My Villain hiring a Morality Chain?

How good is this idea?

My villain is obsessed with revenge, but he´s also aware of how monstrous he´ll become if left unchecked in his quest. He hires a scientist to join him. This scientist acts as both his scientific advisor, but also as a person who sympathizes with the villain´s quest for revenge, yet values human life enough to question his boss´ more monstrous actions.

What kind of obstacles am I likely to encounter if I went with this idea?

Well, there's the fact that "scientists" can vary widely on their respect for the idea of human life as a positive value.

A sociologist or psychologist would be more likely than a biologist or physicist to be good for the role, I'd imagine...

Well she mainly acts as his Mad Scientist by building weapons for him, but with the added bonus of actually caring about life

My point is that different fields generally attract different kinds of people, and different subsections of those fields require things that could be highly morally dubious from a "human life is a positive value" position.

Biology is the big one. Weapons manufacture—aeronautical engineering, etc.—would run a close second. It's hard to care about human life when you're building the next best bullet/bomb/plane/tank, after all...

Perhaps it would be better if the scientist didn't sympathise too much with his desire for revenge?

After all, if you want a differing viewpoint, might as well be opposite instead of "The same but less".

If the scientist didn't sympathize with the desire for revenge, and yet still worked with them, that would indicate that the scientist didn't actually care what was done with their work—hardly what you want in a Morality Chain.

USAF 713

Why biology? I think that I know a biochemist who has an extremely strong sense of morality. I don't know any weapons scientists, but FWIW, I don't think J. Robert Oppenheimer became entirely callous about human life just because he spearheaded development of the atom bomb.

It's a general statement. I'm mostly referring to things like stem cell research and whatnot. In theory, doing that kind of stuff requires that one not subscribe to the positive value of human life, or have a very limited view of it.

I should think this would be better to do with a secretary of some kind, as opposed to the one who's building the weapons. Seems like the secretary would be more sociable by nature of the job...

I don't really believe that the field of science a person studies has any reflection on their ethic code. And I don't agree that people interested in stem cell research don't value human life. In fact, I think the opposite is true. Why get involved in stem cell research if your goal isn't to better human life? They're not just messing with the human body just for the heck of it, they're actually trying to discover things that could improve people's quality of life and cure people of some of the worst diseases.

That's true. Basically, some people are willing to break a few, jewel-encrusted eggs if it meant better omelettes.

I think the main problem here is how you balance your scientist — just where does s/he draw the line? I think you'll do decently with the robotics engineer sort; all your scientist has to do is to program his/her creations in such a way that there isn't too much bloodshed.

Plus, it would probably be better to give this advisor some other motive than money.

Well, stem-cell research tends to be focused on things like curing Parkinson's so... actually, a biochemist with medical knowledge might very well be more preoccupied with human life than most.

The idea that stem cell research is worth the cost to help other people is nice—and I'm not going to try and argue the morality or immorality of it here—but it also shows a trade-off form of thinking. "This life is worth less than that life."

That probably could be useful, in this context, actually...

Isn't most of it carried out with the leftover fertilized eggs from IVF procedures? Which have no prospect of ever being implanted and carried to term? (As far as I know, there's not that much prospect for adoption of a fertilized egg; if someone wants to bear a child in the first place, they'll have their own.)

I don't really know. I'm just noting the generalization.

More or less.

if he's aware of how monstrous he has the potential to become then its possible to go a different way.

Maybe he should hire a scientist so monstrous that the villain has to do all the moral questioning himself, to exercise that morality muscle.