On Niebuhr, Childress, and Preston

One of the questions that surrounds Niebuhr's that how to delimit consequences of actions. In order to balance this, Niebuhr was very consistent in his view that the state cannot be overly presumptuous in its judgement of the consequences of action. For example, a reactionary armed conflict may be more justified than a preventative aggression. Childress attempts to work this out from when perspective by dialoguing with Yoder's interpretation of responsibility and necessity in Niebuhr. What is of utmost interest, but not particularly clear, whether on the part of Neibuhr, or Childress (I assume he may address this somewhere in the rest of his text), how far responsibility can thus be attributed back past the agent (diplomatic or otherwise) of nonviolent or violent "coercion."

What, for example, should be the moral responsibility of weapons builder? And how is his or her action understood in the context of "necessity?" There is a story an inventors or scientists disavowing their work and creations for nearly ever major technological advance in weaponry: Nobel originally thought his invention of dynamite would contribute to peace, Galston; the researcher contributing to the creation of Agent Orange, regretfully lobbied against its use through the Vietnam war; after seeing the appropriation of his AK-47 by terrorist groups, Kalishnakov repented and sought absolution from the Orthodox church for what was originally born from a sense of patriotism and a desire to defend his comrades; Wright thought the planes he was selling to the government in the Great War would be used for spying as a tool for peace, after WWII he lamented that he and his brother were wrong; and many know the story of Oppenheimer, following up on Einstein, who felt deep regret over their contribution to a tool of such destruction. Oppenheimer lamented, "In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."

How then does one figure the role of science and scientists into Niebuhr's consideration of responsibility? As institutions, both pure and applied sciences suffer from the reality that the consequences of their actions are impossible to understand. I don't think that Niebuhr would disagree with this, but it serves as a disturbing realist foil. How should we account for what is often the purest of motives on the part of the scientist, laying the foundation for what are potentially use the most extreme "necessary evils?" In Niebuhr's framework then, it would seem that arms races, weaponization, escalation, and nuclear proliferation are not merely inescapable, but "necessary."