Issue88 [AWB小组]第十四次作业

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Issue 88
Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics.

Disagree
1. Social customs and ethics are mainly determined by history and culture, not by technologies. The rapid development of technologies appears recently, while the social customs and ethics exist for quite a long time. (Respecting teachers in China)
2. Social customs and ethics in most cases limit the development of technologies. The technique of cloning should be restrained because the ethical reasons. (Cloning)
3. Technologies can only influence them in some degree. (Wedding ceremony)

Body
What is the relationship between technologies and social customs and ethics? In modern society, after having greatly changed our world, technologies continue playing a very important part in different fields of both industry and daily life. However, although technologies influence some social customs and ethics, one has to admit that it is social customs and ethics that decide the direction of the development of technologies. Further more, customs and ethics form under certain history and culture environment.

To illustrate that it is history and culture that determines social customs and ethics, I take the high social positions of teachers in China as an example. In China, one obvious customs is that everyone respects the teachers very much, especially the students and their parents. There is an old saying “You should treat your teacher as your father.” The fourth emperor in Qing Dynasty who is called Kang Xi always listened to his teacher’s opinion before making important political decisions. As far as everyone knows, in ancient China, the teacher was the person who gave the students guide not only about study itself but also about life so that they were highly praised at that time. Nowadays Chinese still keep the respect to the teacher as a traditional customs, and compared to other countries, teachers are more respectable in China. That customs forms before the world having been changed greatly by technologies and with the improvement of technologies, it doesn’t change at all.

In fact technologies are determined by social customs and ethics to which people judge their behaviors according. If out of the restraints of social customs and ethics, technologies will bring some negative effect to the society. There are plenty of examples to support that people always give up some advanced technologies for they are against the moral standards. One of the examples is the cloning of human beings, which has been well developed by several scientists from different countries. Why this technology not becoming public and popular? Because we can not explain the relationship of the clone baby and his or her mother! To prevent the possible mess in ethics, neither we continue the research nor do we apply the gained achievement to anyone.

Admittedly, technologies do influence the social customs and ethics in some degree. In the past, when people hold a wedding ceremony, they hired a local band to play trumpets, flutes and drums on the road or in the hall. With the invention of media player and CD, we could listen to all kinds of music which make us enjoy more. In modern wedding ceremony, you will rarely see the musical instruments; instead of that, advanced technology of music playing brings us better background.

As the analysis and examples given above, I could stress again that it is customs and ethics which was born in certain history and culture environment that determine the technologies while technologies could influence social customs and ethics inevitably. Customs and ethics do help us to choose the proper road of the development of technologies when we meet a situation of dilemma. Technologies themselves are objective, but human beings should have their own moral standards.