ABSTRACT
The ethical and the digital When Robert Oppenheimer made his comment about the ‘technically sweet’ solution taking priority over any reflective or ethical assessment, he was choosing, as we argued in the previous chapter, the fairly common technocratic approach of the scientist to his or her work. By way of some mitigation, however, he was at least post facto reflective with respect to his part in the creation of the atomic bomb with his ‘I am become Death’ quote. Moreover, in 1960, just a few years before his actual death, he replied somewhat enigmatically to a question by a reporter who asked if he had any regrets about his role in the Los Alamos research: ‘I do not regret that I had something to do with the technical success of the atomic bomb. It isn’t that I don’t feel bad, it is that I don’t feel worse tonight than I did last night’ (Cotkin 2010: 225, n. 151). Such was the immensity of both the technical challenge of nuclear physics and the consequences for humanity that it would have been impossible for anyone with a modicum of human feeling not to have at least had to struggle with the ethical question. Indeed, it could be argued that his was an ethical decision, insofar as shortening the war through a working bomb came prior to other considerations. And as his words suggest, the psychological consequences of his ethical choice remained with him. The ethical legacy of those critical 1940s choices are with us today in the still-active Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit advocacy group founded in 1968 in the USA and which now has over 200,000 members worldwide. The opening sentence of its Founding Document gives a clear signal of its central ethic concerning the perceived trajectory of the logic of science and technology.
