Science, Virtue, and the Future of Humanity

This book is an accessible and profound introduction to the key issues facing our country in our biotechnological age. Leading public intellectuals bring to bear a wide and deep learning on particular issues of public policy and discuss the relationship between technological and moral progress that takes place over the course of a human life.

Science, Virtue, and the Future of Humanity addresses each of the key public policy issues of our techno-future from the perspective of deeply informed and philosophically inclined public intellectuals. Among the issues addressed are the detachment of our idea of justice from any credible foundation; Tocqueville’s prescience on how a “cognitive elite” might be the aristocracy to be most feared in our time; robotization and the possibility of being ruled by morally challenged robots; organ markets; the degradation of liberal education by obsessive techno-enthusiasm; biotechnology and biological determinism; the birth dearth and the inevitable erosion of our entitlements; the possibility that our techno-domination is basically an unfolding of the Lockean logic of our foundation; and the future of the free exercise of religion in an aggressively libertarian time. All in all, this book should provoke widespread discussion about the relationship between scientific/technological progress and the one true moral/spiritual progress that takes place over the course of every particular human life.