Global sustainability and public understanding of science: the role of socioscientific issues in the international community

If the crux of making informed judgments about worldly matters depends on being scientifically literate, and the expression of scientific literacy is defined in terms of responsible decision-making, then we find ourselves in the mist of tautology. To clear the mist, let us consider the following conceptual distinction. We need to ask ourselves if we can imagine a world where one can be properly identified as being scientifically literate, yet bear no responsibility to subsequent decisions made about policy, research, community, family and the like. We would likely agree that such an individual would possess technical competence, but lack the inclination to enact that knowledge with due consideration of the world around them. In the alternative, can we imagine a scenario in which one makes consistently responsible decisions that impact the world around us and lacks scientific literacy? We would be hard pressed to imagine such decisions not being informed by knowledge of or about science. It would seem that some manner of scientific literacy is a prerequisite to making responsible decisions, though not a sufficient condition for such decisions to occur. While literacy may not require a moral compass, scientific literacy, in the sense that I am prescribing, does.