On the scientist’s moral luck and wholeheartedness

ABSTRACT

Moral luck is real but living with this knowledge is difficult, in particular because attending to the radical uncertainty of future implications of one’s work may have a significant impact on research directions or publication plans. The scientist, the engineer, and the technological innovator, as individuals, may experience increased anxiety or regret an action performed in their professional capacity. I argue that a recipe for avoiding such ethical doom is a necessary part of the first-person attitude enabling serene research activity in full acceptance of the unpredictable twists of publicly assigned responsibility. By pursuing Bernard Williams’s analogy between the analytic approach of rational ethics and the moral doctrine of religious ethics, I argue in favor of the judgment based on trying wholeheartedly as the scientist’s objectively desirable, albeit externally unmeasurable, way of conduct.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral Luck
• wholeheartedness
• trying
• religious ethics
• golem

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Alexei Grinbaum , Ph.D., HDR, is a physicist and philosopher at LARSIM, the Philosophy of Science Group at CEA-Saclay near Paris. His main interest is in the foundations of quantum theory. He also writes on the ethical and social aspects of emerging technologies, including nanotechnology, synthetic biology, robotics and artificial intelligence. He was coordinator for France of the ‘European Observatory of Nanotechnologies’ and partner in the project ‘Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice’. Grinbaum is a member of the French national ethics committee for digital technologies and AI as well as of the French ethics commission for research in information technology (Cerna). His books include ‘Mécanique des étreintes’ (2014) and ‘Les robots et le mal’ (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020: [grant number 709637].