Science and Moral Intelligence

Natural scientists report "the dead zone" is increasing because of the increased fertilizer used to increase the yield for biofuel production.

It is an inefficiency that is a byproduct of organizing our economy to maximize profit with a false shortage and a capital gain with a tax subsidy (the trickle-down tax policy) on energy and commodities.

It is an organizational scenario that lacks good moral intelligence. The science, "the knowlege," of it was easily predictable, and avoidable; and even now, after the fact, with adequate and reliable indication, the "choice," the responsibility, the freedom that comes with knowlege, is reduced to a moral intelligence, as it was in priority.

We, the species human, evolved to enable the experience of "the mind," as the spirit, to command nature as homo habilas, now need to evolve the moral intelligence to manage it responsibly--homo ethicus. The choice is a matter of determinism indeed; it is a choice of self-determination. It is the experience of freedom that through reason God shares with us and we return with the experience of a natural existence.

The climate-change debate, for example, presents a philosophical question that most people are, unfortunately, ill-prepared to consider.

Philosophy is not core curriculum mainly because it cultivates critical thinking and enables the thinker to quickly identify logical fallacy. Big business wants compliant subjects, servants. It does not want critical, free thinking humans, but appetitive, habilitated, consumers enslaved to consolidated capital for its satisfaction like an animal with just enough educated intelligence to function in a highly technical environment with as little supervision as possible.

Cultivating a moral intelligence that comes with critical thinking through the educational process would produce a demanding civil authority from the ground up that is entirely inimical to a command authority and the elitist model of power.

Despite, ironically, the inherent philosophical value of the scientific "ethic" of thinking with empirically verifiable means, the method is applied for technological innovation and practical operations for the production of wealth and the reduction of labor costs.

The scientific method is not applied for the adminstration of a moral intelligence that is fundamentally the same ethical standard to be applied to the common good and a proper understanding of our natural existence beyond the economic animal of class consciousness.

Consider, for example, what "the natural" is. What does it mean to live a natural existence?

We need to understand, there is nothing "unnatural." Human activity produces consequences that are all natural, but may be negative to the human condition--what is nature without the experience of it? Who "knows" and who cares, right?

Science is a method of averting or correcting for the negative consequences, or for producing positive ones with predicitive utility.

Science is the means in which we, the species human, may properly observe the commandment given to Moses: "Do not take the name of God in vain." Attributing, for example, the unnecessary suffering of the business cycle to satisfy the conceited class distinctions of a power elite to "nature" and to a natural existence, or the deliberate means to its ends as the will of God, is to take the Lord's name in vain. It is no less the case for creating hazards like the dead zone.

There are positive and negative consequences to human activity. Science gives us the "freedom" to choose those consequences; it gives us the freedom to choose between right and wrong with a degree of certainty that clearly identifies the righteous without specious rhetoric. It allows us to live justly and righteously within nature.

It is time to recognize the righteousness of our natural existence. It is time to recognize that science is not just a cognitive tool for organizing our animal instincts into a hierarchy of human rewards and deprivations to satisfy the conceits of power. Life is so much more meaningful than that.

It is our Natural Right, our Constitutional Duty to realize our ethical humanity; to actualize the true meaning of our existence and enjoy the good life through empirical means of verifiable legitimacies.

Very best wishes.