Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
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 to the
secular arm; to burn them itself, it piously explained, would
be wholly inconsistent with its Christian principles. Few of us
would allow the Inquisition thus easily to wipe its hands clean
of bloodshed; it knew quite well what would happen.
Equally, where the technological application of scientific
discoveries is clear and obvious - as when a scientist works on
nerve gases - he cannot properly claim that such applications
are 'none of his business', merely on the grounds that it is the
military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or
kill. This is even more obvious when the scientist deliberately
offers help to governments, in exchange for funds. If a
scientist, or a philosopher, accepts funds from some such
body as an office of naval research, then he is cheating if he
knows his work will be useless to them and must take some
responsibility for the outcome if he knows that it will be
useful. He is subject, properly subject, to praise or blame in
relation to any innovations which flow from his work.
An important case history is provided by the career of the
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