14．人们对所谓的知识独裁产生恐惧，正如伊登·肯尼迪所言，是由于我们被迫要接受一些“从精神上和智力上均无任何准备”的选择。例如，夫妻在接受产前先天性疾病检查时，可能会面对艰难的选择：也许要决定是否终止怀孕，或者是否告知亲属们他们所不了解的一种遗传疾病。虽然困难重重，但我相信不能低估公众了解事实真相后面对困难进行抉择的能力。当然，是否需要了解真情取决于个人。当我们考虑到当事人的权利，由他们自己对将来作出决定，那么医学上的诸多伦理问题都可以得到最好的解决。 审查制度 15．有无一些研究领域因为会产生过激的社会反应而需要避免或禁止呢？也许对智力与基因关系的研究，特别是种族与智力关系的研究属于此类领域。有没有如文学批评家乔治·斯坦纳所说的“某些真理会重挫政府支柱，而且会无可救药地激化原本就已十分紧张的社会阶级矛盾”呢？简言之，目前的科学研究中有没有一些领域需要贴上“危险勿动”的标签呢？
16．我了解科学研究的危险所在，但我更珍视科学研究的公开性，不赞成张贴此类标签。我赞同将认识世界的科学知识与运用这种知识区别开来的做法。因此，回答斯坦纳的问题时，我会说不，当然前提是科学家必须承担自己的社会责任。只有当我们更好地认识世界时，才能建立一个公平正义的社会。不能因为科学研究成果会被误作邪恶之用，而放弃将其用于造福人类的可能性。任何一种科学知识都不能避免遭到滥用的威胁。
17．一旦开始审查人们获取客观知识的可能性，我们就迈向了危险之路。科学家并不能完全准确地预测所从事的研究会产生何种社会和技术的影响。例如人们一度争论放射波没有任何实用价值；罗赛福爵士也曾断言运用原子能乃是海市蜃楼。另外，研究细菌抗体和病毒感染的科学家也未能预见到会发现抑制酶，这一成分现在已经成为切分核糖核酸的必要工具，其实也是基因工程的基础。
18．对于那些怀疑公众或政客能否就科学研究及其运用做出“正确”抉择的人而言，我推荐托马斯·杰弗逊说过的一句话：“我仅知道社会的最高决策权不在别处，就在人民之中。如果我们认为人民不够开通，难以行使理智的决策权利，那么，补救的方法不是将此权利从他们手中收回，而是给他们指明方向。”
19．如何才能确保公众参与决策？如何确保科学家、医生、工程师、生物伦理家还有其他有关的专家不会滥用决策权为自己谋利呢？如何确保科学家确实承担社会义务将自己的研究告知公众呢？对此，我们必须依靠我们的民主制度：各界的代表、自由而积极负责的媒体、有关的组织机构和研究人员。诚然，有必要建立起相关的全国和国际的理事会，以便评估科学研究之应用的伦理问题，并开展广泛的公众讨论。但也许人们会产生质疑，这样一个理事会在面临下述问题时会如何表态：公众拥有了一种方便的交通工具，但其代价却是仅在英国一个国家，每年就有约三千多人丧生，二十五万人受伤，另外还造成无法估量的污染。此时，汽车伦理学家们会做何言论呢？
Unit 11 Global Anti-Americanism
Sasha Abramsky
1. Last year I visited London and stumbled upon an essay in a Sunday paper written by Margret Drabble, one of Britain’s pre-eminent ladies of letters. ―My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable,‖ she wrote. ―It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.‖ 2. The essay continued in the same rather bilious vein for about a thousand words, and as I read it, two things struck me：The first was how appalled I was by Drabble’s crassly oversimplistic analysis of what America was all about, of who its people were, and of what its culture valued; the second was a sense somewhat akin to fear as I thought through the implications of the venom attached to the words of this gentle scribe of the English bourgeoisie. After all, if someone whose country and class have so clearly benefited economically from the protections provided by American military and political ties reacts so passionately to the omnipresence of the United States, what must an angry, impoverished young man in a failing third world state feel?
3. I grew up in London in the 1970s and 1980s, in a country that was struggling to craft a postcolonial identity for itself, a country that was, in many ways, still reeling from the collapse of power it suffered in the post-World War II years. Not surprisingly, there was a strong anti-American flavor to much of the politics, the humor, the cultural chitchat of the period; after all, America had dramatically usurped Britannia on the world stage, and who among us doesn’t harbor some resentments at being shunted
onto the sidelines by a new superstar?
4. Today, however, when I talk with friends and relatives in London, when I visit Europe, the anti—Americanism is more than just sardonic asides, rueful Monty Python-style jibes, and haughty intimations of superiority. Today something much more visceral is in the air. I go to my old home and I get the distinct impression that, as Drabble put it, people really loathe America somewhere deep, deep in their gut. 5. A Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project survey recently found that even in Britain, America’s staunchest ally, more than 6 out of l0 people polled believed the United States paid little or no attention to that country’s interests. About 80 percent of French and German respondents stated that, because of the war in Iraq, they had less confidence in the trust-worthiness of America. In the Muslim countries surveyed, large majorities believed the war on terror to be about establishing U.S. world domination. 6. Indeed, in many countries—in the Arab world and in regions, such as Western Europe, closely tied into American economic and military structures—popular opinion about both America the country and Americans as individuals has taken a serious hit. Just weeks ago, 27 of America’s top retired diplomats and military commanders warned in a public statement, ―Never in the past centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted. ‖ 7. If true, that suggests that, while to all appearances America’s allies continue to craft policies in line with the wishes of Washington, underneath the surface a new dynamic may well be emerging, one not too dissimilar to the Soviet Union’s relations with its reluctant satellite states in Eastern Europe during the cold war. America’s friends may
be quiescent in public, deeply reluctant to toe the line in private. Drabble mentioned the Iraq war as her primary casus belli with the United States.
8. In many ways, the Iraq war is merely a pretext for a deeper discontent with how America has seemed to fashion a new global society, a new economic, military, and political order in the decade and a half since the end of the cold war. America may only be riding the crest of a wave of modernization that, in all likelihood, would have emerged without its guiding hand. But add to the mix a discontent with the vast wealth and power that America has amassed in the past century and a deep sense of unease with the ways in which a secular, market-driven world divvies up wealth and influence among people and nations, and you have all the ingredients for a nasty backlash against America.
9. In the years since I stood on my rooftop in Brooklyn watching the World Trade Center towers bum so apocalyptically, I have spent at least a part of every day wrestling with a host of existential questions. I can’t help it — almost obsessively I churn thoughts over and over in my head, trying to understand the psychological contours of this cruel new world. The questions largely boil down to the following：Where has the world’s faith in America gone? Where is the American Dream headed? 10. What is happening to that intangible force that helped shape our modern world, that invisible symbiotic relationship between the good will of foreigners and the successful functioning of the American ―way of life,‖ that willingness by strangers to let us serve as the repository for their dreams, their hopes, their visions of a better future? In the same way that the scale of our national debt i s made possible only
because other countries are willing to buy treasury bonds and, in effect, lend us their savings, so it seems to me the American Dream has been largely facilitated by the willingness of other peoples to lend us their expectations for the future. Without that willingness, the Dream is a bubble primed to burst. It hasn’t burst yet — witness the huge numbers who still migrate to America in search of the good life — but 1 worry that it is leaking seriously.
11. Few countries and cultures have risen to global prominence as quickly as America did in the years after the Civil War. Fewer still have so definitively laid claim to an era, while that era was still unfolding, as we did—and as the world acknowledged—during the 20th century, ―the American Century.‖
12. While the old powers of Europe tore themselves apart during World War I, the United States entered the war late and fought the fight on other people’s home terrain. While whole societies were destroyed during World War II, America’s political and economic system flourished, its dries thrived, and its entertainment industries soared. In other words, as America rose to global pre-eminence during the bloody first half of the 20th century, it projected outward an aura of invulnerability, a vision of ―normalcy‖ redolent with consumer temptations and glamorous cultural spectacles. In an exhibit at the museum on Ellis Island a few years back, I remember seeing a copy of a letter written by a young Polish migrant in New York to his family back home. Urging them to join him, he wrote that the ordinary person on the streets of America lived a life far more comfortable than aristocrats in Poland could possibly dream of.
13. In a way America, during the American Century, thus served as a safety valve,
研究生公共英语教材阅读B第3、4、10、11、14课文原文及翻译
