A recent entry in this blog discussed a poll in which Americans were asked whether or not they believed nanotechnology is immoral. According to the poll, it turns out that a minority of Americans believe that research in the field of nanotechnology is moral. Regardless of what this says about the American political landscape, I feel this raises the more important issue of morality in science. Mainly, what role does morality play in science, and to what extent can we call a technology ‘immoral’?

The first question is ‘to what extent does morality play a role in science’? For starters, it provides some basic guidelines for experimental science. We say that it is immoral to sacrifice human life to perform experiments. We are not allowed to knowingly harm people, and reasonable precautions must be taken when testing new drugs or products to ensure that they are safe, before clinical trials are undertaken. Furthermore, there are moral restrictions on how we apply the results of scientific discovery. Whereas nuclear power plants are seen as an acceptable use of nuclear technology, building nuclear weapons - and especially the use of those weapons - are seen as an immoral application of the same technology.

However, all of these guidelines seem to apply to the application of science. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that anything that can be used for some benevolent purpose can also be used for a malevolent one. Even fire, one of the most primitive and useful inventions of mankind, can be used for warmth, cooking, or burning down a city. The point is that there can be immoral applications of technology, but the question of whether or not the technology itself can be immoral.

So is nanotechnology immoral? The short answer is no. Technology cannot be moral or immoral; it is merely an extension of our knowledge. We widely accept that it can be used for immoral purposes, or we can take immoral paths to develop it, but it is not immoral in of itself. Of course, there are a few exceptions to this. Every society has their luddites, who believe any technological change is wrong, but these beliefs are usually either politically motivated, or born out of some sort of fear of change.

At this point, it is important to understand what the objection often is that is raised against nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and the like. A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that humans should not be allowed to fiddle around with the building blocks of the universe. Never mind we’re already doing this by splitting atoms (also never mind that this is a natural process which happens on much larger scales in every single star), but they believe that it is somehow wrong for us to be altering the evolutionary paths (never mind a lot of them don’t believe in evolution) of plants or animals, or making small machines that could manufacture things with altered molecular structures. These people aren’t always even very strongly religious — they just feel that humans should not be ‘playing god’.

The problem is that people do not know what nanotechnology, or genetic engineering entails. Even worse, is that they often hear from other non-informed parties that these technologies are dangerous, and this combination of ignorance and misinformation scares them. The biggest problem is not that these people are opposed to the technology on some fundamental, or moral level, it is that it has never been properly explained to them. They fear a doomsday scenario due to our ‘uninformed tampering’ with nature, or that we may somehow upset the balance of the universe by altering things that are not meant to be altered. In reality, nanotechnology is nothing more than the creation of really small computers (and eventually hopefully, robots); and genetic engineering is nothing more than a precise and modern application of the age-old practice of combining different strains of plants and animals to achieve a satisfactory result. These technologies are nothing to fear, and in most (if not all) cases they are being used in a completely benevolent and moral way.