Todays lectorial asked us to consider a particular statement and just write our initial responses. Here is mine:

Innovation and progress are hindered by scientific regulation

Well, duh. There is no limit to what we could learn if we didn’t have those pesky morals interfering all the time. There are a lot of experiments we can’t conduct because they’d be morally wrong. We could figure out the nature versus nurture debate by forcibly separating identical twins at birth. Take them away from the real parents before they have a chance to hold them, send them to separate households, one well off and one living in the slums who has to struggle their entire life while the other coasts by. But of course they’d have to be monitored, better yet have scientists pretend to be their parents while they carefully watch them and report on their every move. Cameras placed in their bedrooms, bathrooms and schools could pick up the rest.

Now you see why we have scientific regulations. Cultural values and basic morals dictate how we conduct research and experiments, and while we could learn more by ignoring these, doesn’t mean we should. We live in a society that values morals over knowledge and while that holds true we will continue to advance at our current pace.

This is a difficult balance to maintain and one that hasn’t always held particularly true. Some of the worlds greatest advancements have occurred during wartime, primarily weapons, but also transport and energy. And yet even as we delve into the best way to kill people our aim has always been to advance our own sense of justice, to save our own soldiers, to end the war, to do the right thing.