@fantaghiro
2017-06-05T10:58:15.000000Z
字数 5357
阅读 5821
文本细读 商务英语综合教程
Our age of technology has taught us to be wary of the dangers of certain applications of science, as tools of manipulation, degradation, or destruction. Any Westerner would recognize the image of Dr. Frankenstein's monster gone wild, and we have all become accustomed, as well, to the specter of the nuclear mushroom cloud, the dread of biological or chemical attack, and the stench of industrial pollution. We also know that otherwise beneficial technologies can open up troubling ethical questions.
Our age of technology has taught us to be wary of the dangers of certain applications of science, as tools of manipulation, degradation, or destruction.
This has been clear from the start. It was Francis Bacon, a father of the modern scientific project, who said plainly that "the mechanical arts are of ambiguous use, serving as well for hurt as for remedy."
But Bacon answered his worry in terms that still suffice as a reply to the notion that technology's moral neutrality makes it dangerous. "If the debasement of the arts and sciences to purposes of wickedness, luxury, and the like, be made a ground of objection," Bacon wrote, "let no one be moved thereby, for the same may be said of all earthly goods; of wit, courage, strength, beauty, wealth, light itself and the rest." Anything can be turned to evil in the hands of evil men. This is not the most essential moral challenge posed for us by modern science.
The moral challenge of modern science reaches well beyond the ambiguity of new technologies because modern science is much more than a source of technology, and scientists are far more than mere investigators and toolmakers. Modern science is a grand human endeavor, indeed the grandest of the modern age, and its modes of thinking and reasoning have come to dominate the way mankind understands itself and its place.
Science builds its understanding cumulatively -- so that it always knows more today than it knew yesterday. This is not, strctly speaking, how religion works, or in most cases even how philosophy works. Science is inherently progressive, and so gives us the sense that all other means of understanding must strive to catch up. Not far behind every new development in biotechnology is a well-meaning hand-wringer mouthing the all too familiar cliche that "science is moving so fast ethics just can't keep up."
But this is a profound misunderstanding. The ethical framework we need to deal with the challenges (and to make the most of the promise) of science and technology need not be developed in light of the latest scientific journal article. Its key components have been available to us for a very long time. They were discussed among the priests in the temple of Solomon three thousand years ago, debated in the markets of Athens in the fifth century B.C., preached by a Galilean carpenter to all who would listen, and they have been and continue to be refined, sharpened, and applied by some of the greatest minds of Western civilization ever since. Such an array of non-scientific wisdom is perhaps best understood as traditional.
This is not to say that our tradition does not evolve and grow. It surely does, and always should, but it cannot do so in a simple and cumulative way. The new things we learn in philosophy and ethics and religion do not supersede the old things we have long known. Modern astronomy has simply proven that what Aristotle theorized about the nature of the solar system was wrong. Modern philosophy will never be able to show any such thing with regard to what Aristotle theorized about the best way to live.
All of this is simply to say that there is more than one legitimate way to gain understanding. Our means of understanding and governing mankind are fundamentally quite different from our means of understanding and mastering nature. To understand nature takes ever-growing knowledge. To understand man takes the wisdom of the ages. That wisdom, as it builds, can ben informed by scientific knowledge, but it can never be replaced by it. Science is a tremendously effective and powerful means of gaining knowledge about nature. But human beings and human societies are more than mere objects of nature, and so other things matter too.
Science, morals, religion, and philosophy are not merely different ways of answering the same questions, to be compared to each other based upon their answers. They are, rather, different ways to answer different questions. Modern science, in answering critical questions about the natural world, has brought us health, comfort, wealth, and power undreamt of in earlier ages.
By its very success and its impressive power, then, the scientific mindset convinces us that it is the path to the only knowledge worth knowing, and weakens our allegiance to those other osuces of wisdom so crucial to our self-understanding and self-government. Those other sources of wisdom so crucial to our self-understanding and self-government. Those other sources serve to ground our moral judgment, while science avoids or flattens moral questions, since it cannot answer them and rarely needs to ask them. Rather than as morally neutral, then, we might describe the modern ascnedancy of the scientific worldview as morally neutralizing, crowding out our means of moral reasoning and sources of moral authority. For all its power, science risks leaving us morally and metaphysically impotent.
As the ability of science to remake the natural world continues to expand, science itself, or at least our concession to its uathority, has left us increasingly powerless to decide how best to use our novel master. So the real challenge lies not in the tools that science gives us, but in the attitudes it forms in us. The trouble is not that technology can be used for both good and evil, but that people in the age of technology may have real trouble telling the difference between the two. When we allude to the Brave New World as shorthand for the inhuman technological dystopia that threatens our future if we fail to meet this challenge, we musch be sure to remember the full Shakespearean excalmation from which Aldous Huxley drew his novel's title: "O brave new world that has such people in't!" It is not simply the age of modern science that should worry us, but the refashioned people in it.