Designing a Good Life: A Matrix for the Technological Mediation of Morality

Technologies fulfill a social role in the sense that they influence the moral actions of people, often in unintended and unforeseen ways. Scientists and engineers are already accepting much responsibility for the technological, economical and environmental aspects of their work. This article asks them to take an extra step, and now also consider the social role of their products. The aim is to enable engineers to take a prospective responsibility for the future social roles of their technologies by providing them with a matrix that helps to explore in advance how emerging technologies might plausibly affect the reasons behind people’s (moral) actions. On the horizontal axis of the matrix, we distinguished the three basic types of reasons that play a role in practical judgment: what is the case, what can be done and what should be done. On the vertical axis we distinguished the morally relevant classes of issues: stakeholders, consequences and the good life. To illustrate how this matrix may work in practice, the final section applies the matrix to the case of the Google PowerMeter

From Assigning to Designing Technological Agency

In What Things Do, Verbeek (What things do: philosophical reflections on technology, agency and design. Penn State University Press, University Park, 2005a) develops a vocabulary for understanding the social role of technological artifacts in our culture and in our daily lives. He understands this role in terms of the technological mediation of human behavior and perception. To explain mediation, he levels out the modernist separation of subjects and objects by decreasing the autonomy of humans and increasing the activity of things. His approach consists primarily within a clever integration of the theories of Latour and Ihde, which provides a comprehensive understanding of the social role of technological artifacts. Despite the fact that Verbeek’s book is carefully thought out and already quite influential in the field of philosophy of technology, his approach raises some conceptual and pragmatic questions. The conceptual questions concern (a) the precise meaning of the concept of mediation and the possibility of distinguishing between different forms of mediation, and (b) the differences and similarities between human and technological agency and intentionality. The pragmatic questions concern the application of his theory to the realm of engineering ethics. Particularly pressing is the question of how to assign (moral) responsibility to humans when technological artifacts are mediating the outcomes of human actions. With this article, I will raise these issues, and look forward to Verbeek’s reply

Ethics in Actor Networks, or: What Latour Could Learn from Darwin and Dewey

In contemporary Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) is often used to study how social change arises from interaction between people and technologies. Though Latour's approach is rich in the sense of enabling scholars to appreciate the complexity of many relevant technological, environmental, and social factors in their studies, the approach is poor from an ethical point of view: the doings of things and people are couched in one and the same behaviorist (third person) vocabulary without giving due recognition to the ethical relevance of human intelligence, sympathy and reflection in making responsible choices. This article argues that two other naturalist projects, the non-teleological virtue ethics of Charles Darwin and the pragmatist instrumentalism of John Dewey can enrich ANT-based STS studies, both, in a descriptive and in a normative sense

The influence of measuring technology on model building in molecular biology

Krohs U. The influence of measuring technology on model building in molecular biology. In: Boon M, Waelbers K, eds. Proceedings of the First Biennial Conference SPSP 2007. Enschede: University of Twente; 2007: 75-75

Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy

This volume collects eighteen essays presented at the fifth annual European Conference on Computing and Philosophy (ECAP) held June 21–23, 2007, at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. It represents some of the best of the more than eighty papers delivered at the conference. The theme of ECAP 2007 was the multi-faceted “computational turn” that is occurring through the interaction of the disciplines of philosophy and computing [1]. It was organized under the supervision of the International Association of Computing and Philosophy (IACAP). IACAP promotes scholarly dialogue and research on all aspects of the computational and informational turn, and on the use of information and communication technologies in the service of philosophy

On the ecological/representational structure of virtual environments

This paper introduces an alternative view of virtual environments based on an analysis of two opposing views: the Traditional View and the Ecological View. The Traditional View argues for a representational view of perception and action susceptible of being mapped onto virtual settings. The Ecological View, which is inspired by Gibson's ecological approach to perception, considers that perception and action are inseparable, embodied processes that do not imply mental representations. The alternative view put forward here claims for an articulation of the opposing views, namely the Ecological/Representational view of virtual environments, providing the notion and levels of representation implied in perceptual and agentic processes is functionally defined