The Dialectics between Natural and Artificial - Essay Example

The Dialectics between Natural and Artificial Modern technology has created a material prosperity that is unequalled in our history. It has also created environmental threats of almost inconceivable magnitude. The build-up of carbon dioxide produced by burning coal and oil now threatens to result in a global warming trend that could cause worldwide climatic changes, including devastating droughts coupled with large-scale coastal flooding.1 Widespread industrialization has put serious strains on our energy and mineral resources; it is now believed that the production of oil, aluminium, manganese, mercury, tungsten, and zinc will peak and begin to diminish before the end of this century. These environmental happenstances are due to the perpetually increasing demands for human's basic needs on the backdrop of dwindling natural resources. The debate on the sustainability of resources is the major concern around the world. As stated above, while modern technology provides us with so much comfort in our daily lives, it also undeniably jeopardizes the sustainability of our environment, which happens to be our major provider. One of the ethical discussions on sustainability is the promotion of artificial products through the widespread application of genetic engineering in plants and animals, and creation of man-made ecosystem to alter the deteriorating ecological balance. Artificial is defined as formulation of something based on natural phenomenon but is completely lacks the intrinsic value of what is natural. Conservative thinkers postulate that incorporating artificial schema on environmental context is morally unjustified because it violates the natural mechanism of things, and in religious context, it defiles the God's creation. Conversely, radical thinkers posit that the integration of artificial schema in the environment is morally permissible because it helps in the prolongation and preservation of life, especially that the world is facing a huge problems on natural resources continuous supplies. Advocators of anti-artificial schema argue that the promotion of ersatz products necessitates the used of modern technology, and if certain technology is not yet available, then new technology must be invented first for the realisation of a specific artificial products. The problems with this is that most of the time, the actualisation artificial schema post threats on the natural resources because, one, a new technology must be applied to natural things before it can be proven, and if the technology fails, new technologies will be created, which means that the threat on environment will also increase; two, the artificial procedures of preserving life in the expense of our natural environment is becoming vicious because of the belief that preservation of life is justified in any given context, wherein our natural environment suffers greatly from this belief because the environment is only seen as resource that must be utilised for the nourishment of life. On the other hand, proponents of artificial schema conjecture that natural resources is finite and limited, hence the need to manufacture ersatz products in the expense and out of natural resources is permissible because through this, the continually increasing demand for basic human needs will be resolved, as well as, the environment will be preserved. Radical thinkers argue that modern technologies may have repercussions but its benefits are countless. They even stress out that application of artificial schema with the aid of technology is the only way humanity can preserve its environment and its people. Today the world is embracing the artificiality of things; foods products are being engineered, while natural environment are being photocopied such as lagoon, rainforest, etc. to prevent the continuous deterioration of the environment, and to preserve its present status. Thus our modern advancements and artificial schemes have created major environmental positive consequences, as well as, risks that threaten the lives and well-being not only of ourselves but of the future generations and of other living creatures. For example, genetic engineering helps in the massive production of foods such as rice, vegetables, fruits, etc. albeit new diseases are being born and a great number of living creatures suffers because of the trial and error practice of such advancement. The point is, artificial schema may help in the preservation of life but the environment must suffered from it because once the natural mechanism of the environment is jeopardised, no one can alter its effect and no technology can fixed its problems. Survival of the Fittest Thomas Hobbes claims that man is innately selfish which is a necessary premise for him to do everything in order to ascertain that he can survive and preserves his life. Survival comes with great cost, especially in times of deteriorating natural resources and in period wherein life is becoming more complicated and complex. Preservation of one's life is of great importance to every living creature, but its actualization is set in the backdrop of stiff competition among individuals who desire to survive the trials of preservation. The principal and most significant factors in this survival issues lies on the utilization of natural resources since it is the sole provider of our basic needs. The availability of natural resources is probably close to its infinitesimal status if human needs and demands keep on increasing, and will eventually be aggravated by the fact that these needs and demands are not yet satiated. The affirmation of self-survival is a human right; everyone has the right to do exhaust everything to ensure the safety and prolongation of one's life. But this must be misconstrued to extremity, in the sense that a person must endanger one's life to guarantee the safety of his life. Survival must be put in context, in which it must be seen as a quest of preservation validated by moral standards. Having said that, survival must be put in practice under the precept of universal maxim or the golden rule of avoiding actions that one do not want others do to him/her. In this sense, an individual will take everything in perspective i.e. the maximization of natural resources should be in accordance to one's needs because going beyond the context of excess others will suffer from it, as well as the future generations, which will provoke them to also go beyond limits of excess. One of the drawbacks of excessive usage of natural resources is that persons tend to acquire all things even if they don't need it and these resources will eventually goes into waste. Consequently, the unwise utilisation of the natural resources endangers our environment and jeopardizes others' lives. The Earth cannot satisfy all our desires, therefore it must be curbed and be limited to only what we need. The more we consume what this planet can have, the more we put an inevitable end to its existence. Our survival is directly proportional to the survival of our environment, as well as with other persons, future generations, and other living creatures. As a moral agent, we should consider other beings and of our environment. We must consider answering the question "if I utilise things based on my greedy volitions (which is warranted by the concept of survival) will I inflict injure others and on the environment" before we act on things regarding the usage of the available natural resources. We must also think consider that our utilisation of these resources affects the life of the ecosystem, thus, we must think of how we can ascertain its preservation in the present time and for the near and coming futures. Papanek asserts in The Green Imperative that human survival lies on the survival of the environment, in which the outright defilement of it leads to our own defilement. There will always be competition amongst men and amongst other creatures, but the environment must not be abused in the foreplay of survival. Man's reason should serve as the impetus to preserve the life and mechanism of our nature. Man should put in his head that his power over the environment lies on its preservation and not its corruption, because whether we like it or not, our environment is much more powerful than us, that they can take us in a predicament we don't have any control at all. In toto, our survival is solely dependent of our environment's existence. Do we owe something for the Future From the beginning of the nuclear age, through the Pugwash Conferences of the late 1950s, down to the environmental movement of our own decade, scientists have played a leading role in alerting us to the dangers posed by our present habits and technologies. Each problem in what Platt has termed the "storm of crisis problems"2 facing mankind today - population growth, resource depletion, environmental degradation, and the control of nuclear energy - has typically first been identified and publicised by members of the scientific community. Since a distinguishing feature of all these problems is that they threaten massive evil for generations yet unborn, scientists have also performed the important task of reminding us of our moral responsibility to future generations. More than many of us, scientists have been alert to the fact that our moral obligations extend beyond our contemporaries the generations that will follow us. But although scientists have tended to assume the existence of such responsibility, they do not circumstantiate the abstract question of the nature of that responsibility, its basis, extent, or limits. The are three axioms that must be satisfied in this topic at hand; first, why does the present generation needs to think of the future generation; second, why does present generations must ensure that the life of future generation must be ideally better than our own and certainly not worse; and third, why do we need to sacrifice for the future. Even though the belief that we have obligations for future generations is widely held, the very idea of obligations to persons in the future is quite odd. In a discussion of this issue, Stearns pointed this out when he asked: "Why should there be obligations to future generations We have made no commitments to them. We have entered no social compacts with them Under any moral theory, why should there be obligations to nonexistent persons"3 Utilitarian theory can easily provide us with answer based on the belief that greatest happiness is only achievable if and only if the greatest number of people enjoys it. The problem is, utilitarian theory fails to answer that one's obligation to maximize happiness entails that persons must also multiply its number so that more individuals could experience happiness. Morality does not really involve any kind of lofty commitment to maximizing human happiness, nor even, as some have believed, to minimizing suffering. Rather, morality is an instrument for adjudicating possible conflict between persons and for facilitating non-coercive settlement of social disputes. It is an effort to replace the play of force and power in human affairs with principles to guide our conduct derived from reasoned, common agreement. Rawls proposes that we view our moral principles as deriving from a hypothetical contract situation in which each of us seeks the best to protect our possible interests. In short, Rawls is suggesting that we empathize with other person or to "put ourselves in other's shoes". These considerations suggest just why we are obligated to future generations. It is not, as utilitarians mistakenly believe, because we have a duty to promote human happiness. Rather, it is because our wishes and behaviour can conflict with those future persons. We live, after all, in a finite world with limited space, resources, and opportunities, and not even the most optimistic prospects of technological change in the future are likely to remove all limits. By reducing these resources or opportunities, our conduct in the present can injure those who will follow us, and they, in turn, in anger, or ignorance can inflict injury on their descendants, and also for the future. Ordinarily, when we act out of respect for other individuals, we can at least entertain the possibility that when their turn comes, they will act out of respect as well. But virtually no possibility of such reciprocity exists between generations. Except, perhaps, by respecting our memory, future generations cannot really compensate us for the sacrifices we make on their behalf. This consideration has led some philosophers to suggest that human history displays a kind of chronological unfairness; the earliest generations are called upon to make sacrifices whose benefits they can never enjoy. A similar oddity has been noted by economists and others who have discussed the matter of capital savings for the future. A policy of savings, they observe, benefits every generation but the first, which experiences only sacrifice.4 It is tempting to conclude that policies which disadvantage one individual or group for the sake of others must be unjust. This need not be true. Where circumstances allow no alternative, policies of this sort can be just, and this seems to be the case where obligations to the future are concerned. Not only is restraint on behalf of the future required, but deliberate sacrifices on our part aimed at making life better for all our descendants also are justified. To see this, we need only regard the choices impartially. We can refuse to sacrifice or save, and we can insist on a strict equality of expectations across generations. This probably is to our advantage if we happen to be in any initial generation when savings (construed as betterment) are proposed. But it is clearly to our disadvantaged if we belong to any subsequent generation. Each of these receives something from its predecessors and benefits generally from the process of savings as the circumstances of life continue to improve. Deprived of knowledge of generation to which we belong, therefore, it seems reasonable to opt for some kind of savings policy. Morality expresses itself as the duty to strive, even at some expense to ourselves, for the betterment of the conditions of life of those who will follow us. There are numerous paths that we can take in caring for the future but the best one is to ensure a better quality of life for them, and one way to do it is to preserve the environment for them. Whatever positive directions we select for the future, it remains true that we are minimally required not to worsen the future quality of life. Any historical process displaying retrogression in human prospects would violate the deepest possibilities of the human enterprise. Unfortunately, an unprecedented capacity to inflict deliberate, mammoth, and irreversible injury on our descendants is a distinguishing feature of our era. Our exercise of this capacity is illustrated by our near exhaustion of petroleum resources and by the serious insults we inflict on delicate environmental system. Amongst the most vivid illustrations of outright negligence to the future, however, are the recent proposals for the development of plutonium recycle economy. Since these proposals furnish virtually a textbook case of how not to treat our descendants because this economy poses a great danger on their lives and health, just for the sake of guaranteeing a high material living standards in the present. From the elucidation of the two axioms, we can infer that our obligations to the future are obligations of justice. They form the part of total moral question of how we are to distribute the limited material resources and opportunities our environment affords. There is nothing new in this understanding. It was emphasized almost two centuries ago by Malthus, one of the pioneers in integrational thinking, when he argued against unrestrained procreation. The procreatively irresponsible can be thought of as unjustly pushing their numerous offspring forward to the limited places at some future banquet table of life.5 Nevertheless, if we grant that it is unjust to force our excess progeny on others or that it is unjust to consume more than our generation's share of resources, what does it imply for our total moral responsibility and particularly for the question of how we ought to distribute needed sacrifices in the present The answer is no. just regard for the future is inseparable from just policies in the present. We cannot pick and choose our areas of moral exertion, encouraging or demanding regard for some persons but not for others. Unfortunately, this awareness has sometimes escaped participants in the population and resource debate. Postscript The provided axioms do not extend itself to future generations but also on the limits of artificial schema and on the necessities of one's survival. The aim of this paper is to present a way of thinking about integrational responsibility. Working out all the details of these axioms and the method that underlies them is an important but separate task. In moral reasoning, as in science, the method of thinking about problems may be more important than specific conclusions, "the act of judging more critical than the judgement". 6 Albeit these axioms may be taken singly, there is some value in regarding them altogether. Like organic life, justice is a seamless web.7 If these axioms offer any lesson, it is that, although we are responsible to the future, our efforts to improve quality of life must not become an excuse for neglecting our responsibilities to our neighbours in the present, and most especially to our own survival. Scientists must be careful that their efforts to shock us into responsibility do not help generate the "me-first" attitude of survival more appropriate to a battlefield or lifeboat than an ongoing human community. If scientists allow their foresight to be used in technology as an ideology by privileged, if they fail to keep in mind the strict relationship between justice to the future and justice to the less fortunate in the present, booth science and future generations will be the losers. References: Bronowski, J. (1990). Science and Human Values (Revised edition ed.): Harper Perennial. Gribbin, J. (1982). Future Weather and the Greenhouse Effect New York, N.Y. : Delacorte Press/Eleanor Friede. Papanek, V. (1995). The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture Thames & Hudson Platt, J. (1969). Science: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Rawls, J. (1999). A Theory of Justice (Revised edition ed.): Belknap Press. Read More