Biomedics and Anthropology

Public acceptance will play a major role in determining whether modern agricultural biotechnology continues to expand .The "public" is not monolithic. There are several "publics," ranging from scientists involved in agricultural biotechnology research to those opposed to anything science has to offer. Additionally, views on biotechnology in general differ by country, region, and socioeconomic group .Consumer acceptance can be influenced by education, government responses to biotechnology issues, and the efforts of activist groups opposed to biotechnology, the last probably being the most influential .That consumers need background information is illustrated by survey results showing a significant fraction of respondents holding to the belief that a nontransgenic tomato does not have genes .Effective communication is vital to the development of rational oversight of technology. Laws are made by elected officials, not scientists, and politicians are easily swayed by their perceptions of public opinion. Political decisions are not always rational, since public emotions can easily be influenced by irrational arguments. Vagueness, anxiety, fear, or abhorrence often prevails over rational judgment. Incorrect or hostile commentary about certain kinds of research spreads quickly. Key to promoting wise political decisions about scientific matters is improved understanding of science among public leaders, the general population, and the media.

Wisdom?

I really like the "love of wisdom" definition of philosophy. This definition always inspires the follow-up question: "What is wisdom?" I like Plato's definition of wisdom from the Republic: perception of goodness. This answer in turn inspires the further question: "What is goodness?" In the Republic, Socrates says he cannot answer this question directly, but must do so indirectly, via analogies. This is the very famous passage where he then describes the analogies of the sun, the line, and the cave.It is the analogy of the sun that provides what I regard as the clearest answer to the question of goodness (and hence, wisdom). The sun here represents goodness itself, shining down like light on everything. Ordinary knowledge (perhaps basic factual knowledge) is just to perceive what is illuminated by light. But wisdom adds awareness of the play of light and color.Wisdom is to know not just the factual nature of things, but also to be aware of the play of values over all that we know. Value shines upon everything like light. What gets illuminated? What gets cast into shadow? What colors are brought out by which kinds of values, in what ways?

Plato was right: it is like a light that shines down so ever-presently that we take it for granted. It makes things visible, and yet itself largely remains "invisible." We mostly tend not to turn our attention to the light itself or pay attention to how it informs and colors our vision of other things.

Painfull Feelings

There is nothing more depressing and ominous as the narrative of conscious life. The emergence of a being from ignorant innocence, to the poignant understanding that life grievances are without reason or structure. We have developed as a species many ways in order to better interpret the world, and how best to survive in it. One of our heaviest burdens is the ever present inevitability of death, and the rush to enhance our seemingly banal existence through meaningless financial gains. Often referred to as the elusive “American Dream”, the true driving force within most of the world’s economy. Where dark alley backdrops and destructive urban squalor leads many to be defined not by the man but by his social and economic standing. We are a world obsessed; we strive for our neighbors inanimate possessions with greedy eyes, constantly bombarded by every protagonist’s obstacle in life -self doubt-. Never at rest we sleep less; read less; eat less; feel less; love less; experience less; share less; live less; yet we still find time to hate more; work more; envy more; and just plain forget, we always seem to forget.

Environmental Ethics

Suppose that putting out natural fires, culling feral animals or destroying some individual members of overpopulated indigenous species is necessary for the protection of the integrity of a certain ecosystem. Will these actions be morally permissible or even required? Is it morally acceptable for farmers in non-industrial countries to practise slash and burn techniques to clear areas for agriculture? Consider a mining company which has performed open pit mining in some previously unspoiled area. Does the company have a moral obligation to restore the landform and surface ecology? And what is the value of a humanly restored environment compared with the originally natural environment? It is often said to be morally wrong for human beings to pollute and destroy parts of the natural environment and to consume a huge proportion of the planet's natural resources. If that is wrong, is it simply because a sustainable environment is essential to (present and future) human well-being? Or is such behaviour also wrong because the natural environment and/or its various contents have certain values in their own right so that these values ought to be respected and protected in any case? These are among the questions investigated by environmental ethics. Some of them are specific questions faced by individuals in particular circumstances, while others are more global questions faced by groups and communities. Yet others are more abstract questions concerning the value and moral standing of the natural environment and its nonhuman components.
In the literature on environmental ethics the distinction between instrumental value and intrinsic value (meaning "non-instrumental value") has been of considerable importance. The former is the value of things as means to further some other ends, whereas the latter is the value of things as ends in themselvesregardless of whether they are also useful as means to other ends. For instance, certain fruits have instrumental value for bats who feed on them, since feeding on the fruits is a means to survival for the bats. However, it is not widely agreed that fruits have value as ends in themselves. We can likewise think of a person who teaches others as having instrumental value for those who want to acquire knowledge. Yet, in addition to any such value, it is normally said that a person, as a person, has intrinsic value, i.e., value in his or her own right independently of his or her prospects for serving the ends of others. For another example, a certain wild plant may have instrumental value because it provides the ingredients for some medicine or as an aesthetic object for human observers. But if the plant also has some value in itself independently of its prospects for furthering some other ends such as human health, or the pleasure from aesthetic experience, then the plant also has intrinsic value. Because the intrinsically valuable is that which is good as an end in itself, it is commonly agreed that something's possession of intrinsic value generates a prima facie direct moral duty on the part of moral agents to protect it or at least refrain from damaging it (see O'Neil 1992 and Jameson 2002 for detailed accounts of intrinsic value).
Many traditional western ethical perspectives, however, are anthropocentric or human-centered in that either they assign intrinsic value to human beings alone (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a strong sense) or they assign a significantly greater amount of intrinsic value to human beings than to any nonhuman things such that the protection or promotion of human interests or well-being at the expense of nonhuman things turns out to be nearly always justified (i.e., what we might call anthropocentric in a weak sense). For example, Aristotle (Politics, Bk. 1, Ch. 8) maintains that "nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man" and that the value of nonhuman things in nature is merely instrumental. Generally, anthropocentric positions find it problematic to articulate what is wrong with the cruel treatment of nonhuman animals, except to the extent that such treatment may lead to bad consequences for human beings. Immanuel Kant ("Duties to Animals and Spirits", in Lectures on Ethics), for instance, suggests that cruelty towards a dog might encourage a person to develop a character which would be desensitized to cruelty towards humans. From this standpoint, cruelty towards nonhuman animals would be instrumentally, rather than intrinsically, wrong. Likewise, anthropocentrism often recognizes some non-intrinsic wrongness of anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) environmental devastation. Such destruction might damage the well-being of human beings now and in the future, since our well-being is essentially dependent on a sustainable environment (see Passmore 1974, Bookchin 1990, Norton, Hutchins, Stevens, and Maple (eds.) 1995).
When environmental ethics emerged as a new sub-discipline of philosophy in the early 1970s, it did so by posing a challenge to traditional anthropocentrism. In the first place, it questioned the assumed moral superiority of human beings to members of other species on earth. In the second place, it investigated the possibility of rational arguments for assigning intrinsic value to the natural environment and its nonhuman contents.
It should be noted, however, that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new, non-anthropocentric theories. Instead, they advocate what may be called enlightenedanthropocentrism (or, perhaps more appropriately called, prudentialanthropocentrism). Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants. The practical purpose of environmental ethics, they maintain, is to provide moral grounds for social policies aimed at protecting the earth's environment and remedying environmental degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for that practical purpose, and perhaps even more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making, than non-anthropocentric theories given the theoretical burden on the latter to provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the nonhuman environment has intrinsic value (cf. Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Light and Katz 1996). Furthermore, some prudential anthropocentrists may hold what might be called cynicalanthropocentrism, which says that we have a higher-level anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day thinking. Suppose that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends to act more benignly towards the nonhuman environment on which human well-being depends. This would provide reason for encouraging non-anthropocentric thinking, even to those who find the idea of non-anthropocentric intrinsic value hard to swallow. In order for such a strategy to be effective one may need to hide one's cynical anthropocentrism from others and even from oneself.

Logical Povitism

Just as the empiricists thought that complex ideas had meaning because they were compounded out of simple ideas, and that simple ideas had meaning because they had a direct connection with experience (namely being copies of it), so the positivists thought that some sentences had meaning because they were definable in terms of other sentences, and that at the "bottom" one would find basic sentences, sentences which had their meaning because of their direct connection with experience (in this case being reports of it rather than copies of it). For the positivists these basic sentences were observation sentences. The connection between the world and language thus boils down to a connection between observation sentences, on the one hand, and experiences--the observations reported by observation sentences--on the other. Of course, there is more to the world than experience, and more to language than observation sentences, but the idea is that the world is connected to language only via experience, and experience is connected to the rest of language only via observation sentences.

Unconcious spender

Through glass towers we grow from the road.
Developing tight, skies lights and corrodes.
Painfull, abashfull, continue the trend.
Greedy eyes and skewed shadows only befriend.
American dream!! depth of economys plight.
Dying in dreams we wont dare take flight.
The green eyes shine bright with candid splendor.
Enjoy what life brings; Unconcious spender.