The Ethics of Ordinary Technology

Michel Puech

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317216506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Technology is even more than our world, our form of life, our civilization. Technology interacts with the world to change it. Philosophers need to seriously address the fluidity of a smartphone interface, the efficiency of a Dyson vacuum cleaner, or the familiar noise of an antique vacuum cleaner. Beyond their phenomenological description, the emotional experience acquires moral significance and in some cases even supplies ethical resources for the self. If we leave this dimension of modern experience unaddressed, we may miss something of value in contemporary life.

Combining European humanism, Anglophone pragmatism, and Asian traditions, Michel Puech pleads for an "ethical turn" in the way we understand and address technological issues in modern day society. Puech argues that the question of "power" is what needs to be reconsidered today. In doing so, he provides a three-tier distinction of power: power to modify the outer world (our first-intention method in any case: technology); power over other humans (our enduring obsession: politics and domination); power over oneself (ethics and wisdom).

1 An Introduction to Technoethics

1.1 Why Ethics About Technology and How?

Modernity/Technology

The manifest characteristic of our contemporary world is technology. This statement engages a scale of value and significance that can eventually be reduced to pure and simple ideological prejudice by some cultural relativist, but its prima facie obviousness stands firm as a starting point for our inquiry. Modernity is perceived as technology. This fact is a question, the famous “Question concerning technology” elaborated by Martin Heidegger (1954). Philosophers of technology have never ceased, in the last decades of the twentieth century, to pose again this question. Langdon Winner (1986: Chapter 1) identifies technology as our typical “form of life,” in the sense of Wittgenstein, that is to say a systemic cultural and existential pattern. Albert Borgmann’s book titled Technology and the character of contemporary life (Borgmann 1984) is a milestone in philosophy. On this basis, the fact that technology is the main characteristic of contemporary life and world has the status of a definition in philosophy of technology.

The most important sociological approaches to modernity stress the importance of technology in terms that are cognate to “ordinary technoethics”:

Modernity is a post-traditional order, in which the question, “How shall I live?” has to be answered in day-to-day decisions about how to behave, what to wear, and what to eat – and many other things – as well as interpreted within the temporal unfolding of self-identity.

(Giddens 1991: 14)

More precisely, the ethical content that has long been implicit in philosophy of technology is now emerging, either in a constructive approach (Brey et al. 2012: 1–3) or in a critical approach centered on the crisis of modernity as an ideal (Toulmin 1990). Technological superiority is still taken as an absolute civilizational superiority, in the West at least, but through value assumptions that can hardly claim universality (Mary Tiles in Hershock et al. 2003: 493).

Assessing technology is a methodological challenge. Every contemporary questioning is informed by a technological preconception (Böhme 2012), in a sense reminiscent of Heidegger’s basic argument: technology is already present in every questioning frame, so there is a real obstacle to frame technology itself as a problem. The most important consequence of this methodological issue is, in Borgmann’s terms, “the immunity of technology to traditional moral analysis” (Borgmann 1984: 169).

Technology is even more than our world, our form of life, our civilization. We need to track down a more intimate presence of technology in our world and our life. Don Ihde’s work has highlighted this existential proximity of technology. “Technology makes the ‘texture’ of our world and of our existence” (Ihde 1979: 63); “our existence is ‘technically textured’ ” (Ihde 1990: 1). This technological texture is on the objective side what I will call the technosphere: our actual environment, with the pervasive presence of ambient and background technology (Ihde 1979: Chapter 5). But there is a second and more intimate layer, which I will call the proximal technosphere. It is on the subjective side, or more precisely, at the interface between subject and world. Recent philosophy of technology converges toward the analysis of a technologically mediated self. I will argue that this existential significance of technology is the new frame in which its ethical significance can be analyzed.

There is between science and technology an ontological difference with heavy ethical consequences. Science is discourse; technology is action. Science builds a representation of the world; technology interacts with the world to change it. The values of science are representational values. They are primarily “truth” values or, better, “validation” procedures. The values of technology are necessarily agency values, that is to say, ethical values. The specific values system of technology originates in this rupture with the central epistemic value of the West: truth (Kitcher 2001: 103, 166; Pitt 1995).

The second point to clarify is the precise meaning of non-neutrality in technoethics. I will insist on the oracular Kranzberg’s (First) Law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” (Kranzberg 1986). Non-neutrality in technology does not mean that technology has by essence a definite value, be it good or bad. This simplistic valuation opens the way to dualistic ideologies: technophilia and technophobia. On the contrary, non-neutrality means that technology always imports and sometimes imposes a values system that makes a real difference, but that never supplies predetermined moral categories such as good or bad. To have a knife is neither good nor bad, it can be used indifferently as a powerful tool or as a weapon, but to have a knife is not neutral, in any circumstance. It modifies the global situation. It creates a context and a unique moral context. How can we capture this situation and context?

A typical uneasiness looms over every attempt to understand the moral in a given technological context. Yes, the suspect was carrying a knife for innocent picnic uses, but she never excluded the possibility (how could she?) of using it as a dissuading weapon in case of a bad encounter during this solitary hiking expedition. Yes, that particular kind of knife is more than you need to cut your bread, but it is the appropriate knife to be clipped to a belt and possibly used as a tool in a wild nature environment. How can we morally frame human intentions and artifacts affordances (potential uses) together? The inadequate cultural integration of technology and in particular the uneasy ethical assessment of technology is for Hottois a consequence of maintaining technē and logos as two separate orders of reality (Hottois 1984). The symbolic and value-laden agency of humans (logos) is kept apart from technical artifacts, which maintains technology in an illusory neutrality or invisibility and obstructs the vision of a global and hybrid framework in which logos and technē are jointly deployed in human projects.

In technology itself, there is a values system to elucidate and to assess. This task can be carried out and it has been carried out with different outcomes, on three levels:

1 Political critique. The power of a military-industrial complex and its hidden agenda have been exposed by Jacques Ellul (1954) and this has been the basis of a political critique of industrial technology from the 1970s on. The crude version of this approach is more than often a conspiracy theory where technology is instrumentalized by the “bad guys,” but more realistic versions can be found in Herbert Marcuse (1964) and in philosophers of technology like Winner (1977) or Feenberg (1999, 2002).

2 Ethical assessment. Engineering ethics and some branches of applied ethics have produced several models of values analysis in technology. These models will be a substantial source for my argument.

3 Existential awareness. To address the relevant level of intimacy that we maintain with our contemporary artifacts, the methods of ethical assessment inspired by engineering ethics and standard applied ethics can be evolved into a form of existential analysis with a stronger interpretative ambition and a resolute focus on the self. The objective of this approach is to delineate an existential non-neutrality of technology, more important than ethical non-neutrality (Kranzberg’s Law) and key to some of the yet poorly addressed issues of modernity. Borgmann’s work pioneered this way (Borgmann 1984) in philosophy of technology, and Michel Foucault provided indispensable guidance to carry on this task in technoethics.

From Philosophy of Technology to Technoethics

Applied ethics embraces a variety of domains, corresponding to the various activities of human agents: business, medicine, engineering, law, war, education, interactions with the natural environment, the digital environment, and so on (Frey and Wellman 2003). Bioethics constitutes a large and relatively coherent division of applied ethics, at least under a broad definition of bioethics that includes medical and environmental ethics plus the ethics of research and development in biology and biotechnology. Technoethics may reasonably try to become an equivalent division of applied ethics, under a broad definition that includes any interaction with artifacts (human-made objects, see Baker 2004; Hilpinen 2011; Olsen et al. 2009: Chapter 28). Bioethics and technoethics both require efforts to assess the philosophical consequences of their two foundational concepts, life and artifact. To put it mildly, artifacts have received less philosophical attention.

The introduction to philosophy of technology by Tiles and Oberdiek (1995) remains a sound approach to the field in its entirety. It typically includes the consideration of values. Technology is not just applied science. From this founding observation specific problems arise, which have been neglected, say Tiles and Oberdiek. To address these problems requires a break from the pro- or anti-technology valuation systems that rule when the question of technology is only an excuse for a critique or for a promotion of preexisting social values. But in the much needed bigger picture, where is technology to be situated in relation to the major ontological and ethical distinctions facts/values and human/nature (Tiles and Oberdiek 1995: 29–30)?

Mitcham’s synthetic classic book traces the development of the question in a cross-disciplinary investigation, structured by the distinction between “Engineering Philosophy of Technology” and “Humanities Philosophy of Technology” (Mitcham 1994). The landscape is explored in detail and one possible future emerges clearly for Mitcham: “This book may be read as the prolegomenon to inevitably more explicit ethical reflections on technology” (Mitcham 1994: 7; see also Davis 1991; Cutcliffe 2000; Cavalier 2005).

In the wake of Mitcham, Heikkerö’s recent and synthetic presentation of the field (Heikkerö 2012) gives an idea of the richness and coherence to be found in ethics of technology, justifying its claim to be a next step in philosophy of technology. The importance recently taken by the main regional approaches (bioethics, environmental ethics, engineering ethics) and by the central questions (control and decision, justice, the good life), as retraced by Heikkerö, gives weight to the central question: “How adequate as tools are the traditional Western ethical concepts and theories in the late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century world?” (Heikkerö 2012: 26). Relying on sources that will be used abundantly in my argumentation, such as Thoreau, Gandhi, Heidegger, and Asian philosophies, Heikkerö transposes this question into a task (“to reveal where ethical questions have been ignored, suppressed, or covered over by technical questions,” Heikkerö 2012: 189) and shows that this task calls into question our way of life and our vision of the world: “To put it in simple terms, it seems that humans in advanced societies should find a new way of willing, in addition to or instead of the manipulative willing” (Heikkerö 2012: 193).

The emerging field of technoethics is the subject of the introductory chapter of an extensive textbook (Lu...