The same mistake

To frame the question of ultimate ends in ethical terms is to leave the question of ultimate ends open to the sorts of fractiousness and disputation we see going on in the world today. When we, instead, frame ultimate ends in terms of techniques, as embodied in the processes of productivity, then we tend to get as a natural by-product general uniformity around the entire world. Today, for example, we see the American management style dominating the styles of industry no matter what the ideology, be it capitalist or communist or Islamist or what have you. 

As far as that's concerned the whole-Earth design movement could be the answer to the problem. Whole-Earth design embodies into the standards and professional practices of design, engineering and architecture the values of a more reverant orientation. Whole-Earth design aims to achieve sustainability over efficiency, and that is the difference between stewardship and ownership.

The theological and the secular worlds both made the same mistake. They separated out ultimate ends from ultimate means. As it turns out, there ought to be no difference. The ultimate ends are really about the disposition of the ultimate means; no more, no less. 

God demands His bounty be used in certain ways. The logic of the biblical system is to embed in the property rights of the entire nation a claim to the national wealth, and then to re-distribute to the entire nation the rents to those claims by suspending every seven years or twice a century all property rights over wealth-producing assets so that the imbalances in the distribution of wealth, and, by extension, power, are removed from the social and economic system. 

The conventional framing of the question of ultimate means and ends that says the ethical, on the one hand, pertains to the ends, while the purely scientific, on the other hand, pertains to the means, that framing implicitly favors the ruling elites. By promoting the conventional framing, the moral and political and the theological philosophers have devised a system that serves and perpetuates the ruling power structure because that framing dis-empowers the achievement of the ends and turns them into academic matters, while it surrenders to the most rapacious and most cunning in society the design of the means of enlisting common purpose for the sake of harnessing productivity.