Care in Technology

Xavier Guchet

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781786305596
• eBook ISBN: 9781119821397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Stratégie commerciale

Today, it is widely recognized that in order to meet environmental challenges, it will not simply be enough to make our lifestyles greener; also critical is putting an end to the modern conception of the human as master and possessor of nature. However, to bear fruit, this change in anthropology must also be accompanied by a revision in our conception of technology.

Since the Enlightenment and the development of industrialization, technology no longer seems to be subject to the guiding principles set by the Greeks: prudence and the search for the right measure in all, which leads to the care of beings and the world. Care in Technology analyzes the historical changes that have led technology to become an unthinkable part of care, and care an unthinkable part of technology. It also establishes the conditions for care to once again become a regulatory principle of the activity of engineers who design technology.

1
Care and Technology: An Anthropological Question

1.1. From mastery to care

1.1.1. Making good use of technology, anticipating its potential risks: two possible examples of care in technology?

1.1.1.1. Care and technology in ancient Greece

No more limited to medical practices, the moral imperative of care is now required in multiple areas of technological activity: agriculture, livestock farming, as well as all sectors of industry, which, at one point or another in their value chain (or even at all points, from the extraction of raw materials up to the end of life of the products that they dump on the markets), are the cause of massive pollution, as well as devastating effects on human groups who have the misfortune of living where the giants of the industry have (dis)located their productive activities.

The need to problematize technological activities in the light of the requirements of care is certainly not a recent discovery. While the nexus between technology and care has become a problem for us, it seemed self-evident in Ancient Greece. The term “care” there indeed covered a large number of attitudes and practices, that may be reduced to three major themes¹: firstly, care referred to the set of activities reflecting concern, caring for something or someone. In particular, in this broad field of care as concern, we find the care due to the gods or to parents, but also the care owed to oneself (épiméléia héautou); secondly, the term also had a rather more restricted meaning, linked to the development of rational medicine in classical Greece: it designated acts of caring for the sick, of taking them in charge and of the administration of treatment; thirdly, care referred to the governance of a house or a city, or even the administration of business². Economy, which designated precisely this administration in the private sphere (oikos-nomos, the good order of the house), was thus a matter of care.

It is to be noted that the Greeks had two terms and not a single one to designate care: thus épiméléia, but also thérapéia. These two terms were indeed quite close, in particular in Plato who generally used them interchangeably. In both cases, reference was made to caring and to concern, however each of the two terms had its specificities: on the side of thérapéia, there was treatment in the medical sense, but also religious care (service to the gods, including the maintenance and repair of the temples) and respect for parents, as well as the daily maintenance of plants and animals. Thérapéia also designated services rendered with a view to obtain favors; épiméléia predominately bore the sense of “being concerned”, of concern in itself, but also of the administration of things and of public charges. Thérapéia therefore retained a strong link with this vast field of care, which in archaic Greece was dedicated to the gods, to ancestors and to things, although the term became specialized and eventually came to preferentially designate medical practices (Lombard 2006). Accordingly, for the Greeks it could not be a question of defining all care by extension of the medical model of care. The contrary seems true: the medical sense of care branched out on the basis of a more comprehensive understanding of care. It was understood that thérapéia, in the limited sense of the term, should never lose its ties with épiméléia. Moreover, thérapéia as well as épiméléia concerned a multiplicity of beings: humans, gods, non-human living things, non-living things – but not properly speaking of Nature taken as a whole.

Admittedly, activities of a technical nature, the technai, had different relationships to care. Medicine, agriculture, the activity of shepherds, the political arts (Schaer 2013): all these were activities that involved actions upon living beings and that the Greeks took to be related to épiméléia by an essential, constitutive link. In contrast, the arts of manufacture, such as pottery or carpentry, were only considered as arts of care in a derivative and secondary sense. It was of course obvious that the craftsman should be careful with his materials and his tools, and Plato himself explains that the different arts of manufacture which support the care we have for ourselves are arts of care (Plato 1997, pp. 585, 586). Thus, concern for the feet (therefore of the body) entails concern for shoes. The art of shoemaking is therefore in a sense an art of care, as are all the arts that deal with the body. However, stresses Plato, a distinction should be made between the care we bring to our belongings, and the care that we bring to ourselves as regards the body (épiméléia héautou). If the arts of garments or footwear are indeed in some way arts of care, they focus on things related to the body and not on the body itself – whose specific art is gymnastics. The care that we need in dealing with our body, in concerning ourselves with it, is reflected in some way in these particular arts which aims at providing our body with whatever it needs. It is not as arts that these arts have a relationship with care, but as arts of the body. The object of care is the body, and only indirectly the shoe or clothing.

In addition to the fact that they did not put the arts of manufacture on quite the same level as the arts with an essential relationship with care, the ancient Greeks also made a distinction within the arts of care themselves: if care in medicine had a moral significance, it was not exactly the same for the culture of the soil or the rearing of herds.

However, on these two points, the current extension of the field of care introduces a clear break with the Greek concept of épiméléia. On the one hand, care now also concerns the art of manufacture, in this case the most diverse varieties of industrial production; on the other hand, care for natural things, ecosystems and nonhuman animals (domesticated or not) now has an eminently moral meeting. In our relationships with nature and the living world as a whole, our constitution as moral subjects is at stake – which would have seemed devoid of meaning to a Greek of antiquity. Acting technologically meant for the Greeks to act with prudence, applying care, but this care passing through technè had no moral significance – except without doubt in the medical technè. The decoupling of technological activity and care has led to the depredation of nature, although it is widely recognized today that reconnecting with technological activity which takes care cannot consist of returning purely and simply to the ancient attitude of prudence, in the contemporary form of good management of natural resources. We must now not only be cautious and circumspect, but also take care of nature in granting moral significance to its care.

1.1.1.2. For a moral evaluation of technologies independent of the uses made of them

What are the technologies deemed responsible for the widespread mismanagement to which the industrialized societies seem to be shamelessly devoted? Not all are concerned, of course. It would for example not come to anyone’s mind to incriminate the so-called traditional know-how: on the contrary, these competences are generally seen as custodians of a form of wisdom and a fine knowledge of local environments, likely to help us to change direction onto the path of a less predatory social and economic life, more imbued with the requirements of care. All art implies a form of care, at least in the sense of a cautious and attentive state of mind in respect of what the activity involves. However, technological developments related to industrialization for more than two centuries seem to have forgotten this. The latter seem to subscribe to a reductive idea of technology, in that they seem to ignore the elementary rules of caution and modesty to which, according to the Greeks, any true technè should bow.

The technologies which stand accused of negligence are also not readily listed, and the field that they describe is difficult to mark out clearly: extractive industries, industries based on fossil energy, chemical industries, new technologies generating strong uncertainties about the environmental consequences of their products (bio-and nanotechnology, synthetic biology for example). Also indicted are all the activities which have massively relied on the sectors of innovation and production mentioned above – for example, intensive agriculture dependent on chemistry, mechanization and biotechnologies, or industrial farming that uses pharmaceutical products or even genetic engineering, so that animals can withstand the conditions of life which are imposed upon them in contempt of their most basic needs.

The accusation consists most often of lifting the veil on the way in which all of these areas of technological innovation and development lead to objects or processes whose “mode of existence” has a causal link with the degradation of natural environments. This expression of mode of existence of technologies, coined by French philosopher Gilbert Simondon (2017), means in effect that an object or even a technological process must not be considered only according to how it is used. This point is essential: the lack of care, that is to say mismanagement (in-curia), is not explained mainly by accidental reasons, that is to say, by adverse circumstances or by bad use of technology. It is more essentially implied by the structural or operational characteristics of the objects or of the technological processes that we adopt – which moreover is not always easy to admit, to the extent that the so-called thesis of the neutrality of technology, illustrated by the famous argument of the knife, seems to be the most widely shared thing in the world: the knife is neither good nor bad in itself, everything depends on the use made of it. I can use it to prepare my meal, or to assassinate my neighbor. As American pro-gun lobbyists like to say, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. This corny argument of the “morally-neutral-in-itself” knife (or gun), assumed to apply to all technologies, is often placed at the service of an evaluation of technologies centered on the value of the intentions themselves: the moral value of technological action involves the choices that we make to use our technologies for one use and not for another. Technology does not in itself bear a choice of values; it can be put to the service of good or bad intentions.

However, although this thesis seems convincing at first sight, it faces a formidable difficulty shown by the example, among many others, of the smartphone: the extreme diversity of uses that it is capable of, and therefore the underlying intentions of the users (and designers), does nothing to change the fact that the whole of its manufacturing process is proving to be ecologically and humanly harmful³. Mismanagement lies not only or even primarily in what we are doing with our technologies, but in their conditions of production and working (or functioning).

The imperative of care therefore appears to require us in the first place to reconsider the very concept of technology – to abandon its definition as a simple neutral means at the service of external and pre-established goals (only these purposes of use are then assumed to be subject to moral evaluation), in favor of a conception which emphasizes the way in which, in its properties of structure and its patterns of operation, a technological object or process may give rise to a kind of moral evaluation about its effects on the natural world and/or on the human world – that is to say on areas of reality that are either structured according to moral values (such as the human world) or conceived in such a way that our relationships with them now have a moral meaning (such as the natural world).

Far from being a means that is clearly limited to its known properties, something in which there is nothing more than the intention of the designer and/or manufacturer, the technological object or process always exceeds the list of its specifications and is defined above all by the relations it is led to establish with beings and processes on all levels (natural or human). These relations are most often invisible: in the smartphone that I use, I do not see the soils devastated by the extraction of metals necessary for their operation, or the impressive quantity of water used for its manufacture, let alone the forms of exploitation including slavery that this manufacturing generates, at least in some of the countries where the production is (de)localized. With this smartphone, it is possible to send electronic messages: how many users know that this innocent gesture, without apparent environmental consequences, in reality bears a very high environmental price? These messages are in fact stored on servers located in gigantic data centers, that is to say warehouses or “data farms”. These emit a lot of heat and require a lot of electricity, not only for operation but also for cooling. Sending a simple electronic message is reflected finally by the issuance of a quantity of CO₂ equivalent to that which a tree can absorb in a day. According to a study published in 2015 by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, data centers are responsible for 2% of the total emission of CO₂ in the world, and the situation is expected to worsen.

Our means of communication therefore link us to natural and human processes which, on the one hand, are not immediately visible at the order of magnitude and in the limited field of our existence and our perception and which, on the other hand, cannot always be located in the strict sense in space and in time: the questions of knowing exactly where an electronic message will generate CO₂, as well as determining when exactly its effect will be felt, are indeed devoid of meaning.

Broad areas of technological research and innovation today seem to give birth to strange beings who carry with them, in the relations they have with other beings and with the natural environments, their own topology and their own chronology. Space and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Care and Technology: An Anthropological Question
• 2 Technology and Life: Analysis of a Divorce
• 3 The Conditions of Care in Technology
• 4 Design, Technology and Life
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement