My Ethics and Technology course

School, College and Child development
1

For background purposes, I have to follow this compulsory Ethics and Technology class for my Master’s degree in biotechnology. As far as I am aware it runs from today until the end of december, but they will tell me more about that when the first lecture takes place.

Well, it seems they postponed the lecture by two hours so now I am sitting here reading the recommended material. I think it would be insightful for those who are not closely involved in today’s universities to see what they’re teaching here. I will mostly share things from the lectures and the book we have. This is going to be interesting, I think.

Feel free to comment on things, I’ll just be updating it with new information as I learn more things about the course and what they are trying to teach us…

So, let’s get started here :frowning: (Comments in brackets are mine, same goes for italics)

It starts off nicely, when the book discusses its purpose:

In this way the reader aims to contribute to preparing engineers to practice as professional engineers in a socially responsible way.

They haven’t really talked about what socially responsible means up until now, but I think that’s the aim of the rest of the chapter so I will see if I can answer it in a little while. It doesn’t sound very promising, though.

My suspicion is further confirmed when they define ethics:

In this reader ethics is defined as critical reflection on what is good and bad and on what is right and wrong in the behaviour of people towards each other.[?]

So it seems one can only be moral or immoral when there are others around. This doesn’t explicitly state that the good is what is good for others but it practically implies it. After all, good and evil are based on how they affect someone else; that sounds pretty altruistic to me.

There is also a pretty strong influence of environmentalism here, as for the second time in about two pages of reading they talk about pollution and other environmental risks as negative consequences of technology.

One may also think of all the technological activities that give rise to hindrance or which cause risks, which are undertaken at the expense of nature or space, which pollute the environment or exhaust natural resources. With respect to such issues it is frequently the case that what one person contends [the use of this word seems to imply that there is no one standard for what is good or right] is good or right, might not be agreed with by another at all.

Ah, in the coming quote they state it explicitly! At least they’re honest about it…

Ethics and morality

Precisely what is considered to be good or bad by an individual or in a society and just what behaviour is considered to be right or wrong, correct or incorrect, permitted or forbidden, allowed or not allowed [okay, I get the point already!], is something that is determined by a great complexity of views, rules and customs [this leaves the gates wide open for the multiculturalists to come swarming in… and what do customs and rules (or even views) have to do with morality, anyway? Apparently morality is completely flexible…]. The totality of these views, rules and customs that together determine the actual behaviour of people towards others is termed morality in this reader [i think determine is not the right word as it implies there is no choice involved in the matter; that one’s moral views automatically make a person act a certain way].

And then:

Morality can differ between individuals, groups and societies and, in practice, very often does [saw that one coming, didn’t you? ;)]. There may moreover be differences between people’s moral views on high days and holidays and their everyday moral customs and behaviour. What we mean to say is that certain practices in which people participate (“every day”) need not be consistent with principles which they applaud or find desirable (“on high days and holidays”). In earlier times many people had difficulty with slavery while at the same time they kept slaves. Modern examples of such discrepancies between people’s ideal and actual moral views may be found in all kinds of unsustainable or hazardous activities such as flying and car-driving [?] [there’s a note about game theory here, apparently lifeboat situations are very useful for solving these problems…]. This therefore means that the moral views and customs of people or groups of people can seldom be seen as constituting a consistent whole [i guess that’s true, most people are hypocrits..].

And now for the cashing-in…

Reflection should be taken to mean: thinking about, reasoning. We speak of critical reflection because we do not see morality as something fixed and unchangeable, but rather as something that could be adapted or reviewed in the light of (critical) reflection [scroll up a bit to the definition they gave of ethics to see what they mean].

If ethics is defined as a critical reflection on what is good or bad, and a critical reflection means that you get to reconsider your views after a lot of discussion, you’re both making morality completely subjective and you are enshrining compromise (the bad sort). My class is starting soon, so I guess I have to leave the rest of the introduction for a later time. It does give a good preview of what kind of things are to come, though…

Can’t say that I am looking forward to this, but I hope I can make it clear in some of the workgroup discussions that what they talk about here is complete and utter nonsense. I’ll update this later.

2

This sounds like a lot of fun. :frowning:

3

It doesn’t sound very promising, though.

My suspicion is further confirmed when they define ethics:

:lol: !!!

What I want to know is, how are you going to go through the exam (and the course, too)?

When I was in High school I was taking psychology+sociology (had no choice about sociology).

And let me tell you, the crap they had me eating there did not taste good at all!

During the year I didn’t pay much attention to the class. But when the test arrived me and my friend (who is also intelligent and critically-thinking) were sitting down to prepare for the exam. I remember reading some theories in sociology: at first, I could not understand what the writer is trying to say at all. Then, with great focus and efforts I went through it again. Then, I started noticing contradictions, stating them aloud. Then I started cursing the idiot who wrote those things. Then, we needed to remember the theories. Normally, you have no problem remembering something that you can understand. But try to remember a bunch of things that make no sense at all - that’s a nightmare! We used to read it paragraph by paragraph, provide interpretation to try to summarize the content, and then I would usually swear the author again after each paragraph.

I remember one time we learned about some theory that stated that we (the human race) should brainwash children from when they are born to want to live for the happiness of others, and this would be the way to achieve the perfect world. I was so completely, overwhelmingly appalled by the evilness of that theory, that I didn’t forget it until this day. I was shocked that the teacher just keeps on reading it, and everyone in the class just keep on reading as if nothing terrible has just happened.

We also learned the basics of communism (from things that Karl Marx wrote), but I remember it simply made no sense to me (I didn’t think it was evil back then).

In short, it was <insert three puking emoticons here>.

If I had to take such a course today, I would not agree to go through it. I would appeal to whomever necessary, I would make demonstrations, I would do whatever necessary to get a “pass” grade.

However, if you don’t mind much about your grade I guess that just passing the test would also be good enough for you. So how are you going to handle this irrationality?

4

It’s a compulsory course, so I have to take it if I want to get my degree. But yeah, I was also wondering about that. If they’re going to ask for definitions of certain things, or ask me to explain a theory I know to be false, how should I act then? Should I just tell them what they want to hear or risk getting a fail grade by arguing for what I think is the truth?

Even though they claim that no one is wrong, from my experience with that kind of people they do not at all like it when you claim to be certain of yourself.

We’re not really studying theories, though. It’s mainly a course where you study different cases and then you have to find a solution to them that is satisfactory.

You know what’s worst? The other half of my grade is determined by a group essay! :stuck_out_tongue: Now that will be interesting to witness :lol:

5

Okay, yesterday we had this discussion where someone used an excerpt from our penal code (from the Netherlands, I mean) to support their position. It reads like this (it’s a translation, but as far as I know it’s correct):

Article 273. -1. He who deliberately does one of the following will be punished with a prison sentence of maximally six months or a fourth category fine 1’ making public particulars of which secrecy has been imposed, concerning a business involved in trade, industry or service where he works or has worked, […] -2. Not punishable is he who in good faith could have assumed that the common good required the making public.

-3. No prosecution will take place other than upon the complaint of the company’s management.

(Bold mine)

Now is that horrible, or is that horrible? Apparently you can reveal whatever information you want about your company as long as your intent was to serve the common good. This is like saying that murder is only bad if you do it for yourself, but if you murdered that nasty rich guy you did society a favor and you shouldn’t be punished.

I asked some questions in the discussion group after they brought this up, about why the common good excused behaviour like this, but my good didn’t? In the cases like this that actually happened public opinion shifted dramatically when the guy who revealed information wanted to personally profit from it by making himself available for hire (This was in a large scale construction fraud case; he offered to study the accounting files because that’s what he was good at). The moment he made that publicly known the majority suddenly thought he was wrong, while before I suppose they assumed that he revealed the information for the benefit of the public.

I didn’t get any straight answers on my questions, actually. Well, except for one guy who asked why society should make laws that serve a person’s interests rather than those of society as a whole. Shows you where he stands, doesn’t it?

Well, I have to go prepare for my Collective Reasoning (!!) lecture now. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? I’m not quite sure how a collective thinks (as far as I know groups get dumber the bigger they get :wink: ) but I’m sure I’m going to find out in detail today.

6

Not punishable is he who in good faith could have assumed that the common good required the making public.

That’s terrible and non-objective, as written. An exception is required, but not this one. The law should make an exception to protect the person who reveals his company’s criminal activity: e.g. arms sales to Iran. (Other laws probably define things as criminal when they ought not to be so defined; but, that would be a problem with those laws.)

“Collective Reasoning” lecture… … as far as I know groups get dumber the bigger they get

You’re right, the performance of groups is often less than the performance of its better members. A common exercise that is done in college is to make teams and give them a case study with some answers. The answer sheet has two columns for each answer. First, individuals read the case-study on their own and mark their answers in the first column. Then, they get together with their group and discuss each answer and arrive at a group answer. Many a time, members realize their answer was wrong when they talk to the others in their group; at other times, they continue to disagree. Either way, the group has to somehow agree on a single answer to each question and mark that in the second column.

When the class reconvenes they share the results. Usually, the each group scores better on the test than some of its individual members, while some members score better on the test than the group. Up to this point, it’s a decent exercise in group decision-making. Next, the lecturer will probably provide some commentary that sums up what was learnt. This can go either way. I suppose that he could focus on how the group brought many lower-performers up to a better standard; or, he could emphasize that even though the group was not the best decision, just being the consensus has the advantage that everyone is committed to it; or – if he was really bad – he could make people doubt whether the true answers are really true, or just another opinion.

However, when I was put through this exercise some years ago, I was impressed at what the lecturer stressed. He did not question the correctness of the correct answers. The lessons he taught from the exercise were: those who did worse than the group should ask themselves why they brought down the group’s performance. Was it “ego” rather than commitment to truth that kept them committed to their own answers even if they weren’t certain of them? He even more strongly berated those whose individual performance was significantly better than the group, asking them to consider if they were placing too high a value on being “nice” rather than assertive, on getting an agreement, and not being too committed to what they knew was right.

7

That sounds frighteningly like real teaching SN, good for you (I had no such luck in my “higher” education).

mrock

8

The reader for the course did mention that this part of the legal code was rarely used because most companies would not want to allow something like this to go to court (due to negative press and public opinion). However, I think the mere fact that something like that is encoded into law is quite frightening…

Well, Collective Reasoning is apparently a method for getting agreement, and it has certain “rules”. The only requirement for arguments is that they are deductively valid (i.e. they follow from the premises) but the premises are completely arbitrary. The goal of the method is to try and find some set of premises everyone can agree to and then arrive at the conclusion implicit in those premises. Of course, this doesn’t really work when there are opposing principles at stake, so they stressed the importance (?) of compromise.

As long as arguments are internally consistent they are apparently valid, which I think is pure rationalism.

The whole definition of reasoning used in the course is weird. They say that reasoning is mainly a way to get agreement among people. If that’s not describing something by non-essentials I do not know what is. By completely ignoring what function reason actually performs it’s no wonder they arrive at false tasks for reason to perform later on.

In the workgroup today there was this Collective Reasoning exercise between two groups of two students. One group had to present arguments for the use of Genetically Modified foods, and the other group had to present arguments against it. It was painful to see all the skepticism-fueled arguments used against GM foods, and I made a few powerful comments about that after the discussion (sadly I couldn’t participate, although I did pointed out some logical implications of their position, which is fun to do :slight_smile: ).

One thing I pointed out was that the arguments they used were the very same arguments people have used throughout the ages to denounce any new invention (“we don’t know the risks!” “Who needs cars, anyway? Our horses are much better!” “But it could be abused!” etc.), and I said that if they were going to be consistent then they should also denounce most other forms of technology, because nothing would ever be 100% safe (that was another “argument” they used: apparently as long as it’s not proved that something is never dangerous (which is impossible) you shouldn’t use it because something bad might happen).

This course is both really interesting and really frustrating :wink: