Reckoning With Human Zoos

Back in the mid sixties, my school religious instruction was centred around the unreliability of the biblical accounts or, on a good day, the truth-equivalence of all religions. In history we learned about religious conflicts in the English Civil War.

I don’t recall any teachers worrying overmuch about it making people uncomfortable, or casting religion in a negative light, so why would science get special treatment?

In fact, we live in an age when it the moral implications of science for good and for evil need to be weighed more seriously than in the past. We’ve lived through the risk of mutually assured destruction from nuclear weapons, and a Holocaust based on the same principles that underpinned human zoos.

It’s not primarily about race (there’s too tribal an atmosphere around that already), but about the moral accountability of science. If race is inflammatory, do the bomb, or artificial fertilizers, or leaded petrol, or CFCs - there are ethical back stories in all of those.

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