Applied Ethics

Some people have the feeling that morality applies to family life and Sunday School but that it does not apply to the market place. There it is survival of the fittest. Also, they may be concerned that these soft concepts do not apply to the hard realities of business, science, and technology.

However, all of these are social activities. Today they are central to our social life. The issues may be more complicated than not killing and not stealing, but sometimes they are not. If a business pollutes the water so that children die of cancer, isn’t it murder? If a corporation forces people out of their homes to buy up the land at half the value, isn’t it stealing?

Similar considerations apply to medical experimentation, allocation of money to unproductive scientific research projects, and technology that does more harm than good.

As a more complicated example, consider the genetic modification of food. If the genetic modification greatly increases the productivity and disease resistance of the plant, wouldn’t that be good? Perhaps it would reduce hunger in developing countries and reduce the amount of pesticides that need to be used. This would seem to be just a practical issue of comparing the benefits of the new seed to more conventional seed. But where do we get the seed from? When we look into it we find that the seed company has a patent on the genetic modification. Furthermore, the seed does not produce seed that can be replanted, so new seed must be purchased each year from the seed company. The first issue is the idea of ownership of genetic material. On further investigation we find that the genes spliced into the plant to get the new characteristics come from a particular plant in the Amazon jungle. Were the natives of that area paid for the use of this genetic material? No. Is that theft? Can the genetic heritage of our planet really be owned? If not, how will companies be paid for their research? Is it right in principle to tamper with genes that have taken millions of years to evolve? Are the scientists taking risks with all our lives? Could there be dependencies created that reduce the genetic diversity of food crops so that when the climate changes, we suddenly have food shortages?

This is just one of many possible examples. The main point is that ethical considerations need to be included in what may seem like purely technical or economic decisions. These are situations that may not have not existed before, so it could be that past ethical concepts may not be flexible and subtle enough to deal adequately with them. It is very important for people who understand these issues to develop ethical rules that apply well and look out for all of our interests and are not just a smoke screen to protect the interests of the business and scientific elites because in the heat of developing a product or doing a research the engineers and scientists may not think of ethics. It is not their main concern, and the bad consequences of what they do may not be immediately clear.