touch foxglove NOW 
Alright, no more discussion of the limits of free trade. Let's talk about technology. I saw a lively debate on here between @TheTroubleWithPibbles,
@August,
@Geralt_of_Uganda, etc, about whether it is ethical to develop technologies...
Scenario
This, of course, actually happened
J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist.
being so brilliant, he was able to conceive of, and help build, the greatest weapon known to mankind - the atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer, of course, didn't know the long term consequences of developing such a weapon - but he understood the sheer destructive potential of such a device.
Your question is: Was Oppenheimer acting ethically by assisting to develop the atomic bomb?
NOTE: In this hypothetical, history is at a crossroads. You don't know what will happen in the future - whether the device you created will be used to end life on earth or to usher in a new golden age.
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Extremely ethical to the point of being the most ethical action possible at the time.
Like Rooseveltโs philosophy; in order to have peace and prosperity you must have a very large fighting force ready to dissuade anyone with ill intent, โSpeak softly and carry a big stickโ and all that.
The presence of THIS big stick has saved humanity an unknown countless amount of times from itself since its inception, and everyone arguing that the potential destruction it can cause makes its existence unethical are r-slurred.
People here are arguing that there wasnโt a threat to humanity until the bomb was created and that neither Japan nor Germany were a big enough threat to develop something so dangerous to deal with but thatโs just wrong. The japanese were fiercly loyal to a literal god-emperor who was telling them the entire planet should be subservient to them and were doing things like rounding up the women on islands, chaining their children to them, pushing them into caves and giving the mothers a grenade with the pen pulled on it to try not to drop.
They were willing to commit literally any atrocity and affront to ethics in order to gain control over enemy countries. If they won the war, the half of the world they divy up or win from Germany to control afterwards would be something so unimaginably cruel and violence filled that EVEN IF the world was consumed in atomic hellfire and we were turned into a tomb planet, that would STILL be a more ethical route with less suffering than giving 1940s Japan control of things.
Nothing is more unethical or genocidally threatening to humanity than a slant with ideas of world domination- nukes are basically savior angels delivering us from evil
ownership and oppression.
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still unemployed then?
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philosophy majors seething at this reply
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you've earned yourself a pin
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I think you're conflating the question of whether it was ethical to fight Japs by any available means with whether the development of nuclear weapons by Oppenheier was justified
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Itโs only ethical in the sense that it was the true reflection of total war and blood thirst at the time. Look at the history of their battles and bombings, in other matters they were just as crazy. I really do believe that men were eager and excited to kill men and ultimately thatโs why
happened.
Is it ethical to be eager and excited for (illegal) murder? To me it is not, but maybe for a psychopath or a tough hardened warrior the answer is different.
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