Key ideas: “These remarks were delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March 1962. They were addressed to “the students who are to be America‘s future scientists.” Reprinted from an edited version in The Objectivist Newsletter, October 1962.”
We are living in an age when every social group is struggling frantically to destroy itself—and doing it faster than any of its rivals or enemies could hope for—when every man is his own most dangerous enemy, and the whole of mankind is rolling, at supersonic speed, back to the Dark Ages, with a nuclear bomb in one hand and a rabbit’s foot in the other.
The most terrible paradox of our age is the fact that the destruction of man’s mind, of reason, of logic, of knowledge, of civilization, is being accomplished in the name and with the sanction of science.
It took centuries and volumes of writing to bring our culture to its present state of bankruptcy—and volumes would have to be written to expose, counteract, and avert the disaster of a total intellectual collapse. But of all the deadly theories by means of which you are now being destroyed, I would like to warn you about one of the deadliest and most crucial: the alleged dichotomy of science and ethics.
You have heard that theory so often and from so many authorities that most of you now take it for granted, as an axiom, as the one absolute taught to you by those who proclaim that there are no absolutes. It is the doctrine that man’s science and ethics—or his knowledge and values, or his body and soul—are two separate, antagonistic aspects of his existence, and that man is caught between them, as a precarious, permanent traitor to their conflicting demands.
Science, they tell you, is the province of reason—but ethics, they say, is the province of a higher power, which man’s impotent, fallible intellect must not be so presumptuous as to challenge. What power? Why, feelings.
Before you accept that doctrine, identify concretely and specifically what it means. (Remember that ethics is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions, the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of his life.) It means that you, as scientists, are competent to discover new knowledge—but not competent to judge for what purpose that knowledge is to be used.
Note added Feb. 2026. Read Anthropic’s response to Pentagon: “we cannot in good conscience accede to their request”.
In this case, Anthropic was “competent to discover new knowledge” AND make an ethical desission. Hats off to Anthropic!
Your judgment is to be ,disqualified, if, when, and because it is rational—while human purposes are to be determined by the representatives of nonreason. You are to create the means—but they are to choose the ends. You are to work and think and strain all the power, energy and ingenuity of your mind to its utmost logical best, and produce great achievements—but those “superior” others will dispose of your achievements, by the grace and guidance of their feelings. Your mind is to be the tool and servant of their whims. You are to create the H-bomb—but a blustering Russian anthropoid will decide when he feels like dropping it and on whom. Yours is not to reason why—yours is just to do and provide the ammunition for others to die.
From Plato’s Republic onward, all statist-collectivists have looked longingly up at an anthill as at a social ideal to be reached. An anthill is a society of interdependent insects, where each particular kind or class is physiologically able to perform only one specific function: some are milch cows, some are toil ers, a few are rulers. Collectivist planners have dreamed for a long time of creating an ideal society by means of eugenics—by breeding men into various castes physiologically able to perform only one specific function. Your place, in such a society, would be that of toiling milch-brains, of human computers who would produce anything on demand and would be biologically incapable of questioning the orders of the anthropoid who’d throw them their food rations.
Does your self-esteem accept such a prospect?
No, I am not saying that that dream will ever be achieved physiologically. But I am saying that it has already been achieved politically and intellectually: politically, among your so-called colleagues in Soviet Russia—intellectually, in the mind of any man who accepts the science-ethics dichotomy.
I believe that many of you were attracted to the field of science precisely by reason of that dichotomy: in order to escape from the hysterical mystic-subjectivist-emotionalist shambles to which philosophers have reduced the field of ethics—and in order to find a clean, intelligible, rational, objective realm of activity.
You have not found it—not because it doesn’t exist, but because it cannot be found without the help of a clean, intelligible, rational, objective philosophy, part of which is ethics. It cannot be found until you realize that man cannot exist as half-scientist, half-brute—that all the aspects of his existence are, can be, and should be subject to the study and the judgment of his intellect—and that of all human disciplines, it is ethics, the discipline which sets his goals, that should be elevated into a science.
No man and no class of men can live without a code of ethics. But if there are degrees of urgency, I would say that it is you, the scientists, who need it most urgently. The nature of your power and of your responsibility is too obvious to need restatement. You can read it in every newspaper headline. It is obvious why you should know—before you start out—to what purpose and service you choose to devote the power of your mind.
If you do not care to know—well, I would like to say that there is a character in Atlas Shrugged who was dedicated to you as a warning, with the sincere hope that it would not be necessary. His name is Dr. Robert Stadler.
Many things have happened [in recent months] to demonstrate the ultimate consequences of the science—ethics dichotomy.
If a professional soldier were to accept a job with Murder, Inc. and claim that he is merely practicing his trade, that it is not his responsibility to know who is using his services or for what purpose—he would be greeted by a storm of indignation and regarded as a moral psychopath. Yet at his bloodiest worst, he could not perpetrate a fraction of the horrors achieved by any haughty ascetic of science who merely places a slip of paper with some mathematical computations into the hands of Khrushchev or Mao Tse-tung or any of their imitators in America, and, having read no newspapers since 1914, declares himself to be “above the battle.”
It is thus that the world reached the nightmare spectacle which surpasses any horror story of science fiction: two Soviet capsules circling in “outer space,” as the alleged triumph of an advanced science—while here on earth, a young boy lies bleeding to death and screaming for help, at the foot of the wall in East Berlin, shot for attempting to escape and left there by the prehistorical monsters from twenty thousand centuries deep: the Soviet rulers.
No, this is not the worst evil on today’s earth; there is one still worse: the conscience of those Western scientists who are still willing to associate on civilized terms with those colleagues of theirs who champion unilateral disarmament.
If you are now starting on a career in science, you do not have to share the guilt of those men, but you do have to reclaim the field and the honor of science.
There is only one way to do it: by accepting the moral principle that one does not surrender one’s mind into blind servitude to thugs, and one does not accept the job of munitions maker for Attila’s conquest of the world; not for any Attila, actual or potential, foreign or domestic.
There is only one way to implement that principle. Throughout history, with only a few exceptions, governments have claimed the “right” to rule men by means of physical force, that is: by terror and destruction. When the potential of terror and destruction reaches today’s scale, it should convince every human being that if mankind is to survive, Attila’s concept of government must be discarded, along with the alleged “right” of any men to impose their ideas or wishes on others by initiating the use of physical force. This means that men must establish a free, noncoercive society, where the government is only a policeman protecting individual rights, where force is used only in retaliation and self-defense, where no gang can seize the legalized power to unleash a reign of terror. Such a society does not have to be invented: it had existed, though not fully. Its name is capitalism.
Needless to say, capitalism does not force individuals or nations into the collectivist slave pen of a world government. The so-called One World is merely “one neck ready for one leash.” Capitalism leaves men free for self-defense, but gives no one the political means to initiate force or war.
This—not physical but political disarmament, the renunciation of legalized brute force as a way of life—is the only means of saving the world from nuclear destruction.