"One of the most powerful of these reassurances is compartmentalisation. Many of us don't work on projects directly related to warfare, myself included. And even people working on Gemini can take comfort in the broad range of its applications, or detach their work from how it is concretely used by focusing on the research or technical side. It's easy to push any ethical consideration to the side.
But we can't accept ‘My project is not related to that’, ‘It can also be used for good’, ‘I just make it run fast’, ‘If not us, someone else, it makes no difference’.
Compartmentalisation in this context is just wrong. It's easy and natural given the high pace of our jobs and all the difficulties of our personal lives. But it's wrong, and accepting it is a destructive process for ourselves.
[...]
We cannot preserve our integrity while compartmentalising this deeply. Integrity means wholeness. Compartmentalisation, past a certain point, is fragmentation, and as such, it opposes integrity. Some separation of contexts is healthy, but when it becomes a way to avoid seeing contradictions, it starts to resemble Orwell's doublethink[14]. The scope within which our values, our empathy, and even our rational thought (which we can apply so masterfully to scientific questions) are allowed to operate begins to narrow. We stop criticising; we are no longer indignant at plain lies and incoherence. The best part of us has less and less room to exist."