This "A" Has Gone Straight To My Head

From How Good People Make Tough Choices, by Rushworth M. Kidder

The impulse to condemn the ethical present...has always been there, as has the longing for the return to whatever will give us goodness. That perpetual impulse however, should not blind us to the quantitative and qualititative differences between our past and present technologies. Was there a system in Wordsworth's age that, if you could have turned it over to two engineers like those at Reactor Number Four and said, "Do the most unconscionable thing you can imagine," would have produced a Chernobyl? Where in the nineteenth century (to change the example) could you have found a ship large enough to load with some toxic substance, put a drunken captain in charge, and run it aground in Prince William Sound in Alaska to have done the damage caused by the Exxon Valdez oil spill on March 24, 1989?

...What's new, then, is not simply our knowledge. It's the sheer scale and power of our systems--scientific, technological, financial, governmental, educational, and so forth. ...Like megaphones, they amplify small whispers of wrongdoing into vast bellows of amorality. In that megaphone effect, a single moral lapse--a single ethical Chernobyl--can now affect millions for centuries. ...[This power] now lies in the hands of more-or-les well-meaning experts--whose only failings, perhaps, are a fuzziness at the moral core and a consequent limiting of the vision. The danger increasingly lies in the hands of otherwise ordinary people--people you and I know and like. They are not willfully setting out to create the next Chernobyl. Yet they may be operating in a systemic and personal ethical vacuum that, in the end, leaves them unable to tell right from wrong...the are walking straight into a world-class moral temptation.

In my opinion, this is why getting education right is crucial and a moral imparative. What do you think?