Can vs. Should I have written several pieces in The Ethical Spectacle which deal with the issue of the engineer who solves homicidal problems in a moral vacuum, if not an active state of evil. In an issue devoted to a single long essay on technology and morality , I argued that we too easily equate technological and moral distinctions, eg, that killing 100,000 people with incendiary bombs from the air is more morally acceptable than rounding them up and shooting them in a pit. It is quite natural, because they are extensions of ourselves. And we want to use what we have.
Horses never have a desire to use hands.
Humans, like other animals, experience the world by manipulating it with the tools they have available. The gun induces the brain to divide the world into people who may be shot, and people who may not be. Possession of nuclear weapons induces us to want to use them, even to create harbors in Alaska. From this perspective, law is a technology and lawyers commit the same errors as engineers. Lawyers, as Justice Cardozo pointed out seven decades ago, are social engineers.