A reply to ‘green shame: The next moral revolution?’

Accepted Author ManuscriptEthics & Philosophy of Technolog

Imaginaries of innovation: Turning technology development into a public issue

New technologies will have a big impact on our public life-world, suggesting that it is necessary to have a public debate on innovation. Such a debate is missing: instead of having a debate on the process of technology development, only expected effects of new technologies are discussed. This is undesirable as innovation processes recruit implicit normative assumptions that should be opened up for public scrutiny. This article aims to outline conditions and possibilities for organizing such public debates on innovation. It will do so by depicting innovations as wilful metamorphoses which materialize worldviews and expectations entertained by technology developers. Existing technology assessment organizations could instigate discussions on the desirability and credibility of these worldviews and expectations, so as to further democratize the process of technology development. Values Technology and InnovationEthics & Philosophy of Technolog

Institutions of justice and intuitions of fairness: contesting goods, rules and inequalities

This paper examines the intrinsic relation between institutions and social justice. Its starting point is that processes of institutionalization invoke societal groups to articulate justice demands which, in their turn, give rise to processes of institutional redesign. In liberal democracies, demands for justice are articulated as a pursuit for emancipation and empowerment of groups that feel excluded by dominant categorizations. The imminent presence of this twin pursuit for justice can be explained by the conceptual inconsistencies that characterize the distinction between the public and private sphere. These inconsistencies also explain why demands for emancipation and empowerment are intrinsically ambiguous and inconsistent. In order to reconsider the question how institutions are to be adapted to allow for social justice while acknowledging the plurality, ambiguity and volatility of justice demands, the paper will propose an empirical and normative research agenda.Ethics & Philosophy of Technolog

Making sense of the self: an integrative framework for moral agency

The self is conceptualized in a multitude of ways in different scholarly fields; at the same time moral agency appears to presuppose a unitary conception of the self. This paper explores this tension by introducing ‘moral senses’ which inform the normative evaluations of a person. The moral senses are featured as innate dispositions, but they inevitably recruit discursive categorizations in order to function. These senses forward both an ‘individual self’, by experiencing a unitary body, mind and character, and a ‘social self’, that is similarly experienced as a body, a mind, and a character. This social self is enabled by the capacity to internalize other people's feelings and intentions and the need to have otherworldly explanations for observable reality. This integrative framework of moral senses provides an understanding that helps to address the challenge of moral heterogeneity and plurality.Ethics & Philosophy of Technolog

Values as Hypotheses and Messy Institutions: What Ethicists Can Learn from the COVID-19 Crisis

In this chapter, the COVID-19 crisis is examined as an episode that reveals various complications in the relation between values and institutions. I argue that these complications cannot be addressed satisfactorily by ethics, as this field is characterised by a gap between the identification of values worth pursuing and the effectuation of these values in society through politics. This chapter aims to bridge this gap between ethics and politics by outlining the dialectical relation between values and institutions. It will do so by first presenting values as collectively held understandings that emerge in public deliberation. Second, these values are safeguarded by setting up appropriate institutions, which, at the same time, also allows the further substantiation of these values. However, it also needs to be acknowledged that institutions are not mere instrumental solutions to further societal values. On the contrary, they have their own morally laden dynamics. As such, they should also be susceptible to adjustment following societal demand.Ethics & Philosophy of Technolog

The Good Life and Climate Adaptation

The need to adapt to climate change brings about moral concerns that according to ‘eco-centric’ critiques cannot be resolved by modernist ethics, as this takes humans as the only beings capable of intentionality and rationality. However, if intentionality and rationality are reconsidered as ‘counterfactual hypotheses’ it becomes possible to align modernist ethics with the eco-centric approaches. These counterfactual hypotheses guide the development of institutions, so as to allow the pursuit of a ‘good life’. This mean that society should be organized as if humans are intentional and, following Habermas’s idea of ‘communicative rationality’, as if humans are capable of collective deliberation. Given the ecological challenges, the question becomes how to give ecological concerns a voice in deliberative processesEthics & Philosophy of Technolog

Paradigms and paradoxes: The futures of growth and degrowth

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce three storylines that address the relation between economic growth, technical innovation and environmental impact. The paper assesses if and how these storylines as guiding visions increase our range of future orientations. Design/methodology/approach: The paper first explains its general outline and then explores different strands of literature to arrive at its analytical conclusions. Findings: Pursuing the three storylines in a paradigmatic articulation creates paradoxes. The growth paradigm focuses on economic growth as its main goal. To overcome environmental degradation, products have to be substituted by environmentally friendly alternatives, but the continuous substitution of finite resources seems unlikely possible. The storyline of innovation sees technological development as a driver of economic progress, and holds that innovations allow the decoupling of economic growth from environmental impact, a claim that is compromised by the occurrence of rebound effects. The degrowth storyline holds that economic growth has to be stopped altogether, but is unclear how this can be done. Originality/value: By articulating paradigmatic perspectives as storylines, a new understanding on how these perspectives can be figured as a constructive repertoire of guiding visions and not as mere theory-based descriptions.Ethics & Philosophy of Technolog

Sustainable innovation backcasting and participatory decision making

Participatory intervention methods can be seen as tools to solve the problems that are the results of locked-in institutional practices. To repair such institutional problems, participatory tools have to address three sets of questions.First, who to select as a participant, and what is the function of the selected participants? Second, how can learning of participants of a project expand to wider society? Third, what is the status of the future in a method? The method of backcasting is attended here as a case, it will prove that not all of the issues introduced here are dealt with in a satisfactorily fashion, whereas it is contended that the explicit addressing of these three sets of questions will improve the effectiveness of such participatory intervention methods.Technology, Policy and Managemen

Revisiting Rittel and Webber's Dilemmas: Designerly Thinking Against the Background of New Societal Distrust

In this article, we posit designerly thinking as a family of design approaches that some believe are able to effectively respond to wicked problems. We will scrutinize this premise by revisiting Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber's 1973 article in which the notion of wicked problems was originally introduced. In it, Rittel and Webber note the emergence of a general sense of distrust in professionals in the 1960s and interpret it as a loss of confidence in the then leading approach to addressing societal problems: systems-based planning. Rittel and Webber formulated three dilemmas that societal problems pose, of which the second is their wickedness, and argued that planning does not resolve these dilemmas. In the 2010s, an emerging distrust in professionals has arisen once more, raising the question of whether designerly thinking is equipped to address societal issues. Our review and discussion of Rittel and Webber's three dilemmas reveals that designerly thinking currently does not resolve any of them, as there can always be groups that will oppose certain solutions. We argue that designerly thinking cannot overcome societal pluralism, but that designers can and should interpret social distrust as an invitation to discuss the consequences and their societal equity.Ethics & Philosophy of Technolog

Fictions and frictions: Promises, transaction costs and the innovation of network technologies

New network technologies are framed as eliminating ‘transaction costs’, a notion first developed in economic theory that now drives the design of market systems. However, the actual promise of the elimination of transaction costs seems unfeasible, because of a cyclical pattern in which network technologies that make that promise create processes of institutionalization that create new forms transaction costs. Nonetheless, the promises legitimize the exemption of innovations of network technologies from critical scrutiny.Ethics & Philosophy of Technolog