people who live in a democracy are morally responsible for everything their government does. Were the people consulted about the decision to drop the two Bombs? Obviously they couldn’t be because it was top secret but it doesn’t follow that all US citizens are guilty of that crime against humanity.

Whatever we think of the morality, it cannot be called a crime, since doing so would mean there was an offense punishable by law, but no legal treaty banned it (nor I think does any to this day).

The American people elected that government to make decisions on their behalf, and never refused to take responsibility for their government’s actions. Nor btw did the British people, whose government gave prior consent to the dropping of the bombs under the Quebec Agreement, after contributing materially to the extent that the Manhattan project commander said the Bomb wouldn’t otherwise have been ready.

It remains that the decision to run the project, costing $26 billion in today’s money and employing 130,000 people, and the decision to drop the Bomb, was under total control of a democratically elected government, as opposed to your claimed “science is often a monster over which we have no control”.

 

[inocente]

When Einstein saw the results at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he quickly forgot about that so-called patriotism and became a rabid advocate for disarmament. This was yet another example of a great scientist who got some wisdom but got it too late to stop the genie from getting out of the bottle.

Germany never developed the bomb, so that particular weapon of mass destruction, like the so-called ones supposedly being prepared for our destruction by Sadam Hussein, never really existed. The so-called intelligence was not so intelligent in either case.

So here we are, thanks to those patriotic scientists who really did it because they were fascinated by the prospects of mass annihilation, here we are sitting on top of an arsenal of nuclear weapons sufficient to annihilate human civilization, and of course there is no one patriotic enough to stop the madness.

The Nazi nuclear weapon project was called the Uranprojekt, and part of it was the heavy water plant at Vemork. Several Norwegians and British were killed in attempts to sabotage the plant, culminating in the sinking of a ferry carrying the last shipment of heavy water to Germany, in which civilians died.

Do you have any evidence that those on the Manhattan project were not patriots but instead were “fascinated by the prospects of mass annihilation”? Please cite evidence for that, and for your other strange claim that the Nazis never had a nuclear weapon program.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Do you have any evidence that those on the Manhattan project were not patriots but instead were “fascinated by the prospects of mass annihilation”? Please cite evidence for that, and for your other strange claim that the Nazis never had a nuclear weapon program.

The Nazis never developed the bomb. pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nazis-and-the-bomb.html

"Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. "

Robert Oppenheimer

 

[inocente]

The Nazis never developed the bomb. pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/nazis-and-the-bomb.html

"Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. "

Robert Oppenheimer

Hopefully all combatants in all wars later reflect on the morality of what their duty required of them during wartime, although they may not have his eloquence. But one man’s reflections after the fact is not evidence for your judgment that all the scientists joined the Manhattan project because they were “fascinated by the prospects of mass annihilation”.

Do you believe God will judge them all on such flimsy “evidence”?

Obviously the Nazi Uranprojekt never succeeded in developing the Bomb, since such a barbaric regime wouldn’t have hesitated to use it as often as necessary to bomb the Allies into submission. But in the middle of a war which would claim the highest death toll ever, estimated between 60 and 85 million, your government didn’t know the Nazis would not succeed and decided America had to develop a deterrent.

Do you believe God will judge that government from the comfort of your safe armchair with the benefit of your hindsight?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Do you believe God will judge that government from the comfort of your safe armchair with the benefit of your hindsight?

Yes, and I believe he will judge the scientists as much as the government. After all, as Oppenheimer admits, it was their idea.

God expects us to exercise the wisdom of foresight along with that of hindsight.

If and when the first nuclear weapon hits America, the praise of Einstein and Oppenheimer in America will turn to a curse.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Do you believe God will judge them all on such flimsy “evidence”?

The evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hardly flimsy, even as you judge it from the comfort of your safe armchair. .

 

[Charlemagne_III]

“So far as I can see the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained mankind for ages.” — Mahatma Gandhi

“Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” — John F. Kennedy

“In 1945, therefore, I proved a sentimental fool; and Mr. Truman could safely have classified me among the whimpering idiots he did not wish admitted to the presidential office. For I felt that no man has the right to decree so much suffering, and that science, in providing and sharpening the knife and in upholding the ram, had incurred a guilt of which it will never get rid. It was at that time that the nexus between science and murder became clear to me. For several years after the somber event, between 1947 and 1952, I tried desperately to find a position in what then appeared to me as a bucolic Switzerland,—but I had no success.” — Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire

“It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, 'My God what have I done?” — Ursula K. Le Guin

 

[Aloysium]

. . . an amoral scientific society which ignores the rights of animals and is guilty of diabolical cruelty. PETA has opened my eyes to the immense number of atrocities being committed against our fellow creatures in our so-called civilised world - in addition to man’s inhumanity to man. Evil seems to have no limits… That is where materialism demonstrates that it is a hopelessly inadequate explanation of reality and the secular society is doomed to destroy not only itself but all life on this planet unless moral and spiritual values are recognised and restored by governments and the United Nations. Religion is not a luxury but a necessity in a world dominated by greed and the lust for power.

Necessity if moral and spiritual values and the continued existence of the humankind mean anything. Of what significance are they to exploding supernovae.

To address another part of your post, let’s take a common situation in any medical school. A dog scheduled for euthenasia at the pound is brought in to demonstrate the physiology described in the textbooks. What many see as scared little doggy, is anesthetized. Various tubes and wires are attached to measure such metabolic events such as heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen and carbon dioxide saturation, ECG, gastric secretion and so on. Various chemicals such as oxygen, adrenaline and other nervous system neurotransmitters, along with a variety of medications are introduced and/or their levels manipulated to see the physiological effect. As the dog’s life is terminated, so too part of the students’. A living creature becomes a biochemical process and with it a relationship between a person and life is diminished. This emptiness flows into that with humanity - we see ourselves reduced to an animal, then to reduced to matter. Why would anyone participating in such a world have any second thoughts about abortion. I suppose, save those pangs of conscience that are born in a greater, lost land, the memory of which grows dimmer and dimmer.

 

[tonyrey]

Necessity if moral and spiritual values and the continued existence of the humankind mean anything. Of what significance are they to exploding supernovae.

To address another part of your post, let’s take a common situation in any medical school. A dog scheduled for euthenasia at the pound is brought in to demonstrate the physiology described in the textbooks. What many see as scared little doggy, is anesthetized. Various tubes and wires are attached to measure such metabolic events such as heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen and carbon dioxide saturation, ECG, gastric secretion and so on. Various chemicals such as oxygen, adrenaline and other nervous system neurotransmitters, along with a variety of medications are introduced and/or their levels manipulated to see the physiological effect. As the dog’s life is terminated, so too part of the students’. A living creature becomes a biochemical process and with it a relationship between a person and life is diminished. This emptiness flows into that with humanity - we see ourselves reduced to an animal, then to reduced to matter. Why would anyone participating in such a world have any second thoughts about abortion. I suppose, save those pangs of conscience that are born in a greater, lost land, the memory of which grows dimmer and dimmer.

I entirely agree with you, Aloysium. I 'm sure it can be proved logically that our virtues bring their own reward and our vices their own punishment. We dehumanise ourselves if we treat animals like objects with no intrinsic value. Why should we be any different? Our power over them doesn’t justify treating them like objects with no value of their own…

 

[inocente]

The evidence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hardly flimsy, even as you judge it from the comfort of your safe armchair. .

You’re the one judging, not me.

You’ve provided no evidence for your claim that the hundreds of scientists who joined the Manhattan Project at the request of your wartime government did so because “they were fascinated by the prospects of mass annihilation”.

We can all agree that Newton’s innocent question about mass-energy equivalence finally led to unwanted bad consequences some centuries later: “Are not the gross bodies and light convertible into one another, and may not bodies receive much of their activity from the particles of light which enter their composition?”

What I am contesting is the notion of washing our hands of the sins of all humans by making scientists a scapegoat. The reason I’m contesting it will be clear if you replace the word “scientists” with the word “Jews” in the previous sentence.

 

[inocente]

To address another part of your post, let’s take a common situation in any medical school. A dog scheduled for euthenasia at the pound is brought in to demonstrate the physiology described in the textbooks. What many see as scared little doggy, is anesthetized. Various tubes and wires are attached to measure such metabolic events such as heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen and carbon dioxide saturation, ECG, gastric secretion and so on. Various chemicals such as oxygen, adrenaline and other nervous system neurotransmitters, along with a variety of medications are introduced and/or their levels manipulated to see the physiological effect. As the dog’s life is terminated, so too part of the students’. A living creature becomes a biochemical process and with it a relationship between a person and life is diminished. This emptiness flows into that with humanity - we see ourselves reduced to an animal, then to reduced to matter. Why would anyone participating in such a world have any second thoughts about abortion. I suppose, save those pangs of conscience that are born in a greater, lost land, the memory of which grows dimmer and dimmer.

I looked it up, it doesn’t seem to be a common practice. There appear to be two American medical schools using live animals, in both case pigs - Johns Hopkins, and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Americans can email the schools to protest - pcrm.org/research/edtraining/meded

 

[Bradski]

If and when the first nuclear weapon hits America, the praise of Einstein and Oppenheimer in America will turn to a curse.

If it wasn’t for Oppenheimer and Einstein and Feynman and so many others, we’d be calling you Schultz, not Charles. Assuming that your parents managed to live through the rain of German nuclear missiles.

 

[inocente]

If it wasn’t for Oppenheimer and Einstein and Feynman and so many others, we’d be calling you Schultz, not Charles. Assuming that your parents managed to live through the rain of German nuclear missiles.

Fenyman on the death of his wife Arlene from tuberculosis when he was young and at Los Alamos:

*"I went for a walk outside. Maybe I was fooling myself, but I was surprised how I didn’t feel what I thought people would expect to feel under the circumstances. I wasn’t delighted, but I didn’t feel terribly upset, perhaps because I had known for seven years that something like this was going to happen.

I didn’t know how I was going to face all my friends up at Los Alamos. I didn’t want people with long faces talking to me about it. When I got back (yet another tire went flat on the way), they asked me what happened.

“She’s dead. And how’s the program going?”

They caught on right away that I didn’t want to moon over it.

(I had obviously done something to myself psychologically: Reality was so important–I had to understand what really happened to Arlene, physiologically–that I didn’t cry until a number of months later, when I was in Oak Ridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the window, and I thought Arlene would like one of them. That was too much for me.)"*

He had married her knowing she would shortly die. He loved her. Atom scientists are human too.

 

[Bradski]

I happened to read that only last week. He recounts it in Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman.

He was quite a character. Which is probably the biggest understatement I’ll make this week.

Edit: If you didn’t know, that’s his picture alongside my name. Something of a hero of mine.

 

[inocente]

I happened to read that only last week. He recounts it in Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman.

He was quite a character. Which is probably the biggest understatement I’ll make this week.

Edit: If you didn’t know, that’s his picture alongside my name. Something of a hero of mine.

Wrote the book on QED, played a mean bongo, great educator, solved the Challenger disaster - yes, if you’re going to have a hero then imho you couldn’t do better.

Here’s a short video of him for upsetting metaphysicians - youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo

 

[Charlemagne_III]

You’re the one judging, not me.

You are the one who has judged the scientific community to be right and patriotic in choosing to create weapons of incredible mass destruction capable of wiping out human civilization. This lack of foresight by Einstein, Oppenheimer and others you cannot excuse on the basis of patriotic sentiment. Scientists ought to be patriotic to the human race. They should not be dedicated to its destruction.

I’m really appalled that you are defending scientists at the worst and most shameful moment in their history. It seems that so far as you are concerned scientists can do no wrong, because if there ever was a moment when they could, it was certainly the whole-hearted invention of massively annihilating nuclear weapons.

 

[fisherman_carl]

It can give us information we need to be able to make decisions on what is right or wrong.

Give us an example, Bradski!

Well, OK. We can do studies to see if children brought up in single sex families are better or worse off than those with male and female parents. We can then use the results of those studies to make decisions based on facts rather than emotions.

We can do studies to investigate the validity of ID. We can then use the results to decide whether it should be taught in schools.

We can do lots of fun stuff like this. Whether something is right or wrong is a matter for reasonable people to decide using reasonable arguments. But we do need facts. And science can provide those in many cases.

Let’s hear it for science!

Science can not give us morality. However, as you say it can give us facts that can help us determine morality. For instance, if science tells us that the fetus is a growing human individual then we shouldn’t kill it. Nevertheless, even though science does tell us this, it doesn’t dictate to us our morality. If it did then abortion would have been outlawed by now.

 

[GracieRuth]

#1 never. Science is not designed to form moral judgments.

However, science can provide us with more information upon which we can base our moral judgments. For example, we now understand from science that depression interferes in a person’s ability to think straight, thus we can morally reason that a suicide due to depression cannot be a mortal sin.

 

[tonyrey]

#1 never. Science is not designed to form moral judgments.

However, science can provide us with more information upon which we can base our moral judgments. For example, we now understand from science that depression interferes in a person’s ability to think straight, thus we can morally reason that a suicide due to depression cannot be a mortal sin.

Irrefutable! Although some extremists contend that **all **our behaviour has a scientific explanation thereby contradicting themselves…

 

[tonyrey]

You are the one who has judged the scientific community to be right and patriotic in choosing to create weapons of incredible mass destruction capable of wiping out human civilization. This lack of foresight by Einstein, Oppenheimer and others you cannot excuse on the basis of patriotic sentiment. Scientists ought to be patriotic to the human race. They should not be dedicated to its destruction.

I’m really appalled that you are defending scientists at the worst and most shameful moment in their history. It seems that so far as you are concerned scientists can do no wrong, because if there ever was a moment when they could, it was certainly the whole-hearted invention of massively annihilating nuclear weapons.

And it was with the express intention of using them in Japan…