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Moralizing Technology

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Preface...................................................vii1 Mediated Morality.......................................12 A Nonhumanist Ethics of Technology......................213 Do Artifacts Have Morality?.............................414 Technology and the Moral Subject........................665 Morality in Design......................................906 Moral Environments: An Application......................1207 Morality beyond Mediation...............................1398 Conclusion: Accompanying Technology.....................153Notes.....................................................167References................................................171Index.....................................................179

Chapter One

Introduction

Our daily lives have become intricately interwoven with technologies. Cars enable us to travel long distances, mobile phones help us to communicate, medical devices make it possible to detect and cure diseases. Life has become unthinkable without sophisticated technology. Contrary to what many people intuitively think, these technologies are not simply neutral instruments that facilitate our existence. While fulfilling their function, technologies do much more: they give shape to what we do and how we experience the world. And in doing so they contribute actively to the ways we live our lives (cf. Verbeek 2005b).

Cars, for instance, do not only take us from A to B. They also lengthen the radius enclosing our most frequent social contacts. They help to determine how far we live from where we work. And they organize how we design cities and neighborhoods. Mobile phones make it easy to contact each other but also introduce new norms of contact and new styles of communication. By making it possible to detect specific diseases, medical diagnostic devices do not simply produce images of the body but also generate complicated responsibilities, especially in the case of antenatal diagnostics and in situations of unbearable and endless suffering.

This active contribution of technologies to our daily lives has an important moral dimension. First of all, the quality of their contributions to our existence can be assessed in moral terms. Some roles played by technology can be called "good" and other roles "bad"—even if it is not possible to blame technologies for the "bad." And second, by helping to shape human actions and experiences, technologies also participate in our ways of doing ethics. Speed bumps, to use a favorite example of Bruno Latour, help us make the moral decision not to drive too fast near a school. Ultrasound scans help us to ask and answer moral questions about the lives of unborn children. Energy-saving lightbulbs take over part of our environmental conscience. Coin locks on supermarket pushcarts remind us to return each cart neatly to its place (Akkerman 2002). Turnstiles tell us to buy a ticket before boarding a train (Achterhuis 1995). Current developments in information technology show this moral significance more explicitly. With the development of ambient intelligence and persuasive technology, technologies start to interfere openly with our behavior, interacting with people in sophisticated ways and subtly persuading them to change their behavior, as I will discuss extensively in the final chapter of this book.

Even though the fact usually remains unnoticed, technologies appear to have moral significance. Latour even states that those who complain about the alleged moral decay of our culture are simply looking in the wrong direction. Rather than looking only to humans, we should start to recognize that nonhuman entities are bursting with morality. This is a challenging observation. Mainstream ethical theory, after all, does not leave much room for such a moral dimension of material objects. Ethics is commonly considered to be an exclusively human affair. The claim that technological artifacts can have morality immediately raises the suspicion that one adheres to a backward form of animism, which equips things with spirit. Material objects do not have minds or consciousness, they lack free will and intentionality and cannot be held responsible for their actions; therefore they cannot be fully fledged parts of the moral community, the argument goes. At the same time, though, technologies do help to shape our existence and the moral decisions we take, which undeniably gives them a moral dimension. The time has come, therefore, to develop an ethical framework to conceptualize this moral relevance of technology. How can we do justice to the moral dimensions of material objects?

Further, addressing the moral significance of technology is not only a challenge for ethical theory. It also has important implications for doing ethics. Both the use and the design of technology involve ethical questions that are closely related to the moral character of technological artifacts. How can users deal with the ways in which technologies mediate moral decisions and help to attribute responsibilities and instill norms? How can designers anticipate the future moral roles of their designs, or even "build in" specific forms of morality? Is it desirable at all that designers get to play such a role? How can designers and users of technology bear moral responsibility for technologically mediated actions? What forms of moral discourse could accompany the use and design of moral technologies?

Ethics and Technology

Technologies and ethics have always had a complicated relationship. While many technologies have obviously relieved humanity from misery and toil— like penicillin, agricultural equipment, surgical instruments, heating systems for buildings—many others have received negative evaluations. Nuclear weapons, for instance, have caused destruction and suffering to such a degree that it is hardly possible to see any beneficial aspects to them. Even the birth control pill, which is widely used and has played a tremendous role in the emancipation process—not only for women but also for gays and lesbians, because of its disconnection of sex and reproduction (cf. Mol 1997)—is still contested in some conservative religious circles because it interferes with the allegedly "natural" course of things.

In philosophy, various approaches to the ethics of technology have developed, which differ radically from each other. In its early days, ethical approaches to technology took the form of critique (cf. Swierstra 1997). Rather than addressing specific ethical problems related to actual technological developments, ethical reflection on technology consisted in criticizing the phenomenon of "Technology" itself. Classical approaches in the philosophy and ethics of technology were rooted in fear regarding the ongoing fusion of technology and culture and aimed to protect humanity from technology's alienating powers. They saw the technologization of society as a threat to human authenticity and to the meaningfulness of reality. People would come to exist only as cogs in the machine of a technologized society, reduced to the function they have in the apparatus of mass production (cf. Jaspers 1951), while reality would have meaning only as a heap of raw materials available to the human will to...