Someone else brought up the culpability of fission researchers for Hiroshima. That's one example of a major technical endeavor where even with historical hindsight people won't all agree on its ethics.
Regardless of the ethics of the initial developers of the individual fission researchers, they were experts in their narrow field. They could never be held responsible for not realizing that MAD was the only outcome that their work would result in. The development of the MAD determination was made by the rest of the general public once the full facts of what those initial fission researchers had developed came to public knowledge.
The article is proposing that that public debate happen during or before development so that laws can be made to robustly protect the public from a new technology in the event that it’s misused.
Someone else brought up the culpability of fission researchers for Hiroshima. That's one example of a major technical endeavor where even with historical hindsight people won't all agree on its ethics.