How the responsibility of science can help us to live a better life
Science and research should actually be predestined to be subject to guiding principles such as human reason and the associated ethics. The fact that this is often not the case has long been obvious. Too often it seems that progress is not targeted, but only for its own sake. Even more than ever, time is pressing for science to become aware of its responsibility for the future of humanity and also of the earth.
Responsibility of science Please consider which “achievements” can be traced back to science to this day. We have weapon systems that are designed to kill and torment in a state-of-the-art way that (considering their perfection) it is just macabre! One involuntarily wonders what people invent something like this. Our science, like the affluent society in general, seems to have fallen into a kind of optimization trap.The only motto is "growth and progress at any cost".
From an ethical point of view, it was probably one of the greatest undesirable developments in science (and in particular science) that it turned away from subjective experience towards an exclusively objective view. You try to explain life by dismembering it. This may be used to create vivid and possibly applicable models. But did that really advance us in our humanity? Is humanity a better, more responsible and more moral than before? Considering all of our self-made disasters and grievances, this question can easily be answered in the negative. We may be more "civilized", but this is due to wealth rather than knowledge. Why else should (civilized) people watch the rest of the world starve?
And even now, our science is not going to cover itself with fame. While the hunger of the world is killing more and more people than ever before, our scientists ponder culinary achievements such as genetically modified food. Some gnaw at the starvation cloth and others think about the variation. Of course, the achievements should also benefit those who are in dire need of them. What a cheap PR campaign (in favor of a genetically modified diet) is, becomes clear at the latest when you know that the food produced on earth would be sufficient to supply everyone anyway. So the problem is not availability, but distribution. And anyway: why should the diet with which Mother Earth has fed us for millions of years be so bad now? Instead, a lobby of flimsy scientists and patented seed companies now wants to make sure that we trust their incomplete artificial feed more than nature.
The current attempts to convince us of the need for a genetically modified diet are only one facet of scientific failure. Of course, not all science is entirely without responsibility. But a big problem is that there are relatively few truly independent scientists left. Like so much in our world shaped by turbo-capitalism, science is largely commercialized - it is subject to the interests of the powerful. These can be states or corporations (like the seed producers mentioned). And, of course, these patrons of science wish that the results brought to light should also “be in the spirit of the inventor”. Only when science (and also society!) Sharpens their awareness.
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