How helpful is it to say that science is neutral in itself, and what makes it good or evil are political decisions? Scientists, we’re told, deliver knowledge, and it is up to society to decide what to do with it. It is seldom added, except by Marxist critics of science like Richard Lewontin, that “society” – in effect government and big business – decides what knowledge scientists will look for. Most science costs money. Big science costs big money. It is hardly surprising when the suppliers of that money do so on the basis that they will eventually profit.
Yet not all scientific knowledge is morally neutral. Some, I think, is unequivocally morally good. The discoveries of a smallpox vaccine, an antibiotic, or even a contraceptive pill seem to me good in themselves. It is possible to imagine circumstance in which each of them contributes to wickedness or suffering – antibiotics save the life of a young Pol Pot, for instance – but that doesn’t invalidate the general point. Nothing in this world is so completely good that it can’t sometimes serve evil ends.
Some things, however, are so evil in themselves that it’s hard to imagine them serving any good end. The current issue of Nature has an article about Soviet bioweapons research, which was for the most part a tremendous waste of money. But the programme did produce a couple of successes, and one of these was to engineer the bacterium that causes Legionnaire’s disease so that it would also cause the victim’s immune system to attack the myelin sheathing of their nervous system. In effect, they had invented a rapid, contagious form of multiple sclerosis.
This isn’t bad science. It’s wicked, or evil science. There isn’t even any respectable military justification, since such a weapon must, by its nature, be mainly useful against a civilian population. The German developers of poison gas in the first world war at least intended it to be used against enemy soldiers and the same, I believe, is true of the Americans who developed napalm. The fact that both cause particularly horrible deaths only adds to their military efficiency, since it is part of the purpose of a weapon to frighten those of the enemy it cannot kill.
The Soviet scientists who developed this hideous weapon may not have been unusually bad men. It is in the nature of a corrupt system, like Soviet communism, to corrupt the people who work within it so that ordinarily weak men end up doing extraordinarily wicked things.
The leader of one of these efforts, Yury Ovchinnikov, is supposed to have said: “Nobody would give us money for medicine. But offer one weapon and you’ll get full support.”
It’s easy to understand him. That doesn’t excuse him.
Perhaps this is not a problem that only scientists face. Think of all the artists and writers and musicians who under totalitarian regimes must compromise or be silent. But their dilemma can look less sharp if we consider that propaganda makes bad art, so that the writer who produces hackwork in praise of Stalin isn’t actually making a choice between art and silence, but between bad art and silence, which is very much easier: choose silence.
But the science involved in engineering a contagious form of multiple sclerosis is absolutely rock solid, just like the science of the German doctors who froze Russian prisoners to death to discover how hypothermia works.
It really won’t do to say that scientific knowledge is neutral and beautiful, and only the uses to which it is put can have moral significance. Mathematics may be that way, but nothing that changes the world as science does can be lifted above moral judgment.