God. Real. Right.

The last post on science touts the material benefits of science for societies which respect liberty. But because that argument makes some people think science should operate without restriction, this post deals with the moral value of science’s product: technology. (This post is a necessary excursion on the way to defining science, which is next.)
Scientists regularly lament the restrictions imposed on them by moral, religious, and other value-laden sects of society. A few years ago an ABC news analyst/physician complained that since scientists had given the McGaugheys the ability to conceive their septuplets, scientists should be the ones to decide whether selective abortion was necessary for the health of the children. (The McGaugheys are pro-life and were the focus of Christian pro-life public activity at the moment.) But her argument is based on a poor understanding of liberty.
It is impossible to respect liberty without restricting it. Maintaining liberty with rational consistency requires separating negative rights (good ones) from positive rights (artificial ones). Negative rights preserve the interests (particularly life, autonomy, and property) of individuals against the intrusive interests of others. In other words, negative rights keep a bully from taking a would-be-victim’s iPod. Positive rights, on the other hand, claim entitlement for those who currently are doing without something. In other words, the claim that a person is entitled to medical care is a positive right. Obviously, positive rights inherently lead to a violation of negative rights. A doctor has a right to work only if it is worthwhile to him, and even neglect work altogether if he no longer cares about income. To say a patient has a “right” to that doctor’s care obviously violates the doctor’s liberty. No system with positive rights can survive—it will devour itself because of the practical contradictions built into it.
The ABC analyst mentioned above confused scientists’ libertarian (negative) right to study and learn in whatever direction the empirical data takes them with the contradictory (positive) right to impose the product of their research or the values they associate with it on either their clients or the public. It may be correct that intellectual freedom is essential to valuable scientific progress—as the last post argues. But it is equally correct that moral constraint is essential to the implementation and application both of scientific research itself and of its products. For instance, scientists may be compelled by the empirical track they are on to study undifferentiated human cells. But their empirical pursuit has no intrinsic right to the materials they wish to study—in this case particularly, immature human beings. A scientist may have a compelling empirical interest in knowing exactly what kind of growth is in person’s cerebral cortex, or what will happen if he removes or disables a particular part of a person’s brain (as in a lobotomy), but he has no right to that person’s body; and indeed, society has an obligation to protect the right of the individual from whatever violation such a scientist would perpetrate.
Of course most scientists, being life-, liberty-, and property-loving persons like everyone else, would never dream of crossing such lines. But some do. And some do not know they are doing so. Because scientists typically are not focused on value-laden questions, they do not know how to evaluate the proper limits of their own work. Hence come ethicists, particularly the kind described by Paul Ramsey as serious:

A man of frivolous conscience announces that there are ethical quandaries ahead that we must urgently consider before the future catches up with us. By this he often means that we need to devise a new ethics that will provide the rationalization for doing in the future what men are bound to do because of new actions and interventions science will have made possible. In contrast a man of serious conscience means to say in raising urgent ethical questions that there may be some things that men should never do. The good things that men do can be made complete only by the things they refuse to do.

Ramsey’s statement not only serves as a perfect check on unfettered scientific sycophancy but also a pretty harsh indictment of arguably most ethicists.
One question remains for scientific work in that persistent realm where its moral value is uncertain. Is technology inclined to virtue, vice, or neutrality? Or, put a different way, should society generally trust science, distrust it, or regard it with the same neutrality as, say, mechanics? In an unduly abbreviated form, here is how the argument progresses. First, there is the Luddite approach, claiming that technology is inherently dangerous. Automation robs jobs. But it is not very well thought out and leads to a knee-jerk reaction.
So next, science and technology are presumed good. Technology is the face of progress, and progress is inherently good, so what problem could there be? Of course, it could be abused. But generally, this view holds, wherever there is advancing technology there is progress, civilization, and the general advantage of being impartial and intelligent.
Then there is the synthesis of the two views which recognizes that science and technology may be something like education—fairly neutral in its moral worth. In education, the argument goes, what matters is not simply that students are taught but rather what they are taught. Educating about the fundamental value of life, freedom, and private property may be morally praiseworthy, but teaching Aryan supremacy is hardly so. In the same way, perhaps science can be used to cure diseases with no cost to personal liberties. But it can also be used to develop tools for killing people or even taking away their privacy without their knowledge. So it is not that science produces technology which gives it moral value, but which technology science produces that matters morally.
However, there is also a substantial reason to move through all those arguments and still come down in the position that science and technology are morally dangerous at best, and maybe even vicious when used without restraint. The argument is simple. In a world where people are good (virtuous) even morally neutral activities and pursuits can be valued optimistically. Good people will surely tend to produce good things with neutral tools. In a world where people are neutral, neutral tools could be regarded with neither presumption. But in a world where people are fundamentally flawed, whether by the taint of evil (in the Christian worldview) or simply by egoism (for the naturalists), a neutral tool must be regarded with suspicion. It is, after all, simply a means for expanding the domain and increasing the power of the one who holds it. Just to be as chicken-little as possible: in an optimistic society—one where people have a Pollyannaish trust in the good will of those in whose hands they find themselves—neutral tools will go unchecked with the assumption that their users are well-motivated. So the most dangerous of all possible scenarios is that a tool would tend to vice but be regarded as one which would tend to virtue. Such is this society.
Hence the need for strong ethical constraints on the practices of scientists, engineers, and technicians everywhere; not because they are motivated differently from anyone else—they certainly are not—but because just about anyone can do a decent job of inflicting damage on those who are around them with the rhetorical, legal, financial, and personal tools they have. But scientists, engineers, and technicians have a much bigger tool.
Trust science to do the right thing and not step outside its moral cage to devour those standing around gawking at and even praising it? OK. But keep a padlock on the door of the cage, and check it every night—just in case.