Scientists’ Moral Responsibility and Dangerous Technology R&D 129 would the danger be too great, but without ﬁrst doing animal research, no human subject research could be approved. In the last-ditch effort to save the smallpox stockpiles in the U.S. in 1999, researchers proposed that a useful application of the smallpox samples was in attempting to ﬁnd an animal model for the disease. Toward this end, researchers exposed monkeys to massive doses of smallpox until they ﬁnally sickened the subjects. Nearly every monkey exposed died without developing human-like symptoms of the disease. But a couple monkeys developed responses similar to human smallpox. This was written of as a triumph in smallpox research, and for some has justiﬁed the maintenance of the smallpox stockpile. Finally, a potentially useful animal model of smallpox infection may exist which now justiﬁes maintaining the stockpiles so that further research can be done. And all of this is further justiﬁed by the very real potential that smallpox, while no longer a natural threat, is a threatened potential agent of bioterrorism (Preston 2002). In this context, what are the implications of the decision to preserve smallpox considering the principles of respect for persons, beneﬁcence, and justice? Does an extended moral horizon alter our view? If we consider that the subjects of the smallpox investigations (conducted in part to justify continuing to maintain smallpox stockpiles) include not just the monkeys that were infected and ultimately died, but also humanity as a whole, did this experiment satisfy the Belmont Principles? It would arguably meet these principles if smallpox remained a natural threat. The dignity of individual humans was not infringed. No individual was treated as less than autonomous or deserving of equal dignity. Moreover, if smallpox were still a natural threat, then presumably all experiments would be conducted with the goal of treatment or, as was the case before 1979, eradication. And ﬁnally, the principle of justice is satisﬁed as long as no vulnerable populations were treated less than equally in the course of the experiment. But if we consider the implications of the experiments in the context of a disease that could historically have been eradicated completely, then we can be more critical of the intentions of the scientists and their decisions to take part in the research. Let’s imagine, since smallpox had been eradicated from the natural environment and only posed a threat from intentionally-maintained stockpiles held by humans, that smallpox and ice-nine pose nearly-identical risks, and are similar technologies. Ice- nine, like smallpox, posed no natural risk in Vonnegut’s book, but only posed a risk as a human-devised technology. The dual-use argument that might justify experimenting with ice-nine breaks down in light of it’s artiﬁcial nature. Moreover, the potentially catastrophic results of an accident involving ice-nine (namely, the total destruction of the biosphere) argue in favor of a positive duty not to investigate it beyond mere surmise or theory. Neither beneﬁcence nor justice warrant investigating ice-nine. We might argue that beneﬁcence argues in favor of investigating smallpox because we worry about terrorist uses of it and need to devise treatments. All of which is recursively self-satisfying, because we would not have had to worry about this had scientists done the right thing to begin with, and supported its ultimate destruction. In the world of Cat’s Cradle, we could similarly argue in favor of ethically pursuing ice- nine research only in a post-ice-nine-apocalypse environment. An argument that is often used to justify these sorts of scientiﬁc inquiries is that ‘‘someone will devise the technologies, and employ them harmfully—eventually. 123