Science & Tech Quote by Joseph Wood Krutch

Krutch lands the knife in the soft spot of modern self-confidence: our habit of treating capability as if it were a moral compass. The line hinges on a deliberately plain distinction between can and ought, but its sting comes from how often technological societies pretend that distinction doesn’t matter. “Though many have tried” is a quiet jab at the evangelists of scientific progress who promise that enough data will eventually dissolve ethics into engineering. Krutch calls that bluff.

The phrasing “decisive fact” does double work. It sounds like the language of science itself, then turns it against scientism - the belief that science can answer every meaningful question. Science “can do so much,” he grants, acknowledging its power without romanticizing it. Then he draws the boundary: science can optimize means, but it can’t generate ends. It can tell you how to dam a river, not whether the river should be dammed; how to edit a genome, not what kind of humanity is worth preserving.

As an environmentalist writing in the mid-20th century, Krutch is also arguing with his era’s religion of mastery. Postwar technologies, industrial agriculture, pesticides, and big-engineering projects were sold as neutral tools delivering inevitable improvement. Krutch insists the tool is never the whole story. Decisions about “ought” come from values, politics, and a sense of limits - precisely the domains modernity wants to outsource. The subtext is a warning: when you pretend science decides the “ought,” you don’t eliminate ethics; you just smuggle in someone else’s ethics under the lab coat.