Last night I talked about my CAJ biological warfare with my friend Anna. I started with presenting it in basic terms, which was not hard at all, but when I had to describe some of the details I struggled a little bit. The problem was that it’s been quite a while that I wrote my last blog post so I wasn’t that up to date any more and I kind of forgot some of the details. I could have avoided that by reading through my posts before meeting up with her, but to be honest, I forgot. Anyway, this only was a little problem because our discussion did not need fine details once Anna knew about the general idea.
Throughout our discussion there was one aspect that appeared over and over again: dual-use. The biggest problem is that regardless of the good intentions of research, the findings can literally always be misused in one or another way. It is frightening what people could do if they set their mind to hurting others, and even worse how easily they could do it. What bothered us most was the fact that there is barely anything that can be done about this danger. You can’t just stop doing research, otherwise our civilization would not make progress any more and the wish to develop, to improve and to best yourself and others is a part of human nature. Also, it would not be fair to forbid research just because there is a risk of it being misused. The main focus of research is to facilitate our lives and to improve life quality for sick people or even heal them. It would be unfair to deprive humanity of the chance to help and being helped.
We discussed this problem over and over again, but the only conclusion we could come to was the following: Fear of the risk that something bad might happen should never keep anyone from anything. This applies to personal issues as well as the dual-use dilemma. There’s always a risk in almost anything and there’s nothing we can do about it. Certain risks have to be taken.
[356 words]
No comments:
Post a Comment