“The world mourned Jobs’ death a few weeks ago,” Arthur Dobrin, who teaches applied ethics at Hofstra University, writes for Psychology Today. “Why, then, don’t I join the chorus of hosannas? Whether Job’s contribution to our lives is all to the good is debatable. The impact of Apple’s works on our social life is ambiguous, making us more connected to the larger world and alienated from our immediate surroundings, both at the same time. Just think of the person across from you at a table who is texting a friend from across the world.”
“His heroic status is seriously undermined by his personal moral failures and it this which prevents me from holding him up as an icon for young people. Where there is no vision, a people perish, the New Testament says,” Dobrin writes. “But it isn’t any vision that people need for sustenance. It is a moral vision that is essential.”
Dobrin writes, “Jobs wasn’t the kind of person I want to emulate. The world would be poorer if we were all like him. Whether genius requires such narcissism is an open question. But if we are to venerate Steve Jobs, let’s not be fooled into thinking that he was a good person. And it the vision of goodness upon which a people’s futures rest.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If we all were like Steve Jobs, today we’d be able to ignore the holier-than-thou scribbles of a Hofstra egghead from our beautiful homes on a terraformed Mars.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]