Wednesday, March 15, 2006
This Is Scary
"All the years I worked as a geophysicist, I wondered about issues like global poverty and what it might take to get people out of it," said Dr. Mutter, 57, who is now the deputy director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. "I kept wondering if there wasn't something we scientists could do about global poverty."It's hard to put a finger on what is most terrifying about this - it's bad that it's utterly naturalistic - it's bad that it could best be described as "squishy" science - it's bad in that it is a bald attempt at wealth transfer - it's really bad in that it is an attempt to place a very direct moral justification on an intellectual pursuit with only long term and indirect moral consequences (in other words a naked grab for research money).
Now married to Carolyn Mutter and the father of five children, Dr. Mutter said he had spent the last five years trying to answer that question.
As a result, he said, "I've come to think that some of the answers to global poverty might be found in the places where the social and hard sciences inform each other."
In most parts of the world, people depend on the earth for their livelihoods. "If we can understand more how the earth functions," Dr. Mutter said, "we can learn how it interacts with human well-being."
Just a little "god" would go oh so far.
Related Tags: natrualism, earth sciences, poverty, morality
