Technology and Social Justice

570 Words3 Pages
There are 3 key elements to social justice: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Social justice includes the ideal that all people should be free to pursue their goals in life, to exercise their autonomy in their work, worship, political actions, and personal lives, free from unnecessary interference. Social justice also includes the notion of equality. A socially just society is one in which all people matter equally. The needs and interests of the poor and the powerless are just as important as those of the rich and powerful. While some inequalities are justifiable (such as those based on talent, for example), all unjustifiable inequalities are removed from a socially just society. Finally, social justice includes fraternity, or community, a sense of commonality among human beings and a commitment to the common good. There is a mutual concern for the welfare of others. These are high ideals, to be sure, and while they are not perfectly attainable, progress can be made. Related Articles ------------------------------------------------- Top of Form Bottom of Form One way to foster such progress is to use new and emerging technologies to help achieve more social justice. Rather than focusing on developing technologies as toys for the rich, we should create and employ them to provide necessities for the poor. According to Freeman Dyson, we can use three technologies – the sun, the genome, and the Internet – to help poor villages become sources of wealth. Everyone has solar energy in their midst, and in those countries and regions where poverty is often most grinding (tropical countries and rural areas), it is perhaps most available. At present, it is too expensive and inefficient to capitalize on this, but Dyson suggests that we could develop plants that would be more efficient, and perhaps not even harvested, which we could derive energy from as a source of
Open Document