Science and the Morality of Weapons Research

Background

A straightforward way to describe ethics is to say that it is a study which deals with what persons ought and ought not to do. It is thus to do with the choices, actions and behaviour of mature competent people. Some of the things that people do do not affect others, other humans, other sentient beings, in any significant way and hence these do not come under the purview of ethics. Those actions that do affect others are, however, open to moral or ethical evaluation: are they right or are they wrong? To resolve that question, one needs to appeal to a moral system. All such systems forbid certain actions, namely those that inflict unjustified harm on others. This is surely intuitive and obvious: no one wants to be harmed. It is almost by definition that no sentient being wants to feel pain - assuming that the pain does not indicate that some medical treatment is working or some such – and to be in pain is one form of being harmed.