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If I invent something that can be used for good, but others use it for bad, does it reflect on my character? Does my good intentions absolve me of the harm my

If I invent something that can be used for good, but others use it for bad, does it reflect on my character? Does my good intentions absolve me of the harm my invention did? Or, the opposite? If I invent something fully intending to do harm with it, but others find non-harmful uses for it, does that absolve me of my original intentions to cause harm? A gun may not be good or bad, but the intention of the person who invented guns likely were good or bad.

haswell 3y ago
This takes us back down the road of binary outcomes though. The intentions of the inventor are one thing to examine. The outcomes of the inventions another. And the notion that something is “moral”, may not have answers in practice, even if there might be an answer in principle. Even if those answers could be found, they could only be found after enough time had passed to judge the outcome fairly. But it is unpalatable to retroactively assign moral judgement for actions the originator could not have possibly predicted (there’s a different version of this thought experiment that imagines we could perfectly predict the future, but that seems less useful here). I do think that the moral peril of certain actions/decisions is proportional to the potential risk. There are few discoveries as dangerous as that of splitting atoms, and the more obvious the danger, the more reasonable it seems to judge the original act of invention. When questions like “will we explode the universe?” seem reasonable to ask, that seems like a good sign an invention is not something that should exist in an ideal world. Most inventions don’t have these kinds of stakes, and the effects of their use are local to the actors using them, at which point it seems more reasonable to judge the actions of individual users than the invention/inventor.

haswell 3y ago

This takes us back down the road of binary outcomes though. The intentions of the inventor are one thing to examine. The outcomes of the inventions another. And the notion that something is “moral”, may not have answers in practice, even if there might be an answer in principle. Even if those answers could be found, they could only be found after enough time had passed to judge the outcome fairly. But it is unpalatable to retroactively assign moral judgement for actions the originator could not have possibly predicted (there’s a different version of this thought experiment that imagines we could perfectly predict the future, but that seems less useful here). I do think that the moral peril of certain actions/decisions is proportional to the potential risk. There are few discoveries as dangerous as that of splitting atoms, and the more obvious the danger, the more reasonable it seems to judge the original act of invention. When questions like “will we explode the universe?” seem reasonable to ask, that seems like a good sign an invention is not something that should exist in an ideal world. Most inventions don’t have these kinds of stakes, and the effects of their use are local to the actors using them, at which point it seems more reasonable to judge the actions of individual users than the invention/inventor.