On the scientist’s moral luck and wholeheartedness

Abstract

Moral luck is real but living with this knowledge is difficult, in particular because attending to the radical uncertainty of future implications of one’s work may have a significant impact on research directions or publication plans. The scientist, the engineer, and the technological innovator, as individuals, may experience increased anxiety or regret an action performed in their professional capacity. I argue that a recipe for avoiding such ethical doom is a necessary part of the first-person attitude enabling serene research activity in full acceptance of the unpredictable twists of publicly assigned responsibility. By pursuing Bernard Williams’s analogy between the analytic approach of rational ethics and the moral doctrine of religious ethics, I argue in favor of the judgment based on trying wholeheartedly as the scientist’s objectively desirable, albeit externally unmeasurable, way of conduct.