Blood Lifestyle: Externalizing the Cost of Human Life

Autor/in	Model, David
Titel	Blood Lifestyle: Externalizing the Cost of Human Life
Quelle	In: College Quarterly, 15 (2012) 3, (5 Seiten) PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1195-4353
Schlagwörter	Stellungnahme; Foreign Countries; Economic Development; Education Work Relationship; Higher Education; Economics; Work Environment; Congo; North America + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Ausland; Wirtschaftsentwicklung; Hochschulbildung; Hochschulsystem; Hochschulwesen; Volkswirtschaftslehre; Arbeitsmilieu; Kongo; Nordamerika
Abstract	To build postsecondary institutions that educate responsible citizens as well as competent employees and consumers, it is important that people must teach and learn themselves about the context--domestic and global--in which work is to be done, and the purposes which economic and technological development serve. One aspect of that context is the tremendous human cost of modern prosperity. A moral inquiry into human suffering is surely at least as important as the passing on of the technical skills needed to keep the machinery in motion. A significant historical example concerns the 10 million inhabitants of the Congo Free State who paid the price for King Leopold II's greed and brutality when he opportunistically forced them into slave labour to extract sap from rubber trees to sell to the embryonic automobile industry in the 1890s. Today, externalization of costs insidiously hides cheap labour, unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, destruction of the environment and ubiquitous toxins which have worked their way up to the top of the food chain in mother's milk. Shockingly, human life has become an externalized cost as a direct consequence of the unsustainable lifestyle of people in North America. Literally millions of people have died or been injured as a result of their extravagant lifestyle which, for example, requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels for transportation and the manufacture of consumer or capital products. Paradoxically, due to their consumption habits and lifestyle, they are assigning a value to human life which can be calculated by dividing the resulting excessive purchases germane to perpetual unsustainable growth divided by the number of casualties who have become victims of the American pursuit of economic advantages. Human life has no price. It is alarming that it is held in such low regard, and it is unconscionable that people in North America pay so little attention to their own culpability in social injustice at home and abroad. (ERIC).
Anmerkungen	Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology. 1750 Finch Avenue East, Toronto, Ontario M2J 2X5, Canada. Tel: 416-491-5050; Fax: 905-479-4561; Web site: http://www.collegequarterly.ca
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10