Martin Rees Quotes

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.

There are lots of things that science will enable us to do that we shouldn’t do.

I have always felt that, aside from research that violates universal human mores, when it comes to technological applications, that which can be done will be done.

Is there anything science should not try to explain? Science is knowledge and knowledge is power - power to do good or evil. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be done if the intention to do it is sufficiently resolute.

Experience shows that if you put more ethicists on a problem, you can end up with more problems.

It is not a Pandora's box that science opens; it is, rather, a treasure chest. We, humanity, can choose whether or not to take out the discoveries and use them, and for what purpose.

The extent to which ethics leads or lags the scientific juggernaut will now be measured in the specific policy decisions our democratic political systems produce.

When the goals of science collide with moral and ethical judgment, there are certain times when science has to take a time-out.

Science now finds itself in paradoxical strife with society: admired but mistrusted; offering hope for the future but creating ambiguous choice; richly supported yet unable to fulfill all its promise; boasting remarkable advances but criticized for not serving more directly the goals of society.

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue ... Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.

The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.

Science is important, but so is ethics, so is balancing life. To destroy life to save life - it's one of the real ethical dilemmas that we face.

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

At the end of the day, if there are truly ethical considerations, those have to override scientific considerations.

Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or unethical.

Science is not inherently good.

Some dreamers demand that scientists only discover things that can be used for good.

The real world is far too complex and unpredictable to make something like the idea of humanity controlling its own evolution or engineering itself - well, I wouldn't say impossible but it should be approached with a degree of caution.

Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki. The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved.

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

When grand plans for scientific and defence technologies are made, do the people in power think about the sacrifices the people in the laboratories and fields have to make?

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

But the imposition of morality onto science, - where it does not belong - has become rampant in recent years.

I maintain the importance of an absolute prohibition against torture, while acknowledging that even absolute prohibitions can sometimes be broken. If that is a contradiction, it is a contradiction that ethics has to embrace, or else it becomes like glass: hard, clear, but fatally inflexible.