Strategic Defense Initiative Research A Gray Area for Ethics

Abstract

SUMMARYThe arguments concerning the militarization of research fifteen years ago in connection with the war in Vietnam had to do with more manifest indicators of a military link. Then it was a question often of applied research, and the physical or institutional control over such research. Today we are dealing with new technologies and their basic research underpinnings. Because of the character of these new military technologies, we are facing extensive gray areas. It is no longer possible to so clearly discern boundary lines. Thus it becomes more difficult also to clearly determine when one should hold off from a certain type of research for ethical reasons. Such boundaries also blur.As research and development has become increasingly target or mission oriented, externalist assessments relating to social and political problem definitions have taken on greater prominence in defining what is important. An epistemic drift has been noted, a shift whereby assessments of quality or utility by outsiders and nonscientists have become more common. A corollary to this epistemic drift is the erosion of the meaning of basic research in the direction of practice‐relevance, a problem that concerns laser physicists as well as social scientists in newly emerging disciplines.37At a very general level, we might speak of a change in the social paradigm of science, a change that has become more obvious in the last couple of decades as the role of the state has expanded.Finally it is clear that the concept of epistemic drift has to be divested of ideological overtones, particularly those that would equate it with a purist assumption of autonomy and disembodied science. Science as a whole is founded as a social mandate, and autonomy is always relative. What is at issue here is rather the integrity and meaning of scientific enterprise.