A Measure of Hope

(I put Mr. Morrison in my synthesis conversation with Raymo)

The piece we read recently by Chet Raymo, called “A Measure of Restraint,” centered on a worry that has plagued me for years: the worry that science may be used for ill, either intentionally or accidentally.  I have a lot of ideas that could eventually be made into reality, but some of them I’ve never even tried to produce, for fear of how they might be used.  I identify with a character of a series I read last summer, the first book of which was titled Above World, within which said character is instructed to build a weapon and refuses.  There is so much potential for wrongdoing when one constructs something powerful – or simply very different from anything existing – that it can seem it is best for the world to keep some ideas hidden.  Legend has it an ancient Greek inventor – was it Daedulus, perhaps? – had invented a death ray that focused sunlight to burn ships on the water, but realized the terror his invention would wreak upon the world, and destroyed or modified the blueprints to prevent such a weapon of mass destruction from ever being correctly constructed.  In the aforementioned series I read, however, the character who refuses to build a weapon for moral reasons later regrets his decision, realizing that whatever weapon he could have made would have been available for use for the greater good.  These two decisions – to create an idea and to withhold an idea – reflect the conundrum presented in “A Measure of Restraint”: the fact that an instrument of life can be also an “instrument of death” (Raymo, page 212 in The Bedford Reader).  How can one know what one’s idea will do?  Mr. Morrison, my awesome physics teacher (with whom I have discussed my uncertainty regarding morality of allowing ideas into the world), qualifies Raymo’s assertion by counseling a measure of hope, as he believes “There will always be more good people in the world than bad people.”  While this doesn’t address the complications that result from good people doing bad things on accident, it seems Raymo and Morrison would agree that we should advance with science, but with caution.