Abstract

After the second World War, a cliché was repeated so often as to provoke, I fear, either yawns or giggles: “our moral sense was lagging behind our technical invention,” i.e., science had, as it were, outstripped morality. In those days, of course, the bogey scientists thought to have left morality behind were physicists, especially those who had made possible the nuclear bomb. A wholly new kind of war weapon did indeed seem to have changed the world and to require a new dimension of moral thought and moral philosophy, if we were not all to be destroyed