Abstract
There are competing views on modernity. Some focus on the isolation of the individual, bereft of traditions and rituals, while others optimistically espouse the power of globalization, technology, and science to support progress and enhance human life. The challenges created by emerging diseases and human environmental impacts allow a new appreciation of the power of coordinated human responses while highlighting the limitations of globalization, technology, and science. Both climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate that science and technology provide rapidly updated information, but immediate solutions reside in aggregate changes in personal behavior supported by regulation and governmental or trans-governmental agencies. These requirements for personal responsibility challenge individual powerlessness and highlight the necessity of communal responses to global challenges.
Keywords: COVID-19; climate change; ethical decision-making; global change processes; pandemics, prevention and control; limits of technology.
In the Western mind, science and modernity are inextricably linked in a positive feedback loop. Science begat modernity and the optimistic logical positivism of modernity provided the platform for further scientific endeavor and the development of increasingly complex technology. The interaction between inherent optimism, scientific thought, and technology shapes modern decision-making. This chapter uses the lens of emerging diseases such as COVID-19 and environmental stressors (i.e., climate change) to consider how modern societies address global challenges.
Modernity, Technology, Progress, and Decision-Making
Decision-making is influenced by societal values. Societies that value modern approaches favor technological solutions. Modern theories of decisionmaking like game theory predict that an individual or group would make rational choices, which require complete information (Askari et al. 2019). To make a complicated decision, there are numerous domains that require accurate data, including economic, psychological, social, emotional, and environmental (Ueda et al. 2009). Without full knowledge, individual and organizational choices are limited to known, but not necessarily salient, information (Hernandez and Ortega 2019) influenced by factors external to the process (Ueda et al. 2009) and constrained by inherent risk-aversion (Lane and Cherek 2000). In a world of limited understanding, decisionmaking will be influenced by fiscal, technological, or political biases.
