Jim Manzi has a long and interesting post up over at the American Scene in response to my quick post yesterday about moral progress or the perception of same. I will ponder a bit more before responding. But I do want to respond to a good objection from some readers. Couldn’t I have just as easily said that invention is the father of morality rather than immorality? And the answer, I think, is yes. I think it’s a truism that once you declare something immoral you are proclaiming something else immoral. There are probably exceptions to this, but I think in this case it’s true. Technological and economic progress allows society to abandon practices that once constituted a necessary evil. Then society can condemn the few remains instances of it as backward and barbaric (often with much arrogant sanctimony). So, in effect, technological innovation is inherently moral. But at the same time it illuminates what was once immoral or — since immoral is a problematic word — simply bad. For example, leaving weak or deformed babies on a hillside might have had a utilitarian argument on its side when the tribe simply couldn’t afford to care for a infant that was destined to merely drain resources. The rise of agriculture and prosperity makes such a calculation less necessary and therefore more obviously repugnant. Technological and economic progress render necessary evils unnecessary evils and, as a matter of moral logic, unnecessary evils are the most evil things of all.

Update: From a reader:

G,
I think you are getting into a thicket on this one. Technology is neither good nor evil. The Nazis could not have dominated Europe and murdered millions of Jews without the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. It was not just the stuff like trains, tanks and so forth either. It was the organizational theory that grew out of the Industrial Revolution. Technology gave them a force multiplier that allowed a small number of people to dominate a large number of people. It also gave them the tools and organizational wherewithal to organize and execute the Holocaust.
On the other hand, America’s industrial might allowed us to slowly counter it and destroy the Nazis. Without our great industrial strength, we could not have trumped them technologically and we could not have used this to overcome the force multipliers they had at their disposal.
WW2 was one because one country used all of these things within a moral framework that was ultimately proven superior to that of the Nazis. Technology, was simply a tool.
Have a great Thanksgiving

Me: I don’t disagree with any of this. Indeed, I’ve long argued that technology should be seen as amoral (much like violence). It’s what you do with it that gets measured on the moral calculus. It’s like that old line of WFB’s. If one man pushes an old lady into an oncoming bus and another man pushes an old lady out of the way of a bus, we should not denounce them both as men who push old ladies around.

And while I indeed may be getting myself into a thicket, I don’t think it’s this one. I was referring more to the role of technology as providing the relief of man’s estate, to borrow a phrase from Francis Bacon.