This week we're going to talk about societal constraints.
What we're going to say is in order for
a constraint to be accepted as legitimate that society has to say, yes, in fact,
that innovation is something that's good for us, something that we want.
So that's how we're going to look at it.
We're going to look through sort of these three particular questions of it.
The first being identity and values of these, ways that societies see themselves.
What's the role of values in a society?
Where do we get our identity from?
And does innovation offer to change our perception of ourselves?
We're going to talk about social control,
how is it that society asserts control over things and also history?
What's the role of history, what came before?
So we can think about this way, the values identity or beliefs, the beliefs a society
used to judge its members and the sense of self that we construct from that.
So our sense of self comes from those around us, and so how does that work and
how would that get in the way of innovation,
how would that constrain innovation?
We're going to talk about social control.
That's the formal ways and the informal ways that society guides behavior.
It really keeps people accountable for being meaningful members of society,
productive members of society, and to be not destructive to society itself.
Then we’re going to talk about history,
which are the obligations that come from what we did in the past.
We had beliefs in the past, we’ve done actions in the past, and
those things actually come forward through time, and
are things that we have to deal with when we do innovation.
Because innovation are changes, and
changes are in the context of these things.
And so we need to understand how does it work and
how does their life really change us?
When we talk about societal constraints,
one of the basic question is can we choose a changed society?
Is it something we can just sort of say, hey I want to change society?
I have an idea for this innovation.
Let's go ahead and change things.
And I just put it out there.
One thing to understand is we have very little control over society.
Society has a lot of different people a lot of history a lot of things that
we just dont have direct access to.
We have very little control of it yet society can stop change pretty quickly.
Somebody can say well, hey we're not interested in that.
That thing you're saying like what on Earth?
You can't possibly do that.
So, that's what we have to understand about societal constraints.
Well in 2003, Dr. Bridget Boisselier, a French doctor and geneticist,
she claimed the birth of the first cloned human, so
what she claimed to have done was to clone a human from some other cells.
What happened next, society came out and said you can't do that.
This is incompatible with the dignity and protection and human life.
Like what on Earth are you thinking?
Human cloning was banned.