Technology and Ethics: Overview
CARL MITCHAM AND KATINKA WAELBERS
Since the mid-twentieth century, technological change has increasingly led to public debate. Concerns have been raised about the legitimacy of nuclear deterrence, dangers of environmental pollution, informed consent in medicine, privacy and computing, the safety and desirability of genetic engineering, intellectual techno-property rights, and nanotechnological risks. Given the large and increasing number of these moral discussions, one could anticipate that any companion to the philosophy of technology would include analyses of a diversity of ethical issues. The twenty-three chapters included here, covering topics from agricultural ethics to water technology, confirm such expectation. New technologies, now affecting and affected by all aspects of the human lifeworld, open up and have become manifold opportunities for philosophical negotiation and critical reflection.
In the regionalized field of technology and ethics discussions, there are two distinct types of interactions. One focuses on the ethics of technical professionals, that is, the specialized ethical codes appropriate to physicians, engineers, computer scientists and the like. Critical reflection on how technological change influences such codes of conduct has become an increasingly prominent aspect of the ethics of technical professionals. Another focuses on how best to extend ethics in general from its traditional focus on human–human interactions to human–technology–world interactions, with the world including both humans and the non-human environment. Questions have also been raised about the possibility of specifically ethical dimensions to some human– artifact interactions, especially with artifacts that may be so complex or sophisticated as to acquire apparently human-like properties of intelligence or emotional responsiveness. A third and quite different interaction between technology and ethics has attempted to turn ethics itself into a technology. In the present overview, however, emphasis will be placed on general discussions, without meaning to deny the legitimacy and importance of professional technical ethics, human–artifact interactions, or efforts to create a technology of ethics.
There are nevertheless dangers in general ethical reflections, not just with regard to technology but in any moral assessment that too quickly interprets challenges in positive or negative terms – or even neutral ones. Any judgment deserves to be preceded by careful description. As the playwright Harold Pinter wrote, “To supply an explicit moral tag to an evolving and compulsive dramatic image [is] facile, impertinent, and dishonest” (Pinter 1998: 18). What the Nobel Prize-winning British author maintained with respect to his own plays applies equally well to dramatic unfoldings in the techno-lifeworld. As the essays collected here show, we are in the midst not only of major plot developments in the human condition but also of what might be called a relighting of the very world stage on which we “all play our parts.” To give too quickly a determinate moral interpretation to this evolving and compulsive narrative would be facile, impertinent and dishonest. Indeed, philosophy must work to appreciate the enlightenments of history and the dramatic ideas being played out therein.
1. From Cultural Criticism to Cultural Lag
Two influential and related general descriptions of the new stage lighting in which we perforce assume our roles emerged in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social sciences. In Europe, a key figure in the development of what became known as the cultural criticism of modern technics was Georg Simmel. As has been argued by José Luis Garcia (2005), Simmel’s socio-philosophical study of money analyzed how what began as a simple enhancement of the means of exchange, through the monetizing of all exchanges, fundamentally altered socio-cultural life. This alteration, which Simmel identifies with the particular technical means known as money, applies even more to modern technics as a whole. The result of industrial production, mass consumerism, and “creative destruction” – to use Joseph Shumpeter’s illuminating descriptor for the unification of the technical inventive and commercial impulses – nevertheless tempers any unqualified Enlightenment, liberal or socialist belief in progress. Technological progress appears to bring not only the goods of increased wealth, reduced physical labor and extended lifespan but also the more problematic, unintended and not easily controlled consequences of alienation, bureaucratization and intensified decision-making – not to mention environmental pollution and transformation. For Simmel, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Romano Guardini, Günter Anders and others, the combination was creating a new type of cultural life that appears incommensurable with all that has been known up to this point in human history and within which people thus struggled for moral orientation.
A related argument took more programmatic form in cultural lag theory, which can be found adumbrated in Marxist analyses of the need for a proletarian revolution to take full advantage of the liberating potential created by capitalism, but was given distinctly American formulation by sociologist William Fielding Ogburn and philosopher John Dewey. According to Ogburn (1922), social orders are constituted by semi-independent elements that normally reinforce one another, as when religion and science present compatible cosmologies or governments fund teaching respect for existing political arrangements. Maladjustment occurs when a cultural ecology experiences differential change in its elements such that disharmonies are introduced. Leading examples are associated with new inventions in material culture that no longer mesh easily with existing socio-cultural habits, which then require periods of sometimes difficult adjustment. One example of such technologically generated cultural lag (from Ogburn 1964) was the period during which the social institutions and customs of road-building and -use had to adapt to the increasing speed of automotive travel. Establishment of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the early part of the twentieth century provides another case; prior to the industrial processing of food and mass marketing of drugs, no governmental agency was necessary to supplement traditions of experience and personal assessment to inform patterns of use.
From the perspective of Dewey, cultural lag presents special challenges for democratic theory, which can easily fail to appreciate how the unity of the modern state depends on new transportation and communications technologies. As Dewey observed, “Political and legal forms have only piecemeal and haltingly, with great lag, accommodated themselves to the industrial transformation” (1927: 114). “Cultural lag” praise for and reliance on forms of schooling and freedom of the press that have been weakened or captured by special interests “is everywhere in evidence” (Dewey 1939: 48). Numerous other cases in which science and technology have outstripped the social, political or intellectual capacities of a culture have been documented by anthropological studies such as those collected by Edward H. Spicer (1952) and H. Russell Bernard and Pertti J. Pelto (1987).
One of the most pressing mid-twentieth-century examples was the advent of nuclear weapons, which presented an enormous leap in scientific knowledge and technological power prior to any political adjustments that would ensure wise or prudent use. As Albert Einstein put it, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking,” thus calling for “a new type of thinking” – or, equally important, of acting. More generally, according to philosopher Hans Jonas, “Modern technology has introduced actions of such novel scale, objects, and consequences that the framework of former ethics can no longer contain them” (Jonas 1984: 6).
More positively, however, one can identify during the last half of the twentieth century in many Euro-American countries diverse pragmatic, institutional responses to techno-cultural imbalances. Recognition of the problem of environmental pollution, stimulated by publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), led to establishment of the Club of Rome (1968) – which produced an influential series of studies on the limits to growth (see Meadows et al. 1972 for the initial volume, and Simon 1981 for a vigorous response) – and the US Environmental Protection Agency (1970). Additionally, in the United States, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was created (1972–95) to “assist Congress with complex and highly technical issues that increasingly affect our society”; in Europe similar initiatives were both adopted and maintained, with the Dutch Rathenau Institute (1986–present) being one good case in point. In the 1980s, challenges associated with advancing biomedical technologies led to the development of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and Institutional Biosafety Committees (IBCs) to ensure the free and informed consent of human experimentation participants as well as the health and safety of those working in or affected by this expanding technological sector. Since the 1970s, professional ethics in science and engineering has also focused reflection on such issues. Finally, the funding of Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) research as part of the Human Genome Project, and the development in Europe of new democratizing practices such as citizen participation projects (Netherlands) and consensus conferences (Denmark), witnessed creative efforts to bridge gaps between technological change and socio-cultural patterns of action and ideas.
Broadly speaking, much of the applied ethics movement – from environmental and bioethics to engineering, computer and nanoethics – can be interpreted as a response at the level of intellectual culture to technological changes in material culture. Post1980, optimism about the ability of free markets to mediate adjustments can be read equally as an applied ethical–political theory about how to address cultural lag phenomena – an optimism that nevertheless deserves to be qualified, as much as the governmental response it seeks to replace, by the continuing emergence of problems associated with natural resource utilization, energy production and human-induced climate change.
Indeed, the sometimes ambiguous notion of cultural lag itself deserves to be qualified, in order to avoid assuming the primacy of technology. Is it not possible for intellectual culture to lead as well as follow material culture? Historical analyses of the rise of science and technology in Europe during the 1500s, such as Weber (1904) and Lynn White, Jr (1978) – as well as of the different trajectory of historical development in China (see, e.g., Needham 1954) – argue that ideas and ideals can be major influences on technological change. Thus it need not always be assumed that “lagging” aspects of culture must simply be altered in order to “catch up” with technology. When applied uncritically and interculturally, cultural lag theory can threaten to rationalize Eurocentric assumptions about “underdevelopment” and forced transfer of technology – in accord with the ideology of techo-economic development put forth by “point four” in President Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural address (see Truman 1949 and Sachs 1992).
To repeat: It may be intuitive that various aspects of culture change at differential rates. But this need not imply that one aspect (whether behavioral or intellectual) simply lags behind another or has failed to adjust to an inevitable or non-problematic change in material culture, as if there were no choice other than running to remain upright on the treadmill of technology. Futurist Alvin Toffler, for instance, has argued for recognition of a phenomenon he terms “future shock” or “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time” (1970: 4). Building off Ogburn’s theory, Toffler suggests “there must be balance, not merely between rates of change in different sectors [of society], but between the pace of environmental change and the limited pace of human response” (1970: 5). Cultural lag theory can highlight the values of preserving proportionality, equilibrium and harmony (the right adjustment) among the parts of culture. For Toffler:
The only way to maintain any semblance of equilibrium . . . will be to meet invention with invention – to design new personal and social change-regulators. Thus we need neither blind acceptance nor blind resistance, but an array of creative strategies for shaping, deflecting, accelerating, or decelerating change selectively.
(1970: 331)
Achieving this selective change is no simple, technical issue of “catching up,” but selective decision-making about what constitutes the good life and the ideal society. It may also happen that altered elements become interactive in some new and equally balanced way that awaits recognition.
2. Dramatic Tensions
On the stage lighted by technological change and its cultural concomitants there have emerged a number of not necessarily mutually exclusive dramatic ideas. Given their diversity, it is difficult to parse these ideas or to attach to them clear and distinct typological tags for tracking the emerging interactive narrative tensions. But consider enacting alternative responses to the following closely related questions: (a) To what extent do humans shape technological products or processes? (b) In what ways do technological products or processes shape human action and perception?
To the first question, responses run a gamut from beliefs that technologies are the free creations of humans to those emphasizing an inner logic or determination in technology. What might be called voluntarism argues that people freely create technological artifacts and see technological development as completely malleable. This, of course, tends to be a corollary to popular expressions of faith in creativity and innovation. By contrast, what is often called determinism sees technological development as following its own inner logic, with humans functioning as something like vehicles for its expression. Just as human beings are not free to think anything other than 2 + 2 = 4 (although they are, of course, free to speak otherwise), so they are not free to create a perpetual motion machine (however much they might aspire to do so). Such historical phenomena as repeated sequences of invention (stone ages always come before iron ages), multiple invention (the wheel) and simultaneous invention (the telephone, motion picture, and airplane were all independently invented at about the same time) suggest determinate patterns or autonomy to technological history.
To the second question, responses again spread out across a spectrum. What might be termed substantivism is the position that technological change strongly shapes or influences social, political or human affairs; all stone age cultures are basically the same, and, as technology globalizes, socio-cultural orders converge. By contrast, instrumentalism views artifacts as tools that can reflect and be used in many different ways by diversities of human lifeworlds; that Thomas Edison invented the telephone for business communications did not prohibit its subversive deployment for private talk. People shape their lives and cultures, then as individuals or groups incorporate and adapt technologies in whatever ways they choose – a perspective especially congenial with the research of Michel de Certeau (1980).
Combining these two spectra of ideas yields a two-axes matrix. One (the x-axis) would concern the extent to which humans shape technology; another (the y-axis) would focus on the extent to which technology shapes humans (Figure 64.1).
The better-known philosophical arguments have been in support of positions that fit most comfortably in quadrants II and III. Quadrant II involves a combined determinist interpretation of technological change and substantivist assessment of the influence of technology on society. The thought of Jacques Ellul, for instance, is typically interpreted as representative of this quadrant. Quadrant III, by contrast, involves some combination of a voluntarist interpretation of technological change and instrumentalist assessment of the influence of technology on society. Samuel Florman (1976), along with most engineers, not to mention most people, would place themselves in this quadrant.
This does not mean that quadrants I and IV are empty. For instance, David Collingridge (1980) could be interpreted as representing the quadrant that combines a voluntarist position concerning the creation of technology but a substantivist position with regard to its societal influence, once created. What has become known as the “Collingridge dilemma” states that early in its development a new technology is quite malleable or subject to a free shaping by human beings, although, once created, the technology takes on a momentum and influence that can be difficult to alter. The construction of the interstate highway system in the United States is one example: there was considerable freedom in its initial design, but since being put in place it has strongly influenced landscape, commercial activities, and patterns of travel. Another philosopher who holds a similar position is Jonas, with his “contention that with certain [free] developments of our powers the nature of human action has [necessarily] changed,” which “calls for a change in ethics as well” ( Jonas 1984: 1).
As for the combination of determinism and instrumentalism, the thought of thinkers as diverse as Karl Jaspers, Donella Meadows and colleagues, Julian Simon and Nick Bostrom might serve to illustrate an idea that may initially seem anomalous. Jaspers, Meadows, Simon and Bostrom all argue that technology is a means that humans can use in many different ways, yet one that nevertheless exhibits a developmental logic all its own. For Jaspers (1949), the course of history manifests a degree of independence, but in its different stages and especially with the arrival of modern science and technology, most explicitly with the atomic bomb ( Jaspers 1958), presents challenges to human freedom; in the present human beings must struggle to maintain Technik als Mittel, or technology as means. Meadows et al. (1972) and Simon (1981) both argue some degree of inevitability about techno-social progress, but divide radically on their interpretations of the human meaning and appropriate response. Bostrom (2005) argues for taking advantage of technological opportunities that have appeared for human self-transformation, to become transhumans.
Much ethics-relevant work in the interdisciplinary field of science, technology and society (STS) studies has nevertheless challenged the adequacy of one or more of the basic ideas constitutive of these quadrants. For instance, according to Ellul’s adumbration of STS scholarship, analysis of the character of modern technology reveals it to be distinguished by such key features as automatism and self-augmentation. Technological decision-making exhibits a pursuit of efficiency such that when engineers see one technology as more efficient than another – that is, as increasing output relative to input, in relation to some context – their choice is determined; they automatically choose the more efficient technology. Moreover, what Ellul terms the technical system re-enforces itself in a quasi-determinist manner. New technologies often and unintentionally have consequences that only seem to call for the development of ever newer technologies. Examples are easy to find: classic industrial manufacturing technology caused environmental pollution, which then stimulated the development of clean-up technologies, medical treatment technologies to deal with health problems that arise, and new, less-polluting technologies. The extent and density of technological artifice seems only to increase. From industrial production to medicine to warfare, human activity becomes ever more technological and thereby to engender a technological milieu that replaces previous natural and social milieux.
What appears persuasive from one perspective has nevertheless been contested by another. Arguing the social construction of technology, subsequent STS scholars have described in detail how one technology does not always replace another simply because it is more efficient; technological adoption depends fundamentally on some degree of acceptance or appreciation by humans, be they engineers, marketers or consumers. Indeed, different groups of people are always redefining what counts as efficiency. According to one highly influential study of the historical development of the bicycle, for instance, its technical evolution was more a result of competition between social groups for how the bicycle was to be defined than the pursuit of anything that could be called the most efficient two-wheeled means of transportation (Bijker 1995). From this perspective, increases in the technological character of the human lifeworld are more the result of social commitments to technology than of any domination by technology. In the marketplace, some technologies succeed while others fail – but the reason choices keep being made between one technology and another rather than between more or less technology is simply that technologies themselves taken as a whole are socially desired.
At the same time, complementary STS studies have argued that technological development is not always as free as it may appear in the quasi-voluntarist accounts of social constructivism. Technological developments depend not just on the laws of nature but also on what have been identified as “orgware” and “hardware” (Smits and Leyten 1991). Orgware is constituted by the organizational and institutional conditions that influence the development and application of an invention, from engineering standards and governmental regulations to suppliers of materials, distributors and customers. Hardware is constituted by the physical technologies already invented, regulated, distributed and purchased. In sum, although efficiency may not determine everything, neither are the makers and users of technology as free as they might sometimes think. Neither determinism nor voluntarism seems a fully adequate account of the complexities of the techno-lifeworld. Related arguments have been brought to bear to question the substantivismversus-instrumentalism divide. Substantivism appears to reify if not anthropomorphize technology. Instrumentalism is somewhat idealistic about the abilities of humans to understand what they are really making and doing. As an outgrowth of such contesting arguments, a number of theories have emerged that attempt to integrate or move beyond the particular insights of different quadrants.
3. Dramatic Theory
Ideational tensions in the ethics of technology, just like observations tensions in empirical science, are synthesized in dramatic theories; and, even though the dramas themselves are more rich than any theoretical models meant to capture them, the theories provide pathways to enhanced dramatic appreciation. Two major theorists of technology and ethics tensions who have also challenged the oppositions between the four quadrants defined by substantivism, determinism, instrumentalism and voluntarism are Langdon Winner and Bruno Latour. Given their influence across a wide variety of discussions, it is worth considering each in modest detail.
Winner aims to go beyond descriptions of making and using in order to “examine critically the nature and significance of artificial aids to human activity” (Winner 1983: 749). There is more involved with technology than commonly recognized in the ways inventors, engineers, operators, repair technicians and the like make and maintain artifacts that others can pick up, use and then set aside. For Winner, both voluntarist and instrumentalist views constitute a “technological somnambulism” in which we sleepwalk through and fail to recognize the extent to which technologies reshape human activity and its meanings. Adapting a term from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Winner argues that automobiles, electric lights and computers have become “forms of life” – creating a culture that is scarcely thinkable without them. Taking the example of television, Winner notes how “none of those who worked to perfect the technology . . . in its early years and few of those who brought television sets into their homes ever intended the device to be employed as the universal babysitter.” Additionally, “if anyone in the 1930s had predicted people would eventually be watching seven hours of television each day, the forecast would have been laughed away as absurd” (Winner 1983: 257). But Winner is also critical of substantivism and determinism. Watching television is a choice, even when turning it off may not be as easy as instrumentalists customarily assert. Television is woven into the fabric of daily life with programs that are topics of office conversation and news sources and as the hearth around which household furniture is arranged. High-definition television was as much a creation of marketing, especially the marketing of sports programming, as of technical invention. Such observations invite consideration of what Carl Mitcham (2002), responding to arguments by Ivan Illich, has called technological asceticism.
With some nuance, Winner nevertheless observes how artifacts can “embody specific forms of power and authority” in at least two ways. In one, the invention, design or arrangement of a technology functions to enforce an often hidden political decision.
His example is bridges on a Long Island roadway that were made so low as to exclude the buses African Americans would most likely need to ride in order to access public beaches, thus effectively promoting segregation. (The particular example has been contested; but, even if some details are mistaken, the case well illustrates how artifacts can enforce political beliefs.) This case of what might be called a voluntary, instrumental substantivism is complemented by cases of what Winner calls “inherently political technologies” or technologies with a kind of existential influence. Assembly lines, for instance, demand that labor be broken down into simple, mind-numbing routines and require rigid workplace discipline; it is hard to imagine nuclear power not implicating authoritarian systems of control.
Winner’s examples argue how social arrangements that precede artifacts can be reified in their design and how technologies can have their own social-ordering effects. In both cases, artifacts can be said to have politics. To cite another easily appreciated example, most stairs and curbs are serious obstacles for less mobile people. As Winner puts it, such artifacts are political in the sense that they have “power and authority in human associations as well as the activities that take place within those arrangements” (Winner 1980: 290). Such an argument falls between yet combines determinism, voluntarism, instrumentalism and substantivism. Yet Winner has provided little in the way of response, other than to call for more consciousness and public participation in the design and use of technologies.
Latour’s development of actor network theory (ANT) can be read as another effort to provide a systematic framework for dealing with the kinds of issues to which Winner attends. Certainly it is the case that Latour strives to avoid “technological somnambulism” or deterministic pessimism – but in a way that, more dramatically than Winner, offers a new ontology of artifacts (or what he prefers to call an anthropology). Rather than seeking to steer a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of voluntarismdeterminism and substantivism-instrumentalism, Latour rejects two basic assumptions shared by all four opposing positions.
Actor-network analysis focuses on the continuous reassembling of the social. In Latour’s words, his concern is “how to resume the task of tracing associations” (Latour 2005: ch. 1). This concern devolves into two further questions, the first of which asks what is meant by associations. For Latour, technical and human associations cannot be distinguished from each other when it comes to their social or moral roles (Latour 2002). Both are agents, or what he prefers to term “actants,” in so far as they both exhibit figuration (shape) and traceability (traces of making a difference). When it comes to figuration and traceability, the actions of humans and artifacts are associations that are themselves associated. In other words, Latour fundamentally (dis)solves arguments between voluntarism versus determinism and instrumentalism versus substantivism by simply denying the modernist presupposition that one can distinguish subjects and objects, and then argue about which influences the other to what extent.
A second question focuses on how to trace the trail of associations, and the continuous change of the social. Effective activity (that is, agency, whether of humans or of artifacts) is always found in a shifting network. Agencies continuously form, change and break off associations. Understanding the social role of anything requires appreciating how arrangements shift and interact. The presumption that the two axes of the matrix are separable (voluntarism-determinism versus instrumentalism-substantivism) is not tenable. There is no substantial distinction between technological and societal development. The trail of a technology changing shape is inextricably intertwined with the trail of societal change; social and technological evolution cannot be distinguished because the two are not distinct. Latour even denies the distinction between “making” and “using.”
To summarize: Two arguments are central to ANT. First, a social role is granted to non-humans. The subject–object dichotomy is dissolved so that artifacts (and even natural objects) are conceived as agencies along with humans. Second, what is called the social never stabilizes, but is composed of associations that form, change, break off and re-form across time. The roles of different actants and the actants themselves are not fixed, but the network is a continuously co-evolving complexity.
4. Theory and Description
In actant-network theory, what are constitutive features of actant agency? As already noted, these are figuration and traceability – which neither singly nor together constitute autonomy, one of the foundations of modernist moral theory. Technological artifacts, just like people, become agents when they exist in a form that makes a difference in the existences and actions of others. To elaborate, Latour adapts an analysis from Marilyn Akrich (1992), who has argued that the designers of technical artifacts place in them scripts indicating their functions or uses. Engineers, inventors and others inscribe worldviews and thereby define actant artifacts with specific competences, motives, aspirations, political prejudices and more. But technical artifacts function like film scripts: they provide frameworks for interactions with other actants; they do not fully determine such actions. Like a piece of music or a drama, they require the interpretation of performance. When a technology is used or performed, it is also possible for de-scription to take place, with new associations between humans and nonhumans leading to the emergence of new and often unpredictable agencies.
Artifacts and humans are described as co-shaping the social by means of multiple mediations: translation, composition, blackboxing and delegation. Mediation by translation occurs when a human actant, attempting to reach some end that it may lack – for instance, sufficient strength to achieve – utilizes another, often non-human, actant. But, when this detour toward an end takes place, the initial end of the original actant is changed by the involvement of the new actant, and both will reach their communal new goal instead of the first actant’s original goal. In mediation by composition, many actions and actants are already the result of a collection of human and non-human actants. For instance, in the manufacturing of an automobile, multiple artifacts such as chassis, wheels and axles, engines, sheet metal, and more are combined. The development of these technologies (which are all actants) depends on multiple negotiations between different humans and non-humans.
Mediation by blackboxing is a process that makes the joint production of actants opaque. The acts of a driver (normally a human actant) are the result of the automobile, road construction, traffic laws, the behavior of other automobile compositions, and more. That a driver was in a hurry is an inadequate explanation for some act of speeding.
Other users of the road can make speeding (im)possible, and so can the road and/or the car, all of which are typically placed in a mental black box, not to be considered. Being in a hurry is not even a necessary condition for speeding, since roads can be designed to keep traffic at a certain speed. In fact, the affordances designed into roads and many automobiles are scripts for speeding as defined by traffic laws. Finally, through the mediation of delegation, actants take on meanings in the sense that they produce special types of articulation that cross the boundaries between signs and things. Consider a comparison between a speed bump, a traffic sign and a police officer; the regulation of speed can be delegated from the policeman to a traffic sign or a speed bump.
Appreciating these four, interacting types of mediation introduces a shift in how action is perceived and described. The world comes to be seen as a constructed “concatenations of mediators” or as links of ever changing associations. Each point in the network represents an acting agent, like actors in a stage play or like puppets connected to their puppeteers. But there is no real author of the play. Nor is there a puppeteer who pulls the strings or a script that fully determines the play. The only scripts are the “programmes of action” of the different agencies (Latour 1994: 40). Action (or agency) “is distributed, variegated, multiple, dislocated and remains a puzzle for the analysts as well as for the actors” (Latour 2005: 60).
Summarizing again: In an actant network, the social role of technological artifacts is equivalent to that of humans. Relations between technologies and humans are comparable to relations between humans. Additionally, both humans and non-humans are agencies, but neither are autonomous agents. Actant agents act as they do as a result of associations with other agents, human and non-human. Human agents are not unique sources of action, but neither are non-human agents.
A brief but important aside: Although Latour is critical of modernism, he is not postmodernist. Postmodernism, on Latour’s reading, seeks to deconstruct the modernist social project and argues against the possibility of formulating a theory of the social or of the technical. Social agency is not possible; and society and nature, if they exist at all, cannot be objectively understood or studied. Contrary to such postmodernist claims, the a-modernity of ANT “retraces the social and society by subtle changes in connecting non-social resources” (Latour 2005: 36). Within ANT, agency continues to exist but with new and different meanings.
Two other philosophers whose work intersects in critical ways with this new theory of descriptions, especially in so far as the descriptions contribute to advancing the regionalized field of technology and ethics, are Don Ihde and Peter-Paul Verbeek. Ihde’s phenomenology of human-technology originated in primarily theoretical (instead of social theoretical) interests. Independent and in anticipation of Latour, Ihde thematized a set of human–technology–world mediations in which technology influenced not action but perceptions of world and self. In the two basic types of mediations, technology could be incorporated into the human or taken as part of the world. The former, symbolized by Ihde as “(human–technology)–world relations,” with one example being the use of telescopes, constitute embodiment relations; the latter, symbolized as “human–(technology–world) relations,” and illustrated by the thermometer, constitute hermeneutic relations. In embodiment mediations, a technology becomes a kind of extension of the body; in hermeneutic mediations, the technology has to be read or interpreted. Other mediations are constituted by alterity or otherness and background experiences of technology. But, more importantly, in embodiment and hermenutic mediations Ihde identifies an invariant amplification–reduction structure. The telescope amplifies perception of things at a distance while reducing the cone of vision; the thermometer amplifies accuracy of measurement while reducing sensory engagement with the world. All mediations, that is, are non-neutral in amplifying some experiences while reducing others.
Although Ihde does not develop the possibility, one could imagine an ethical argument for the pursuit of those technological amplifications in which reduction is itself minimized or exhibits a distinctly marginal character; in so far as amplification does not carry with it, human experience undergoes an unqualified enlargement. This would be analogous to efforts in risk–benefit analysis of technological actions to minimize risks while maximizing benefits. As a limit case, such amplifying technologies as eye glasses could become so integrated into body functioning that the (human–technology)–world relation would be better-represented as a technobody–world relation (eye glasses becoming contact lens “I-glasses”) with humans as cyborgs (Haraway 1985).
Both Latour and Ihde are on record as seeing their theories of mediations for actions and for perspectives, respectively, as at odds (see Latour 1991, Ihde and Selinger 2003). For Verbeek, however, Latour can be read as picking up where Ihde leaves off, as moving from perception to action. Whereas phenomenology in general attacks the subject–object dichotomy by explaining how reality arises through relations between humans and their environment, Ihde’s particular contribution to this tradition (which Ihde calls “post-phenomenology”) is to note how these relations are mediated (co-shaped) by technological artifacts. Ihde’s mediation of perception can be easily seen as complemented or extended by Latour’s analyses of mediation in social action. “Technology mediates our behavior and our perception, and thereby actively shapes subjectivity and objectivity: the way in which we are present in the world and the world is present to us” (Verbeek 2005: 203).
The mediating role of artifacts should not be understood as intermediate between humans and the world. Instead, mediation constitutes both subject and object. “Humans and the world they experience are the products of technological mediation, and not just the poles between which the mediation plays itself out” (Verbeek 2005: 130). At the same time, Ihde and Latour seek to overcome the subject–object gap in quite different ways: Ihde bridges the gap not by denying it but by showing how mutual engagements constitute subjects and objects. In support of Ihde, Verbeek then argues that “it is indeed meaningful to make a distinction between someone who experiences and something that is experienced, someone who acts and a world in which action takes place – regardless of how interwoven and mutually constituted they are” (Verbeek 2005: 166).
5. Description Plus
This overview of technology and ethics began by drawing on an objection by Harold Pinter to those who would reduce dramas to moral didacticism, to suggest that to some extent moral judgments of technology ought also to be suspended in favor of careful observation. Descriptive ethics is a necessary prolegomenon to prescriptive ethics. However, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Pinter (2005) makes a distinction between how, for him as a writer, morality must remain an open question, while for him as a citizen it cannot. In the play itself, “Sermonizing has to be avoided at all cost”; but in life, in contrast to art, sermonizing cannot be avoided. For Pinter, his point had to do with what he considered a responsibility to expose the lies and mendacity of United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. In like manner, analysts of the technology-ethics drama have often felt called to criticize modern technology on such grounds as its disruptions of traditional culture, alienation and the loss of human autonomy in mass society, destruction of a natural environment, multiple risks and dangers (material and political), or its dehumanizing (including post-humanizing) tendencies. In counterpoint, others have celebrated technology for its contributions to human welfare, freedom and progress.
Pinter has been lambasted for his moralistic sermonizing in terms that echo the castigation directed at many critics of technology for their alleged naïve romanticism of the past or idealistic and unrealistic proposals for such reforms as democratic participation in technical decision-making. (Interestingly enough, the celebrations of technology are much less commonly criticized for their naïve optimisms or unrealistic forecasts.) There nevertheless remains a philosophical obligation not only to move beyond the celebration of technological change with its attendant ideologies, but also to weave ethical analysis into normative discourse that can contribute to the abilities of citizens to appreciate benefits while exposing and delimiting or transforming wherever possible its self-regarding dominations or public and private harms. How to square moral philosophical analysis and reflection with normative assessment is as difficult as Pinter found it was to bridge the hiatus between art and politics.
The theories of ethical drama that have been associated here with Winner, Latour and their followers are cumulative products of a trajectory of dialogue on relations between technology and ethics that remain rich but largely descriptive in character. From Winner through Latour, challenges have been formulated to any narrative that would simply enact distinctions between voluntarism versus determinism or instrumentalism versus substantivism. The relation between humans and artifacts needs to be understood as a fluid network, in which a rigid distinction between the technological and the social disappears. But are there no down sides to such a sophisticated theory?
Winner himself has raised one when arguing the vacuousness of “opening the black box” of the social construction of technology in ways that can leave in place uncriticized existing power relations (Winner 1989). Another important objection is that Latour’s symmetry between humans and non-humans at once anthropomorphizes artifacts and objectifies humans (Collins and Yearley 1992). If humans are co-constituted by non-humans, then it becomes unclear to what extent humans can form their own moral character, the idea of normative ethics withers, and any argument that actants should behave one way rather loses force. Moral responsibility seems to disappear. How could someone be praised or blamed for an action or intention if these are constituted by a continuously shifting network of associations?
One body of work that seeks to negotiate a clearer path from description to prescription – that engages descriptive complexities in the technology-ethics drama while arguing the need for normative orientation – can be found in the work of Albert Borgmann. In Real American Ethics (2006), for instance, Borgmann agrees with Latour that the insistent mediations of artifice undermine any simple autonomy as a precondition of ethics and proposes with Winner a politics based in what he proposes to call “Churchill’s principle.” In 1943, when the Nazi-bombed House of Commons needed to be rebuilt, Winston Churchill, as prime minister, argued against an architecture of the new and in favor of reconstructing what had been, on the grounds that “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” As Borgmann also emphasizes, it is not the individual who shapes buildings; instead, “We do it together, after disagreements, discussions, compromises, and decisions” (Borgmann 2006: 5). Giving Churchill’s principle a more general articulation, Borgmann continues:
[T]he Industrial Revolution changed the stage of life from the ground up, and now the technological devices that surround us channel the typical ways we behave. Ethics has to become real as well as theoretical and practical. It has to become a making as well as a doing. Real means tangible; real ethics is taking responsibility for the tangible setting of life. Real also means relevant, and real ethics is grounding theoretical and practical ethics in contemporary culture and making them thrive again.
(Borgmann 2006: 11)
Recalling the matrix that provided orientation to the dramatic tensions of technology and ethics narratives, it is possible to imagine an analogous situating of ethics itself. On the x-axis would be the extent to which humans voluntarily adopt their ethical guidelines or have these determined for them, if not by nature then by reason or social institutions. On the y-axis would be stretched out an opposition between substantive and procedural moralities. As with the previous matrix, it is the second and third quadrants that would seem best-populated. Conservative fundamentalists argue determination by some substantially delimiting moral code, liberal constructivists for an inclusive proceduralism adopted in something like a social contract. Borgmann, however, criticizes liberal proceduralism as itself manifesting a semi-determinist influence of the thin way of life typical of the culture of high-tech consumerism and aspires instead for the free affirmation of a more substantive vision of the good.
We must, Borgmann argues, recognize the extent to which human freedom is a reality that leaves us able – and even calls us forth – to argue about what constitutes the good life within that material culture associated with advanced and ever advancing technology. The proceduralism of public participation is not enough. In a series of works that began with his philosophical study of Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984), Borgmann has argued repeatedly for a substantive view of the good as composed of engagement with reality in both nature and artifice, and has sought to spell this out with both descriptive richness and normative depth. At the same time, Borgmann recognizes that philosophy engages the good by way of neither the apodeictic causal explanations of science nor the deictic witness of poetry; instead, in ethics, philosophy can only present the good in a paradeictic or paradigmatic form that at once throws into unifying relief an apparently chaotic world with an attractiveness that perhaps can open the mind and heart to greater things.
For Borgmann, this greater good is the conscious design of an artifice that recognizes its own limitations and promotes instead not simply more human freedom and mastery of experience but what he calls focal things and practices such as those exemplified by well-wrought material objects and the festive meal. Ethics, in Borgmann’s terms, is constituted by recognizing and responding to the claims of realities such as natural beauties and human virtues that, were they to be ignored, would diminish us as persons in our particularities as members of communities natural and social – that is, in landscape and country. In America, Borgmann finds real ethics dispersed in the new urbanism, environmentalist, and voluntary simplicity movements, and in his concept of focal reality he seeks thereby to concentrate and illuminate the multiple intuitions at their core. Even those who remain unpersuaded by Borgmann’s own paradigm for the realization of a more substantive ethics in the midst of American technological prowess, who criticize it perhaps as a romantic idealization of the past, may still be attracted to his approach as providing a paradigm of descriptive sensitivity woven together with an enriched and enriching normative seriousness.
