OFFICE MEMORANDUM @ STANFORD UNIVERSITY ¢ OFFICE MEMORANDUM e STANFORD UNIVERSITY © OFFICE MEMORANDUM

xX

Date:
AUG 21 1972
To: Jack Lambert
Macquarie University
North Ryde NSW 2113

From

Sussect: Yours of 8-16, re my SC Law Rev article
~y
Whatever hybris may be feared to atkugk be daagnosed by your letter, you
will have to take up yxtke with the gods; if you were concerned about offending
_me, I have to say that this was a hasty, patbh-up job that I would much have
“preferred to think through more carefully: but it was a special issue of the
journal and they had an implacable deadline.

I do enclose two versions of a corrigendum that I have inserted in copies I
have sent out, and which may have eloped from yours.

I think I might answer your pocket-sack analogy, first of all by agreeing
Atul with you/ (See my footnote:5, p. 598; and compare my Nobel-XIV paper; and the
and hee. last paragraph 611.* But Isee I did not really state my own position as clearly
read immanentjas I had intended: certainly, tool-logic cannot validate value-axioms: these
are axiomatic. I open myself to profound misinterpretation if this is in doubt).

I also have serious reservations about the reliability of scientific inference
in loose myames systems-- i.e. every humanly important one. At least one should
not cloak common. sense policy judgments with unwonted scientific rigor.

Lack of center? Yes this does seem the weakest point. I do not offer clearcut
ethical prescriptions; and if I did they certainly would not be in any sense
scientifically demonstrable. What tool-logic can do, at most, is to test the
interhal consistency, and to exhibit the probable ramifications, of a given
ethical theory. Until I am prepared to work out a constructive ethical theory
of man (and my work until now is preeminently critical rather than constructive)

I am afraid you will see vortices leading to other dimensions. But the phrase

you caught about impossible/unavoidable is just sm sloppy writing. "Impossible"
reflected my hopelessness about doing the redefinition of rights really well;
"unavoidable" that we had to make some efforts (but we should not expect too much).

Well you may say, I have not touched the real issues at all! Lbt me turn around
and ask you, what is your model of an tm ideal world, plausibly attainable, in
which technology is applied for nothing but the commom good.

As to your diagram about do vs know, I react that they are indeed totally
inextricable. But in law we . distinguish between guilty intentions versus actions,
and for similar reasons we can factor out large scale action ("technology") as
a target of social regulation likely to have fewer distressing side-effects than

efforts to control XRHKRXREMENY "science".
Bek redo Pv teartpend fore bool,

bon Cas.

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