Ethics and the Use of Technology essay

The problem of the correlation between the use of technologies and ethics is very important, especially nowadays when technologies progress rapidly and the modern life is practically unimaginable without the use of existing technologies. At the same time, the implementation of new technologies does not always lead to the improvement of human life but often leads to the violation of ethical norms. Naturally, this problem is widely highlighted in media and literature. In this respect, it is possible to refer to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where the author raises the problem of the use of new technologies to condition the development and identity of people.

Basically, the book focuses on the problem of the conditioning of an individual in accordance with the norms established by a limited group of people which actually rules the world. At the same time, to realize the idea of making all people happy, the brave new society uses new technologies to give birth to new people and, what is more, due to the use of new technologies and medicaments, people are conditioned and receive specific identity which is supposed to meet their position in the society. The rulers of this brave new world, such as Mustapha Mond sincerely believe that the use of technologies to program people is absolutely correct and ethically justified. The major reason of Mustapha Mond and the class of rulers is to make people happy. The even use special drugs, soma, created due to the progress of technologies, which bring happiness to people but, in actuality, these drugs simply help people to escape from reality to the world of their hallucination and imagination. The supporters of such a use of technologies argue that this system gives people what they need, according to the needs of the particular group or class of society people belong to.

However, they did not say whether the needs of people are conscious or probably they are imposed to them. As the matter of fact, the use of technologies opened the opportunity to program the personality, the identity of an individual from the beginning of his life as fetus. Such programming of people, which became possible due to the use of sophisticated technologies, is absolutely unacceptable for Savage, the character that was brought to the brave new world from the reservation. Savage is actually the only person who is not conditioned and he proves to be the only normal person and this is why he cannot live in the world which morals and lifestyle are absolutely hostile to him. He rejects this world but he cannot escape from it and this is why finally commits suicide that may be viewed as a protest of this character against the existing system that regulates the life of the brave new world. In such a way, it is possible to estimate that the main character, Savage, protests against the violation of basic ethical norms since he wants to be free and independent and he wants other people to be free too, such as Lenina, for instance. But he cannot defeat the system, which uses sophisticated technologies to condition people’s identity and control the existing social order.

In such a way, it is possible to conclude that Aldous Huxley depicted the extent to which technologies may be destructive and their use unethical because the use of technologies actually deprived people of their individuality, of their consciousness, and transformed them into a kind of machines.