COSMOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY 113 



hundredfold improved and multiplied. There is then some automatic 

 co-ordination of scientific endeavor and technologic needs, co-ordina- 

 tion achieved without any of the losses entailed when constraint be- 

 comes a general policy for science. 



THE REPROBATION OF SCIENCE 



For better or worse, the automobile affects social mores; radio, tele- 

 vision, and the cinema condition aesthetic taste. Acting through 

 technology, science changes the whole pattern of our culture. Our 

 central-city civilization can first arise only with the development 

 of artificial fertilizers that vastly increase the yield of agriculture, 

 public health measures typically reflected in municipal water sys- 

 tems, and so forth. Today we are most acutely aware of some rather 

 different technologic exploitations of science. Contemplating the nu- 

 clear weapon and its intercontinental carrier, we may well feel stirred 

 to moral rejection of the science that has made them possible. 



Science vastly multiplies and diversifies the range of possibilities 

 humanly attainable, among which we choose those we will make 

 realities. But unless we reject as morally evil the ultimate scientific 

 commitment to the quest for knowledge— and some of course do- 

 moral condemnation of science is nonsense. The scientist makes an 

 ethical judgment, and assumes a moral responsibility, when he elects 

 to take part in the technologic exploitation of science for destructive 

 purposes. "Social demand" may applaud but cannot itself justify such 

 a decision— any more than it can the decision of the smith who turns 

 iron into swords rather than plowshares. But scientific knowledge is 

 ethically as neutral as iron: "evil" only when forged as a sword, 

 "good" when beaten into a plowshare. Conceivably there is some 

 knowledge that can lead only to "evil"; certainly there is no knowl- 

 edge that can lead only to "good." The discovery of some marvelous 

 vaccine against a lethal plague would seem solely "good"; but it 

 opens up also wholly new possibilities for "evil"— an aggressor will 

 wage germ warfare only if he possesses means to protect his own 

 population. Science a curse, its exploitation bringing death and dis- 

 aster? It may be so. But life is commonly esteemed the supreme 

 blessing; and the vast majority of us would not now be alive save for 

 advances in agriculture and hygiene that are also exploitations of 

 science. Ambivalence attaches to the works of science simply because 

 their technologic exploitations rest in the hands of men. 



