The Ethical Challenges Involving Technology - Essay Sample

Introduction

Sustainability is an essential concept that has received massive support from all around the world but still, it still faces ethical challenges in the implementation process. The development and implementation of technology are among the key issues that have brought challenges to sustainability. Sustainability is meant to achieve three goals: social equity, ecological health, and economic welfare. Sustainability has an ethical commitment to ensure the well-being of the current populations and future generations. The developed technologies and sustainability management methods significantly impact the natural environment, affecting how citizens and societies become empowered. The ethical challenges involving technology and management for sustainability have brought about effects that could negatively or positively impact the future.

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Ethics of Sustainability

The ethics of sustainability are mostly concerned with global issues such as climate change, food shortage, and poverty, among other topics. Sustainability ethics also evolve around the impacts that scientists and other management personnel could have on the successful implementation of the projects meant to enhance a sustainable environment within the community. New technologies that are intended to drive sustainability range from the genetically engineered seeds, antibiotics, robots, and wireless systems that have been connected by data highway. Ethical issues in technology to enhance sustainability have been a matter of discussion, especially when it comes to costs. Most of the technologies are rendered obsolete even though many resources were used in their successful implementation.

Implementation of new technologies should go hand in hand with sustainability and should not depend on the decisions made by a few individuals that aim to benefit from the same. Before such technologies become implemented, they should weigh the short-term and long-term risks, but this is not the case in technological implementation. New technologies have negative impacts on the environment and can alter their normal operation.

Ethical Challenges

Much effort has been made to implement technology for sustainability, but such efforts have been met with ethical challenges. Technology is meant to shape future lives but is currently faced with massive ethical issues. Being among the main difficulties sustainability faces can provide partial remedies to solve environmental problems (Kibert, 2012). Technology can provide solutions such as reducing the consumption of resources, wastes, and other resources that are beneficial to the environment. Ethics, sustainability, and technology are concepts that go hand in hand because human beings have the authority to select the kind of technologies to develop and to implement. Most of the ethical issues related to sustainability result from the development of array chemicals that negatively impact the environment. The initiation of new and high technologies is faced with numerous ethical issues that have made the developers;l be faced with challenges from evaluating new inventions to how such technologies should positively impact future generations. Most technologies do not enhance a sustainable framework, but instead, it has few long-term benefits on human beings and the environment. Most of the new technology is harmful and does not support life and natural systems.

There is evidence that new technologies come with new ethical dilemmas that had not emerged in the past. For instance, sustainability technology is known as Cloning in which a biological organism can be produced in the same copy as the original one. New technologies can manipulate the original DNA fragments. A variety of contemporary ethical issues arise due to new technologies such as the development of Cloning. Such ethical issues in technology fall under sustainability as they can affect future generations in different ways. For instance, the cloning kind of technology can harm humans' general quality of life and non-human beings. It is evident that Cloning is a kind of technology meant to enhance sustainability but in an unethical manner.

One of the ethical challenges in managing sustainability is that the elected leaders are more concerned about catering to the present needs without considering the future. There are various ethical concerns about how the current leaders use the available resources. Most of them use such resources to cater to their personal needs and not the community at large. The contributions made to poor societies benefit a few individuals who are already wealthy and leave poor people without any help. Such ethical issues are expected within the management of sustainability and result in the misuse of resources meant to benefit impoverished communities (Kibert et al., 2011). The high rates of poverty evident in most parts of the world result from ethical issues in managing resources. The trusted leadership put in place to ensure equal distribution of future resources has their interest in catering for and leaving the future generation with nothing to look up.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are adequate resources that can get utilized to eradicate poverty. Still, resources end up in the hands of a few people who benefit from them without involving the community's most vulnerable members. Most of the personnel responsible for the management of resources misuse such resources without considering their primary purpose. Such ethical issues become a hindrance to the goal of achieving a sustainable environment for future generations. Resources such as oil and gas no longer get developed in an environmentally-friendly manner, and such industries have negative impacts on water and the surrounding environment. Water and air pollution are the greatest enemies of sustainability. Continuous pollution of the same would lead to a future that cannot control global warming. Pollution is the main enemy of sustainability, and this occurs due to ethical issues in the management of such firms.

References

Kibert, C. J., Thiele, L., Peterson, A., & Monroe, M. (2012). The ethics of sustainability. Retrieved on September 26, 2017.

Kibert, C. J., Monroe, M. C., Peterson, A. L., Plate, R. R., & Thiele, L. P. (2011). Working toward sustainability: Ethical decision-making in a technological world (Vol. 35). John Wiley & Sons.