Morality by Design: technology’s challenge to human values
The introduction: How do you build a utopia? What does it take to construct the best of all possible worlds? Thomas More chose the name Utopia (in Greek, it means no-place) for the ideal society he described in his Renaissance masterpiece of 1516, written as a young man long before he served as Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII (and was beheaded for his trouble). The book was a visionary critique of fractious English society which More described as a “conspiracy of the rich,” in which the “greedy, unscrupulous and useless” lived off the labour of others. In Utopia, he sketched a form...
Read MoreGreed, Inc.: Book Excerpt – Introduction, Chapter one Part 1
© 2012 Wade Rowland Introduction Protests come and protests go. Sometimes, rarely, they morph into the kind of social movement that can change history. When I briefly attended the Occupy Wall St. gathering at Zuccotti Park on lower Manhattan in late October, 2011, there was no way of knowing whether or not it had legs. The Arab Spring was in full bloom, and the Occupy movement, which had quickly spread to scores of cities around the world, took some inspiration from it. But the young people in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in the bloodied streets of Tunis and Benghazi had been playing for...
Read MoreCan the Corporate Workplace be a Moral Environment?
Note: In speaking to various groups concerned with corporate ethics a cluster of questions routinely arise. One of the most frequently asked is the one in the title. It’s always important that I preface my comments by emphasizing that I’m not speaking of corporations that are relatively small and still owned and/or controlled by their founders. I am, instead, speaking of the very large corporations that control the market and are listed on the world’s stock exchanges. There is no reason why corporations that are owned and controlled by individuals or families cannot behave morally, if...
Read MoreAbout Wade Rowland
Ranked among Canada’s leading literary journalists, Wade Davies Rowland has written more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from television journalism, organized crime, and international environmental law to his current concerns, which include communications technology, the philosophy of science, and technology and human values. Full author bio.