Technoscientific Angst: Ethics And Responsibility

6 The Price of Responsibility: From Personal to Financial

6 The Price of Responsibility: From Personal to Financial This chapter attempts a difficult feat: to retain a postmodern orientation in the ethical realm despite the limits of postmodernism. In other words, I try to walk a tightrope that spans the abyss between absolutism and relativism. As Bauman so eloquently says: The ethicalparadox of the postmodern condition is that it restores to agents the fullness of moral choice and responsibility whilesimultaneously deprivingthem of the comfort of the universal guidance that modern self-confidence once promised. Ethical tasks of individualsgrow while the socially produced resources to fulfill them shrink. Moral responsibility comes together with the loneliness of moral choice. (Bauman 1992., xxii) As we have seen in the previous chapters, the questions that loom over our culture for the next century, as well as for the next millennium , are not limited to a set of ethical principles or moral prescriptions . On the evidence of the events of World War II, we can sadly conclude that the implementation of principles and prescriptions by political leaders falls short of the intentions of individuals and parliaments . For example, despite a comprehensiveset of fully articulated and recorded ethical guidelines, Nazi Germany undertook some of the most heinous experiments on human subjects in concentration and labor camps (Annas and Grodin 1991). More generally, the optimism that accompanied technoscientific research and development prior to World War II has been displaced by a heavy dose of anguish and pes100 The Price of Responsibility 101 simism. As Oppenheimer told his listeners at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1947: But that I should be speaking of such general and such difficult questions at all reflects in the first instance a good deal of self-consciousness on the part of physicists.This self-consciousnessis in part a result of the highly critical traditions which have grown up in physics in the last half century, which have shown in so poignant a way how much the applications of science determine our welfare and that of our fellows, and which have cast in doubt that traditional optimism, that confidence in progress, which have characterized Western culture since the Renaissance . (Oppenheimer 1955, 82) Does the shift from optimism to self-consciousness change the cultural role and practice of members of the technoscientific community? How have their experiences transformed them individually and as a group? Oppenheimer continues: Despite the vision and the far-seeing wisdom of our war-time heads of state, the physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting , for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons, as they were in fact used, dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. (Oppenheimer 1955, 88) So it makes sense to shift the discussion here from ethics in general or from the anguish of those involved in the production of nuclear weapons to the responsibility of individuals. As Bauman says: All in all, in the postmodern context agents are constantly faced with moral issues and obliged to choose between equally well founded (or equally unfounded) ethical concepts. The choice always means the assumption of responsibility, and for this reason bears the character of a moral act. Under the postmodern condition, the agent is perforce not just an actor and decision-maker, but a moral subject. The performance of life-functions demands also that the agent be a morally competent subject. (Bauman 1992, 203) This chapter begins with an artistic rendition of the situation in which our culture finds itself since the war, the existential predicament that permeates every facet of our life. It continues with the problem of defining guidelines, or matrices, acceptable to the culture as a whole, accounting along the way for Lyotard's view of justice. Lyotard's dis- 102 The Price of Responsibility cussion of justice is used as a starting point in relation to which the ideas and concerns of Kant, Simone de Beauvoir, and Emmanuel Levinas can be understood. What is at stake is not a set of behavioral commandments but, rather, a warning about the limits of our legal imagination. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of the financial costs of complying with the ethical tenets most...