【Flyer杀G作文组】1月26日作业Issue88

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"Technologies not only influence but actually determine social customs and ethics."
技术不仅仅影响而且实际上是决定了社会传统和道德规范。


In a long time, the ethic problems have become a mud of controversies among the intellectualls. Of all these important issues, maybe the discussion about the origin of all kind of social and ethics have been recognized as the most fierece one. And perhaps one of reasons is that if we can explain this problem, then the solution of other related questions will become available. No matter what the final answer is, technologies at any time in human history is not only an indicator but also an external variable which exert all kind of impacts on the transformation of human ethics. However, do we have enough reason to believe that the technologies is the final determinant of the social customs and ethics. Clearly not.





To begin with, if we accept the statement above, then we could make a such implication that, at least, the earliest technology of human being would appear no later than the original formation of the social customs and ethics. However, some evidence is quite contrary. Biologists generally believe that the time when human firstly understand how to make tools for themselves, which is regarded as the embryonic form of human technologies, stands approximatly at the higher levelof the evolution. While two professors of Emory University make a experiment among a group of capuchin and find that some of the characteristics of social feelings, which are actually part of our social customs and ethics, also exist among moneys. The similar discoveres could also be found in the experiments on other kinds of primates, which means monkey, like human, have their social customs, too. In other words, human beings have already owned the traits of the morality when they are still animal, if we admit, human evolved from the monkey or the similar primates. Unless we are convinced that the determinant could appear later than the variable which be determined, then some of the scientific findings negated the logic basis of the statement.




Moreover, we could not deny that at some times in the history, human customs are actually varing when the technologies remains at the same level, for exmaple, the time between the Middle Age and the Renaisssance, which is the very period of transformation of social ethics. Historians have not found any persuasive evidence to justify there was a great improvement in technologies in the Europe by then. Therefore, there is no necessary relationship between the changings of social ethic and the technologies.

People, who claims the technologies determines the social ethics, do not understand that although, at some times, it is technologies promotes the improvement of human ethics, we human could also be brought into the dilemma made by our technologies, thereby our social ethics will still remain unchanged, because we cannot know which side of position we should choose, say, the technoligies of cloning, Till now, all of the world can not make an agreement on this issue. People do not know whether we should develop this technologies. Anyway, human ethics will doubtlessly be chanlleged by the cloning issue somehow, which we have not witnessed yet, though the majority do not want to see that.

Therefore, I generally cannot agree with statement for its fallacy of the implications that be-determinant cannot preexist anyway. And we should also pay more attention to the cases on the oppsite position in the history. Furthermore, the progress of some technologies would also puzzled us that we cannot do anything, which actually ceased the advancement of human ethics.