INTRODUCTION
Science
and technology has generated new knowledge, such as discoveries of new
principles, and has dramatically contributed to the development and progress of
people’s lives, the economy, and the society. Particularly in Japan, which
lacks natural resources, technological innovations served as the key in
achieving a remarkable recovery and high economic growth from the postwar
devastation bringing material affluence to people’s lives. In this process,
Japan, which was making efforts to catchup with Europe and the United States,
became one of the front runners as the world’s second-largest economic power,
and the time has come for Japan to demonstrate creativity and open the way to
the future. Thus, the Japanese government enacted the Science and Technology Basic
Law in 1995, and has implemented various measures for promoting science and
technology according to the Science and Technology Basic Plan Phase 1 and Phase
2, in order to become an advanced science and technology-oriented nation. On
the other hand, social and public expectations for science and technology
became more sophisticated and diverse, and new problems that need to be
addressed such as global environmental issues have emerged. Under such
circumstances, international knowledge competition has intensified not only
among western developed countries, but also among countries including China and
the Republic of Korea. Therefore, Japan needs to further develop its
“scientific and technological capabilities.” Dr. Shinichiro Tomonaga, the
physicist who was the second Japanese Nobel Prize winner following Dr. Hideki
Yukawa, said the following in an article contributed to Kagaku (Science)
magazine, after referring to the difference in the research environment between
Japan and the United States at the time: “It is wonderful that there are many
brilliant scholars and ardent, competent young researchers also in Japan. These
people have actually made remarkable accomplishments despite various adverse
conditions.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Creation
and Use of Knowledge
A single
mobile phone alone is packed with numerous cutting-edge scientific and
technological accomplishments. In this manner, in the modern society, the
scientific and technological knowledge and achievements are being used in our
daily lives in various forms. Science and technology has two functions:
creating new knowledge such as elucidating unknown phenomena that surround us
and discovering new laws and principles; and using the knowledge gained in the
real world. Because these two functions interact and are hard to separate, and
because scientific and technological achievements have already been permeated
throughout our daily lives like the atmosphere itself, we have come to rarely
realize them as scientific and technological achievements. However, science and
technology has had various impacts and spillover effects in our daily lives in
the process of their development. These impacts and spillover effects are
reviewed below.
(Intellectual/cultural values of
science and technology)
Science is an intellectual activity that started from
intellectual curiosity for understanding natural phenomena, originating from
the feelings of admiration and inspiration for nature and other things
surrounding human beings.
Scientific and technological achievements bring us new
knowledge. Their accumulation expands the limits of people’s activities both in
space and time, beyond the conventional concept of values. They can enlarge the
possibilities of people’s activities and serve as the driving force for society
from the view points of culture and civilization. In medieval times, when people
believed the geocentric theory of Claudius Ptolemaeus, Nicolaus Copernicus
advocated the heliocentric system (Copernican theory), and the theory came to
be established by the efforts of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo
Galilei. Later, the idea was inherited by Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation and
modern astrophysics represented by the Big Bang theory, and has influenced
people’s views of the universe and the Earth in the various times. John Dalton
demonstrated the existence of atoms, which had been a philosophical concept
until then, and this developed to Amedeo Avogadro’s molecular hypothesis. In
addition, the discovery of atoms was accelerated by Dimitri Mendeleev’s periodic
law, which had a large impact on the understanding of the composition of
matter, i.e. that all matter is made up of a certain number of atoms. Furthermore,
the possible existence of even smaller elementary particles has been indicated.
In this manner, our understanding of matter is likely to deepen even further in
the future. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution proposed an idea on the
evolution of organisms, while the elucidation of genes, which started with
Gregor Johann Mendel’s law of heredity, hints at the answer to the mystery of
organisms. Yet new views on organisms and senses of ethics are expected to
develop in the 21st century, which is being called the “century of life science.”
Today, as development of science and technology accelerates, their achievements
are expected to influence people’s values at an even faster pace and may
dramatically change the paradigms of society.
In the preceding section we have
offered a brief description of some developments in Western Europe that gave
rise to the Enlightenment, in which scientific positivism played such a pivotal
role. The Enlightenment made a profound impact on both the industrial
development of Western Europe - also causing the sharp opposition between
tradition and modernity - and on the development of the idea of human rights.
As Herrera put it succinctly,
For Enlightenment, all things in
nature are disposed in harmonious order, regulated by a few simple laws, in
such a way that everything contributes to the equilibrium of the Universe. The
same rational order is the basis of the human world and manifests itself
through the instincts and tendencies of men. The main obstacle to this linear
unending human progress is, for the Enlightenment, ignorance and the education
of all strata of society in the light of reason and science will finally lead
to a perfect and happy society.
Indeed, the rational analysis of
the physical and social world will gradually show many ideas of the established
traditional order to be errors, which will be replaced by scientific truth.
Moreover, in connection with these ideas, a new type of society evolved and
conscious attempts were made to change political and social orders in the
direction of a "rational society." It was, as Eisenstadt phrased it,
the birth of "the civilization of modernity," which is, among other
things, characterized by growing structural differentiation and specialization,
the establishment of universalistic organizational frameworks, and the
articulation of relatively open, non-traditional systems of stratification and
mobility in which criteria of achievement are dominant.
The rise of this industrial,
open society, based on a specific set of values of the Enlightenment, is
closely connected to the birth of human rights. Although the idea of human
rights has deep historical roots - and not exclusively in the Western world
-human rights, as formulated in documents such as the Bill of Rights and the Declaration
des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, are very much the product of both the
Enlightenment and the rise of industrial society. As such the concept of human
rights is strongly associated with individualism, rationalism, and
universalism. Dumont states that the adoption of the Declaration marks
in a certain sense the triumph of the individual.
This seems to be a rather
restricted view of the origin of human rights. Are these rights - as liberties
- primarily a functional alternative in a modern world, for the security that
is provided in an organic way within traditional structures? In European
history we can observe several periods which bear witness to the disintegration
of established social structures and the concomitant rise of individualism -
for example, the period after the downfall of the Greek city-states and the
Renaissance period in which the individual emerged from the communal order of
the Middle Ages - without the development of a concept of human rights that is
comparable to the concept as it emerged in the eighteenth century.
In the historical documents to
which we referred earlier, the idea of human rights is associated with a very
positive image of individualism. In the period when these documents were being produced,
individualism was considered by many advocates of social change to be a pivotal
characteristic of the emerging social order. It referred not only to respect
for the intrinsic value or dignity of the individual human being in relation to
privacy, but also to individual autonomy, the capacity of the individual to
think independently, to decide for himself or herself, to control the
conditions under which he - or she - lived and worked. As such, autonomy was -
and is - the reverse of alienation and powerlessness. The coming social order
was contrasted with the traditional order of feudal society in which an
individual's opportunities in life were strongly determined by his or her
position in the social order, based on birth, and the rights to which his or
her estate entitled the individual.
This connection between the
birth of human rights and the rise of a new liberal, democratic order produced
consequences for the contents of human rights as individual, universal
rights. The origin of human rights, and the subsequent development of
socioeconomic rights, shed some light on the model of man that is
traditionally associated with those who favor civil rights. This model is, as
Campbell says, of a person somewhat beyond the "norm" in the sense of
the normal: an active, rational, and entrepreneurial person for whom the life
which is claimed is one in which there is a degree of self-expression,
self-help, and self-defense. It is of a person who has the opportunity to have
and manage property, to communicate views and pursue happiness along
individually chosen lines, to share in government and freely go about
day-to-day activities without the interference of officials and prohibitions of
the state beyond those strictly necessary for the defense of the rights of
others.
Human rights are, as we
explained, tied to an individualistic view of society and man. In this view
individualism is combined with rationalism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism,
and as such they stand in opposition to particularism, collectivism, and
traditionalism. Human rights refer to the individual and are beyond his or her
particular social relationships or roots. This primacy of reason, universalism,
and the individual over the group appears to be essential in solving problems
related to human rights as it develops in international law today.
In order to pursue our analysis
of the relationship of technological development and human rights we have to
elaborate on the model of development that is connected with the Enlightenment
and the rise of industrial society. This is particularly important because this
model of development still plays a dominant role in the thinking of many
leaders in the domain of (post) industrial development. Our description of the
Enlightenment model of industrial development will be, perforce, of an ideal,
typical or constructed in the Weberian sense.
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