There's a much easier way to resolve this, I think.

There's a much easier way to resolve this, I think.

It's very difficult to work out ethical quandries reliably (even if you are very intelligent), and some of the ones we run into all the time are, as far as we can tell, actually insoluable. So the landscape of ethics is a lot like that of mathematics: you can't tell beforehand whether something is trivial or impossible. But, unlike mathematics, few people are willing to ignore important ethical problems entirely.

If you're very smart and you're solving problems all the time, every physical problem you work on has an ethical dimension (and all your potential solutions have ethical valences, which themselves are fractalline -- like the length of the coast of England, the human cost of any decision grows the more carefully you try to measure it). Being willing to ignore these factors gives you more time to work on other things.

In the case of Von Neumann, you could imagine another world in which he pursued ethical issues the way he pursued other concerns & as a result was only involved in half the things he's currently credited with. He'd still be considered a great scientist, but he'd be in the company of other great scientists rather than being head and shoulders above them in terms of the metrics we're looking at (like the number of things named after him -- according to wikipedia, 53 notable concepts or fields are named after him).

As people who *do* worry about ethics, we recognize the possibility that maximizing the number of things named after us is actually probably not the most ethical thing we could be doing with our time and energy!