The Moral Case for Speed

A husband and wife sit happily in bed together cradling their life’s greatest joy - their newborn daughter. She has her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s mischievous smirk. The parents couldn’t be happier and neither could their daughter who only rarely cries and when she does so never sheds a tear - it’s a bit peculiar but fails to disturb their joy.

One day the baby girl’s head drops forward, her knees bend inward, and her body crunches into a tight, strained ball. It happens in an instant and her father barely registers what happens but then the cycle repeats, a cluster of frantic, silent movements, leaving her limp and exhausted. The couple rush their daughter to the hospital in what begins a long series of doctor’s visits and escalation to specialists, they can luckily afford as high earners living in the bay area.

It turns out their daughter has a rare genetic disease - she’s not producing enough of a protein encoded by the faulty gene. The parents are elated because they now know the cause, but it turns out there’s no treatment. Not because we don’t know how to treat the disorder - there’s two relatively simple options here: supply the missing enzyme or edit the gene. The problem is nothing is approved. There aren’t even trials yet. No product will make it to market for at least a dozen years, if ever. That’s longer than their daughter’s life expectancy.

A researcher could design the guide RNA (gRNA) sequence in minutes - there’s little to it given the girl is already sequenced. Synthesizing the nucleotides might take the lab assistant a couple of hours. There are multiple labs that have worked on nanoparticles for delivering to the specific tissue of importance. Hundreds of other labs have done viral transfection with AAV9 hundreds of thousands of times in cells and animals for small genes such as this one. If we wanted to, if we allowed it, there could be an experimental treatment made in a week.

That’s of course a bit cavalier and very illegal. The IRB is aghast - what terrible parents would they be to consider such a thing - it’s criminal! No, there are procedures for these things. Multiple years studying the target, multiple years creating the models, multiple years testing the editing mechanisms, at least a decade of clinical trials and long term safety studies.

No the girl can wait 10 to 20 years for the drug to hit market - that is if the parents can find other families to form a foundation and a registry, convince pharma companies to invest hundreds of millions, convince insurers to pay millions per patient, and corral an entire industry of researchers, biotech operators, and medical professionals to focus their careers on this single disease. Except the girl can’t wait she’ll be dead by then but no use worrying what can be done?

To prioritize speed over safety would be preposterous - think of the harms?

There are no villains in this story. Everyone is behaving ethically, they are following norms and guidelines around medical treatments and scientific inquiry. There is a procedure and a burden of proof here. You need to run the experiments, satisfy the reviewers, present at the conferences, publish in the journals, appease the ethics committees, run the trials, dine with the investors, mollify the regulators. The machine performs exactly as designed.

Science, we are told is slow.

That this girl dies along with thousands like her is of no consequence to the broader world which never learns their names. We have built a civilization that treats waiting as neutral, as if time plays no part in the course of disease.

It’s time we built a moral case for speed

The case for caution is rooted in the very definition of wisdom. Aristotle defined prudence (phronesis) as the master virtue—the practical wisdom needed to steer between extremes. It was the deliberate pause that allowed a person to find courage between rashness and cowardice, or generosity between wastefulness and greed. The Stoics saw this pause as the battlefield of the soul, where reason could conquer the irrational passions of haste and anger. For Thomas Aquinas, prudence was a cardinal virtue that directed the conscience, ensuring that moral principles were applied correctly. In the East, Confucius taught that the superior person is cautious in speech and deliberate in action, understanding that true effectiveness comes not from speed, but from harmony and timing.

But this noble tradition has been corrupted. For these ancient philosophers slowness was not about inaction, but the disciplined pursuit of right action. Caution was an active, rigorous process - a means to a moral end, not an escape from it.

We have kept the mechanics of slowness while discarding its purpose. The ancients slowed down to aim better; we slow down to avoid firing the shot at all. Our world is defined not by virtuous deliberation, but by bureaucratic inertia, where process is a shield against accountability. We engage in endless review cycles, risk-mitigation workshops, and stakeholder alignments that serve not to clarify the best course of action, but to diffuse responsibility for any action whatsoever. We have created systems where the greatest personal risk is not failure, but decision.

The result is a profound institutional cowardice, a state of paralysis Francis Bacon warned against centuries ago: “he who will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.” We are choosing the guaranteed evil of stagnation to avoid the potential embarrassment of error.

Philosophers of the modern era gave us the tools to diagnose this pathology. Hannah Arendt saw it in the rise of bureaucracy, which she called the “rule of nobody.” It is a system where individual moral agency dissolves into process, allowing enormous harm to occur with no one person to hold responsible. This systemic paralysis is built on a lie that John Stuart Mill identified as moral cowardice: the belief that harms of omission (the suffering we fail to prevent) weigh less than harms of commission (the mistakes we might make by acting). This paralysis is a direct affront to the pragmatic spirit that built the modern world, an ethos embodied by Benjamin Franklin. His entire philosophy can be summed up in a simple, powerful maxim: “Well done is better than well said.” For Franklin, virtue was not found in endless deliberation but in useful application. He knew that progress comes from iterative action—from trying, failing, and trying again. Our culture of caution, by sanctifying process over results, has chosen ‘well said’ over ‘well done.’

We are heirs to an Enlightenment that once believed knowledge should be applied. We still believe in knowledge, but we have grown afraid of application.

Nowhere is this clearer than in medicine, especially gene therapy.

CRISPR systems can knock out entire genes. Base editing can swap single nucleotides precisely; prime editing can surgically insert, delete, and rewrite sequences. We’ve used these tools in cells, in plants, in animals, in people. Nanoparticles made of lipids, polymers, and metals can deliver gene therapies to muscle, liver, brain. We can quantify off-target effects and transduction efficiency. We can manufacture therapies at scale.

The knowledge exists - but the system retards us.

More than 5,000 known monogenic diseases could be cured with this technology. Yet the law treats each disease as a separate product. Five thousand disorders, five thousand bespoke approvals. Each costs hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade of review. Every molecule must prove itself from scratch, even when the platform is identical. The system insists on learning the same lesson thousands of times at human cost.

We could cure them all. License the platform, editing mechanism plus delivery vehicle, once. Validate each edit under continuous monitoring. Learn in real time. Build safety through speed.The devil is of course in the details but many will find even the suggestion heretical.

There is an incentive mechanism at the FDA called the priority review voucher (PRVs). Create a drug for a neglected disease area - rare pediatric disorders, tropical diseases, medical countermeasures - and you can earn a transferable voucher such that the FDA will take “only” 6 months instead of 10 to make a determination on your drug. PRVs are an absurdity. They sell for $150M meaning we know the economic cost of 4 months delay to a pharma company for a single therapeutic is $150M, with nothing to say of the costs to patients left waiting or society writ large. We’ve baked in lethargy into our institutional design as a way of incentivizing actions rather than making speed the default condition.

The pattern repeats across civilization. We take decades to approve reactors while coal plants pollute the air. We can manufacture solar cells by the billion, but not build the transmission lines to use them. We can print a house in days, but it takes five years to permit it. Capability exceeds permission everywhere.

The late twentieth century optimized for caution, so now the twenty-first will be defined by its cost. Time has become our scarcest resource, and yet we waste it by design. Caution used to be wisdom. Now it is decadence—the comfort of institutions that no longer care about winning.

This is the work of Moloch, that evil god of malcoordination. Each individual actor—the regulator, the scientist, the investor—is behaving rationally within their local incentives, yet the system as a whole produces a catastrophic outcome. The procession draws closer to his jaws as he consumes with insatiable hunger. It is not enough to turn around. We must run, not walk, as fast as possible in that other direction. A system that cannot act faster than the crises it faces will eventually be consumed by them. Gods can wait indefinitely, humans can’t.

“It’s time to build” cannot be a call to arms merely for the operators and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. Action must be embraced among the academy and the state as well. What use is the rapid movement of the river if the village refuses to harness it? We must align on progress as our north star and speed as the virtuous means of achieving it. History rewards the civilizations that learn fastest. There was a time when moral courage and scientific speed were the same virtue. When we decide to act, anything is possible. We have done it before. And not just once.

In 1898, the chemist William Crookes warned of famine. The world was running out of nitrogen fertilizer needed to supply wheat. He called upon the world’s chemists to act; the output would not be draft guidance or policy papers but a technological solution to an urgent societal problem. A decade later, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch delivered it; their process feeds billions to this day.

In 1939 Howard Florey and Ernst Chain took up the task of purifying penicillin, discovered by Fleming a decade earlier. Within a year the Oxford scientists had tested on mice successfully. A year after that they began testing in humans and by 1943 it was being mass produced to treat allied soldiers only four years after its first purification.

In 1962 Kennedy declared that “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade”; while the US lacked the rocketry, navigation, and life support technology to make such a project feasible. That deadline though was a moral technology—one that galvanized the populace under state resources to achieve the impossible in seven years time.

We desperately need to rebuild that notion of a mission economy. To create a technological state that sets priorities and acts on them. One that can harness and coordinate the strengths of the academy and industry together towards a common goal. A high-capacity state does not equate slowness with seriousness. Its legitimacy comes from efficacy—the ability to translate public will into public action. To govern is to act in time. We need institutions that learn as they regulate. That test, publish, adapt. That reward officials for problems solved, not meetings held. That permit in parallel, not in sequence.

Modern people forget what progress is. As Jason Crawford wrote, we live like fish in water—surrounded by wonders we no longer see. Electricity, antibiotics, the global food supply—each was once a miracle we now treat as background noise. That blindness breeds complacency. We forget that progress is not self-sustaining. It is the product of deliberate velocity. Left to itself, the world decays. Waiting is not neutrality; it is a surrender to entropy.

Every civilization faces this reckoning. Ours is overdue. We cannot preserve abundance with the tempo of austerity. The Enlightenment believed that knowledge would light the path forwar, but the road must be built as we walk it—and we are years behind schedule.

Speed is not hubris. It is respect for the briefness of every human life.

The moral case for speed is simple: lives, climates, and generations all run on clocks that ignore our bureaucracy. Delay is not a form of care. It is care deferred until it becomes cruelty. Every therapy trapped in review, every reactor trapped in licensing, every family trapped in a housing hearing—each is a moral debt accruing interest.

We are rich enough to give back more. We are powerful enough to act. We are the first civilization with the knowledge to edit the fabric of our beings, to harness the power of the sun, to reshape the world around us into a modern Eden. And yet we do not, because it is easier to wait and wither.

We have been afforded a boon; a spectre gifts us a glimpse of the future. There is a sprawling cemetery and in it a tombstone towering over all the other nameless graves. The inscription reads “They knew how, yet waited.”

We can wait no longer. It is time for us to accelerate. We must build momentum towards progress. We must embrace speed as our ultimate virtue.