Jonah Goldberg has an interesting post up on the relationship between necessity and morality in light of technological developments. However, I don't think (and I don't think Goldberg is implying) that technological progress can always obviate moral problems and that inventive "breakthroughs" will always lead to the categorization of more things as "immoral." Though Goldberg emphasizes the way in which the development of technology helped make child labor less necessary and, therefore in the eyes of many, more immoral, we can also look at the example of the cotton gin. I don't know exactly how true this theory is, but many historians believe that the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s helped perpetuate the institution of slavery because it made the plantation system more efficient and increased the commodity value of a slave. Even as this system may have seemingly become more efficient, opposition to the slavery system also grew. (And eventually the slave system may have impeded technological progress in slave-holding states, so, ironically perhaps, a piece of technology may have ultimately retarded technological progress in a wider sense due to the radical cheapness of labor in and the agrarian emphases of the plantation system.) So the relationship between technology and moral progress is not always so clear cut. As Goldberg says at the end of his post, it is a very interesting topic...