What are the two or three most pressing ethical issues of today? Our members participated with the Triangle Vegetarian Society in a joint panel discussion recently to answer this question. Here is one person's answer to that question. I'll provide other answers in subsequent posts; however, the order they appear is not an indication of our judgement as to which one is most important. We will leave that determination up to the reader.
Jeff states that two most important ethical issues are the state of the physical environment and the state of the mental environment…
"The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report states:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.
It is especially important for me because I put faces with climate change impacts. Ten years ago, I studied abroad in Bangladesh for a month. Bangladesh is a country of 163 million people in an area the size of Iowa that is almost all river delta. Climate change effects like sea level rise, more precipitation, more intense storms, and more Himalayan snow melt all threaten to reduce quality of life for the wonderful people I met there.
This is an ethical issue because it is clear human activity is the primary driver of climate change. In fact, it’s the largest environmental justice issue in human history. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are higher than they have been in 800,000 years. Despite the emotionally-derived stances of skeptics (remembering Jonathan Haidt), the greenhouse effect is a physical law that has been known for 150 years, and the first paper on global climate change was in 1896.
This brings me to my second issue, the mental environment. We’re totally spaced out these days. High school kids spend 11 hours a day looking at a screen and send 3,400 text messages a month, or 7 per hour. Only a third of them ever socialize face-to-face with friends. Digital media are changing our brains. That is, the brains of those wealthy enough to own digital technology, which, globally, is still not that many, even though Facebook has 1 billion active users, and there are 400 million tweets sent per day. For those who don’t know, tweets are messages, no longer than 140 characters long, published on the network Twitter. Which is timely, because it’s hard for us to stomach much more text than that in one sitting. We younger folk are increasingly image- and video-based learners and communicators. Teens use smartphone apps to hook up, which means have casual sex without any pretense of the obligations of a relationship. As Jonathan Franzen points out, digital media orient us toward likability at the expense of love, while the terms “love” and “happiness” are commodified. Love is absent from so many so-called relationships, but it’s still what makes a Subaru a Subaru. And when you open a Coke can, you open happiness. “Epic” now means anything impressive. When it snows, it’s a “snowpocalypse”. We need to be dramatic because we’re desperate for attention, and we’re becoming harder to please. As, as the comedian Louis CK pointed out, everything is amazing, and nobody is happy. Our smartphones are our constant companions, and we don’t know what to do when we’re just sitting there without it. Everyone is terrible at doing nothing now.
We can address this by remembering that digital media are amazing tools, to be taken out of the toolbox occasionally and used to learn and connect with people far away. They shouldn’t be companions, though."
