Moral for Any Age by Jacob Bronowski

¶ … Louis Alexander Slotin was working in an extremely delicate and dangerous environment, where a simple slip of the hand or a jerk of the knee could put in motion a series of devastating effects on himself and his colleagues, he had no right to employ risky or awkward tactics. In the article, he was credited with saving the lives of his seven co-workers; but in reality, he was guilty of making them sick. And they all could later become ill from delayed cancers.

The other major points of the article were interesting, beyond the actual accident and causes of that accident. When Slotin asked the other workers to make note of their positions in the room at the time he began pulling apart plutonium with his bare hands, it almost seemed as if he had planned this "accident" and wanted to die anyway.

Nevertheless, he predicted out loud that one will die, but then apparently allowed the others to live by warning them of the imminent danger. And he did live, and the others did recover. With that as a backdrop, the author of the article goes into the issue of morality. He claims this story is shared because the issue of heroism is connected to morality. And morality is made up of a pair of issues, the author states: one, others do matter when it comes to the issue of humans loving one another; the second, is to make a decision, a judgment, of what the consequences will be as a result of that decision.

Will the decision make the protagonist a hero, or a coward? And in the end, the writer insists that morality is about searching one's conscious for the clues to what is right, and what is wrong. Morality, he continues, is not about the fact that all humans should behave the same, but rather that they all search within themselves for answers that can only come from deep analysis of their collective consciousness.

Moral for Any Age - Page Two Essay

So why did an intelligent professional act so carelessly in the first place, when the highly dangerous workplace situation cried out for extreme caution? A screwdriver does not sound like a very appropriate workplace instrument when one is working with the plutonium, some of the most dangerous material known to the world. It would seem that the possibility exists that Slotin had given thought to suicide, indeed that he has possibly premeditated this little stunt.

One can draw that conclusion given the facts of the profession Slotin was in: it seems inconceivable that a highly skilled, heavily trained professional in a research environment would be working with a screwdriver and plutonium at the same time, no matter how creative the experiment. "He was doing it as experts are tempted to do such [a] thing with a screwdriver" Bronowski writes. "Experts" don't usually handle highly dangerous material of any kind with something like a screwdriver.