Barbour attempts to ‘present an interpretation of Christianity that is responsive both to the historical tradition and to contemporary science’. The first volume (Religion in an Age of Science) explores the impact of science and its challenges to religious life, asking and answering questions surrounding the compatibility of science and religion and the impact of science on human nature. The second volume (Ethics in an Age of Technology) explores the ethical implications of technological and applied-scientific advancements, reflecting on the value of these achievements in relation to such concerns as environmental and human costs, and projecting possible future directions of control relative to human values.

KEY WORDS: Ethics, Technology, Human values, Environmental values, Religion, Critical technologies, Agriculture, Energy, Computers, Controlling technology

From the Preface, xvii–xix:

[Ethics in an Age of Technology] is divided into three parts, Part 1 explores conflicting values that are relevant to the appraisal of technology. Chapter 1 presents widely divergent contemporary views of technology and asks about their underlying assumptions. Chapter 2 analyzes two groups of human values affected by technology: values most significant in individual life (food and health, meaningful work, and personal fulfilment), and those characterizing society (social justice, participatory freedom, and economic development). Chapter 3 deals with three environmental values: resource sustainability, environmental protection, and respect for all forms of life. The scientific, philosophical, and religious grounds for defending each of these values are examined. Technological policies can be discussed in the public arena in terms of such values, which people with various philosophical and religious commitments can understand and support, though I will try to show that the Christian tradition offers a distinctive perspective on each of them. I will suggest that justice, participation, and sustainability are particularly important today—and often neglected—in policy choices concerning technology. These opening chapters provide the ethical framework for the discussion of specific policy decisions in subsequent chapters.

Part 2 offers case studies of three critical technologies: agriculture, energy, and computers. In agriculture (chapter 4), environmental constraints such as soil erosion and water pollution from fertilizers and pesticides must be addressed, but the human consequences of mechanization and agribusiness as they affect rural life and family farms must also be considered. In energy (chapter 5), reliance on fossil fuels poses severe problems of global justice, environmental quality, and sustainability; nuclear energy is sustainable but expensive and vulnerable to large-scale accidents and the diversion of plutonium to nuclear weapons. Computers (chapter 6) have low environmental impacts but raise major questions about meaningful work, inequitable access to information, centralization versus decentralization in decision making, and the prospect for artificial intelligence. Most of my examples are taken from the United States, with which I am most familiar, but I have also included comparisons with Europe and Japan. Each case study includes a section of the Third World. I do not take up medical technologies such as life-prolonging equipment, organ transplants, and new reproductive techniques, because a much more extensive literature is already available on medical ethics than on ethical issues in other kinds of technology.

Part 3 looks to the future of technology. Chapter 7 deals with the unprecedented powers of recent technology: damage to global environments (including global warming and the rapid extinction of endangered species); the genetic engineering of plants, animals, and humans; the creation of more destructive conventional weapons and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The chapter calls for international action in each of these areas. Chapter 8 maintains that citizens can participate in the democratic control of technology, despite the technical character of these policy choices and the difficulties in assessing and regulating particular technologies. Chapter 9 explores strengths and weaknesses of the appropriate technology movement and the possibilities for more efficient technologies and more frugal life-styles in industrial nations. It closes by suggesting four sources of change: education, political action, crises that evoke new perceptions, and alternative visions of the good life.

The challenge for our generation is to redirect technology toward realizing human and environmental values on planet earth.