Moles' Classroom

5 Most Important Ethical Issues Facing  American

1. The citizenry’s lack of life skills: I’m referring to critical thinking, financial planning, and general research. The reason for this ignorance is a side effect of our country’s utilitarian mindset; we think of education as only job training. This isn’t just the evil corporations, as anti-corporate activists see colleges as activist factories. The solution is for anybody who can influence children and students to teach these skills, and anybody reading this to learn said skills themselves. Focusing on the job is good, but individualism is part of our cultural mindset too.

2.Fossil fuels: Wars are fought over politics, religion, and resources, and the current fought-over resource is oil. While most of our power plants run on coal, that’s still problematic because it’s polluting and in finite supply. Sure, there’s plenty of oil shale in C-type asteroids, but we barely have the technology for another moon landing. We need new energy sources and we need several of them: solar, wind, OTEC (my personal favorite), fusion (fission’s too messy), and more. If we don't find new energy sources, we'll either have to die in our sick or give in to the Luddites. This isn’t to say they don’t have a point about over-consumption...

3. Toleration of inefficient and inelegant products: This can tie in to lack of critical thinking, but is important to mention on it’s own. Although she misquotes Victor Lebow, Anne Leonard has a point in that we buy too much stuff. The problem isn’t consumerism, but passive consumerism; we tolerate products that can’t be modified or upgraded, and we lack the desire to upgrade them anyway (typing this on a Mac, I am quite guilty of this, but at least I don't throw away old electronics). We need to raise awareness of unmodifiable products and encourage entrepreneurs (remember financial planning?) to create and market configurable and upgradable consumer goods.

4. Poverty: People become poor through bad education, bad decisions, or bad luck. Entire books, often conflicting, have proposed solutions, but few most agree that we should level up and not level down. (No, this isn’t a complaint about wealthier people paying more taxes.)

5. Crime: Includes terrorism and white-collar crime. I’m sorry to say that I don’t know how to solve this one, but keeping police officers and judges honest is the best place I can think of to start. How to do that is worthy of its own question.