Role of Science and Technology
Role of science and technology
My mandate, as I understood it, was to sketch the principal orientation of peoples in the capitalist democracies of North America and Europe to the human rights issues implicated in the constantly growing capacity of men and women to manipulate the natural world and to influence virtually every aspect of human life in ways hardly imagined just a few decades ago.
TENSION BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND THE HUMANITIES
The juxtaposition of "science and technology" with "human rights" in the overall project description implies, I believe, a felt tension between two ways of knowing the world, between two distinct yet constantly interactive realms of knowledge: the realms of science and the humanities. The quickstep of science and technology increases exponentially the means for conscious intervention in everyone else's personal and social life by the small minority of people possessed of the requisite knowledge, capital, authority, and/or coercive power. In response, morally sensitive members of the human community, including some who are themselves positioned to exploit new knowledge, search desperately for standards to channel evolving technologies toward serving rather than subverting broadly shared interests.
Perhaps their search is driven by an even deeper concern. The leaps of scientific and technological knowledge threaten to do more than sharpen the pitch of extant hierarchies and increase the destructive potential of conflicts between liters. The new knowledge imperils our very sense of what it means to be human: our subjective feeling of responsibility; our belief in the capacity for moral action and personal improvement.
Our sense of what it means to be human depends on our conviction, however unconscious, that there exists a zone of autonomous, self-conscious choice, constricted but never entirely occupied by chance and genes and chemistry, and defensible, albeit not always successfully, against the intrusion of state and
My mandate, as I understood it, was to sketch the principal orientation of peoples in the capitalist democracies of North America and Europe to the human rights issues implicated in the constantly growing capacity of men and women to manipulate the natural world and to influence virtually every aspect of human life in ways hardly imagined just a few decades ago.
TENSION BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND THE HUMANITIES
The juxtaposition of "science and technology" with "human rights" in the overall project description implies, I believe, a felt tension between two ways of knowing the world, between two distinct yet constantly interactive realms of knowledge: the realms of science and the humanities. The quickstep of science and technology increases exponentially the means for conscious intervention in everyone else's personal and social life by the small minority of people possessed of the requisite knowledge, capital, authority, and/or coercive power. In response, morally sensitive members of the human community, including some who are themselves positioned to exploit new knowledge, search desperately for standards to channel evolving technologies toward serving rather than subverting broadly shared interests.
Perhaps their search is driven by an even deeper concern. The leaps of scientific and technological knowledge threaten to do more than sharpen the pitch of extant hierarchies and increase the destructive potential of conflicts between liters. The new knowledge imperils our very sense of what it means to be human: our subjective feeling of responsibility; our belief in the capacity for moral action and personal improvement.
Our sense of what it means to be human depends on our conviction, however unconscious, that there exists a zone of autonomous, self-conscious choice, constricted but never entirely occupied by chance and genes and chemistry, and defensible, albeit not always successfully, against the intrusion of state and