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V_V comments on A brief history of ethically concerned scientists - Less Wrong
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Comments (150)
Thanks for the clarification.
However, if you are not specifically endorsing scientific secrecy, but just ethics in conducting science, then your opening paragraph seems a bit of a strawman:
Seriously, who is claiming that scientists should not take ethics into consideration while they do research?
It's more that humans specialise. Scientist and moral philosopher aren't always the same person.
OTOH, you don't get let off moral responsibility just because it isn't your job.
It's more that many of the ethical decisions - about what to study and what to do with the resulting knowledge - are taken out of your hands.
Only they are not, because you are not forced to do a job just because you have invested in the training --however strange that may seem to Homo Economicus.
Resigning would probably not affect the subjects proposed for funding, the number of other candidates available to do the work, or the eventual outcome. If you are a scientist who is concerned with ethics there are probably lower-hanging fruit that don't involve putting yourself out of work.
If those lower hanging fruit are things like choosing what to research, then those are not "taken out of your hands" as stated in the grandfather.
Some of those decisions are taken of scientists hands - since they are made by funding bodies. Scientists don't often get to study what they like, they are frequently constrained by what subjects receive funding. That is what I was referring to.
Moral philosophers hopefully aren't the only people who take ethics into account when deciding what to do.
Some data suggests they make roughly the same ethical choices everyone else does.