With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
We live in a time when complex ethical questions are easily subordinated to the demands of efficiency, profit maximization, and maintenance or furthering of political power.
We should absolutely be concerned with ethical questions - to exactly the same degree as everyone else. It's never my intention to sneak any kind of sermon into a story - I've got no business preaching, and besides, that kind of thing plays poorly in fiction, always has.
A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?
One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes. . . Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.
Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.
It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. [. . . ] Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. [. . . ] The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's.
