Technology can help us lead more moral lives — if we let it

When my now-wife and I were on our first date, she asked me what part of our everyday lives our grandkids would find morally shocking — what they would see the way we now look back on segregation and slavery. (Quite the first-date conversation, I realize.) We agreed, immediately, on what it was: exploiting animals, particularly animal testing and eating meat. Now, just to be clear, this was a conversation over sushi, and we both love a good steak. But we were also painfully aware of the suffering of livestock and laboratory animals, and believed that advancing technology would eventually make it unnecessary.

Technological advances have many virtues. They can make us richer and healthier, safer and more educated. Perhaps their most profound impact, however, is that they can expand our moral universe. Better technology gives us the opportunity to be better people — if we choose to use it that way.

Technological advancement was, for example, a key enabler of the feminist revolution. In the classic economics paper "Engines of Liberation," economists Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri and Mehmet Yorukoglu examined the impact of appliances like washers and dryers on household labor. They found that as the price of these machines declined and more people were able to afford them, women spent less time on housework and were increasingly able to enter the workforce. Other technological developments, including improved contraception, and social changes such as more educational opportunities also helped women gain more economic power, and therefore more freedom and equality.

But the women’s movement also illustrates the way in which society sometimes opts to ignore or underutilize the new possibilities created by technology. As historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan has noted, the decrease in household labor for women enabled by the new machines wasn’t as large as it could have been. Why? Because as the technology spread, household cleanliness standards went up.

Technology is uniquely able to improve our moral conduct because it enables us to do the right thing without sacrificing our self-interest. One of the most fundamental findings in social science is also the simplest: Our preferences follow our interests. For example, when Winston Churchill was chancellor of the exchequer and focused on containing spending, he was a ferocious opponent of increasing budget for the Royal Navy. When he was first lord of the admiralty, however, he was an equally powerful and articulate advocate for increased naval spending. Social scientists often shorthand this idea as "where you stand is where you sit."

I recognize the environmental damage of eating meat (animal agriculture accounts for 11-20% of greenhouse emissions) and the suffering it causes. But I really like it. And while companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have made brave attempts to create substitutes, both have struggled to get uptake in the mass market. The reasons range from their higher price relative to conventional meats to the perception that they are ultra-processed and less healthy. Until one of these advances can show a clear advantage in performance, cost or both, most eaters are unlikely to make the switch, moral argument or no.

But that doesn’t make replacing animals for food and laboratory testing impossible. It just means it will require making customers feel that they’re both getting something better and doing the right thing. That approach is beginning to show some promise in the lab. To understand how animals might be phased out of drug development, I spoke with Murat Cirit, a bioengineer and the chief executive officer and co-founder of Javelin Biotech, a startup trying to replace animal testing with silicon chips containing collections of human cells.

Today, any candidate molecule for a new drug must demonstrate both safety and efficacy on animals before it moves to human trials. The Federal Drug Administration has mandated this for decades, Cirit explained, because biological systems are so complex that it’s extraordinarily difficult to predict the effects of a molecule. If you want to find out what one does outside the lab, the only way to know with confidence is to test it in a living organism.

This combination of uncertainty and regulation makes pharmaceutical companies very reluctant to bet on new testing technologies. But animal tests have limitations. Particularly for modern approaches, such as gene therapies, what works and is safe in animals provides little information about how the approach will affect humans. So, Javelin is building chips that provide testing data in areas where animal testing data already has little utility. "Our eventual goal is the commoditization of the technology and completely replacing animal testing," he says. The company wasn’t founded to save animal lives. But it — and other new technologies — could eventually enable us to avoid the horrible tradeoff between human and animal suffering.

This is a path other revolutionary innovations — from antibiotics to computers — have followed before. They start with a technological advance that enables them to solve previously unsolvable problems, then go on to capture the mass market and, sometimes, to transform our world. The process for replacing animal testing is starting to gain traction. The same can’t be said for replacing animals as food yet, but plenty of organizations are trying (companies making cultivated meat have raised more than $3.1 billion since 2013).

So, while it’s early going, that prediction about our grandkids is still looking good.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Gautam Mukunda writes about corporate management and innovation. He teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management and is the author of "Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter."