essay on ethics of technology in modern society

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Philosophy of Technology

If philosophy is the attempt “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”, as Sellars (1962) put it, philosophy should not ignore technology. It is largely by technology that contemporary society hangs together. It is hugely important not only as an economic force but also as a cultural force. Indeed during the last two centuries, when it gradually emerged as a discipline, philosophy of technology has mostly been concerned with the meaning of technology for, and its impact on, society and culture, rather than with technology itself. Mitcham (1994) calls this type of philosophy of technology “humanities philosophy of technology” because it accepts “the primacy of the humanities over technologies” and is continuous with the overall perspective of the humanities (and some of the social sciences). Only recently a branch of the philosophy of technology has developed that is concerned with technology itself and that aims to understand both the practice of designing and creating artifacts (in a wide sense, including artificial processes and systems) and the nature of the things so created. This latter branch of the philosophy of technology seeks continuity with the philosophy of science and with several other fields in the analytic tradition in modern philosophy, such as the philosophy of action and decision-making, rather than with the humanities and social science.

The entry starts with a brief historical overview, then continues with a presentation of the themes on which modern analytic philosophy of technology focuses. This is followed by a discussion of the societal and ethical aspects of technology, in which some of the concerns of humanities philosophy of technology are addressed. This twofold presentation takes into consideration the development of technology as the outcome of a process originating within and guided by the practice of engineering, by standards on which only limited societal control is exercised, as well as the consequences for society of the implementation of the technology so created, which result from processes upon which only limited control can be exercised.

1.1 The Greeks

1.2 later developments; humanities philosophy of technology, 1.3 a basic ambiguity in the meaning of technology, 2.1 introduction: science and technology’s different relations to philosophy, 2.2 the relationship between technology and science, 2.3 the centrality of design to technology, 2.4 methodological issues: design as decision making, 2.5 metaphysical issues: the status and characteristics of artifacts, 2.6 other topics, 3.1 the development of the ethics of technology, 3.2.1 cultural and political approaches, 3.2.2 engineering ethics, 3.2.3 ethics of specific technologies, 3.3.1 neutrality versus moral agency, 3.3.2 responsibility, 3.3.3 design, 3.3.4 technological risks, encyclopedias, other internet resources, related entries, 1. historical developments.

Philosophical reflection on technology is about as old as philosophy itself. Our oldest testimony is from ancient Greece. There are four prominent themes. One early theme is the thesis that technology learns from or imitates nature (Plato, Laws X 899a ff.). According to Democritus, for example, house-building and weaving were first invented by imitating swallows and spiders building their nests and nets, respectively (Diels 1903 and Freeman 1948: 154). Perhaps the oldest extant source for the exemplary role of nature is Heraclitus (Diels 1903 and Freeman 1948: 112). Aristotle referred to this tradition by repeating Democritus’ examples, but he did not maintain that technology can only imitate nature: “generally technè in some cases completes what nature cannot bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature” ( Physics II.8, 199a15; see also Physics II.2, and see Schummer 2001 and this encyclopedia’s entry on episteme and techne for discussion).

A second theme is the thesis that there is a fundamental ontological distinction between natural things and artifacts. According to Aristotle ( Physics II.1), the former have their principles of generation and motion inside, whereas the latter, insofar as they are artifacts, are generated only by outward causes, namely human aims and forms in the human soul. Natural products (animals and their parts, plants, and the four elements) move, grow, change, and reproduce themselves by inner final causes; they are driven by purposes of nature. Artifacts, on the other hand, cannot reproduce themselves. Without human care and intervention, they vanish after some time by losing their artificial forms and decomposing into (natural) materials. For instance, if a wooden bed is buried, it decomposes to earth or changes back into its botanical nature by putting forth a shoot.

The thesis that there is a fundamental difference between man-made products and natural substances has had a long-lasting influence. In the Middle Ages, Avicenna criticized alchemy on the ground that it can never produce ‘genuine’ substances (Briffault 1930: 147). Even today, some still maintain that there is a difference between, for example, natural and synthetic vitamin C. The modern discussion of this theme is taken up in Section 2.5 .

Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes—material, formal, efficient and final—can be regarded as a third early contribution to the philosophy of technology. Aristotle explained this doctrine by referring to technical artifacts such as houses and statues ( Physics II.3). The four causes are still very much present in modern discussions related to the metaphysics of artifacts. Discussions of the notion of function, for example, focus on its inherent teleological or ‘final’ character and the difficulties this presents to its use in biology. And the notorious case of the ship of Theseus—see this encyclopedia’s entries on material constitution , identity over time , relative identity , and sortals —was introduced in modern philosophy by Hobbes as showing a conflict between unity of matter and unity of form as principles of individuation. This conflict is seen by many as characteristic of artifacts. David Wiggins (1980: 89) takes it even to be the defining characteristic of artifacts.

A fourth point that deserves mentioning is the extensive employment of technological images by Plato and Aristotle. In his Timaeus , Plato described the world as the work of an Artisan, the Demiurge. His account of the details of creation is full of images drawn from carpentry, weaving, ceramics, metallurgy, and agricultural technology. Aristotle used comparisons drawn from the arts and crafts to illustrate how final causes are at work in natural processes. Despite their negative appreciation of the life led by artisans, who they considered too much occupied by the concerns of their profession and the need to earn a living to qualify as free individuals, both Plato and Aristotle found technological imagery indispensable for expressing their belief in the rational design of the universe (Lloyd 1973: 61).

Although there was much technological progress in the Roman empire and during the Middle Ages, philosophical reflection on technology did not grow at a corresponding rate. Comprehensive works such as Vitruvius’ De architectura (first century BC) and Agricola’s De re metallica (1556) paid much attention to practical aspects of technology but little to philosophy.

In the realm of scholastic philosophy, there was an emergent appreciation for the mechanical arts. They were generally considered to be born of—and limited to—the mimicry of nature. This view was challenged when alchemy was introduced in the Latin West around the mid-twelfth century. Some alchemical writers such as Roger Bacon were willing to argue that human art, even if learned by imitating natural processes, could successfully reproduce natural products or even surpass them (Newman 2004). The result was a philosophy of technology in which human art was raised to a level of appreciation not found in other writings until the Renaissance. However, the last three decades of the thirteenth century witnessed an increasingly hostile attitude by religious authorities toward alchemy that culminated eventually in the denunciation Contra alchymistas , written by the inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric in 1396 (Newman 2004).

The Renaissance led to a greater appreciation of human beings and their creative efforts, including technology. As a result, philosophical reflection on technology and its impact on society increased. Francis Bacon is generally regarded as the first modern author to put forward such reflection. His view, expressed in his fantasy New Atlantis (1627), was overwhelmingly positive. This positive attitude lasted well into the nineteenth century, incorporating the first half-century of the industrial revolution. Karl Marx, for example, did not condemn the steam engine or the spinning mill for the vices of the bourgeois mode of production; he believed that ongoing technological innovation allowed for the necessary steps toward the more blissful stages of socialism and communism of the future. A discussion of different views on the role of technology in Marx’s theory of historical development can be found in Bimber 1990. See Van der Pot 1985 [1994/2004] for an extensive historical overview of appreciations of the development of technology generally.

A turning point in the appreciation of technology as a socio-cultural phenomenon is marked by Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), written under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Butler’s book gave an account of a fictional country where all machines are banned and the possession of a machine or the attempt to build one is a capital crime. The people of this country had become convinced by an argument that ongoing technical improvements are likely to lead to a ‘race’ of machines that will replace mankind as the dominant species on earth. This introduced a theme that has remained influential in the perception of technology ever since.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century a critical attitude predominated in philosophical reflection on technology. The representatives of this attitude were, overwhelmingly, schooled in the humanities or the social sciences and had virtually no first-hand knowledge of engineering practice. Whereas Bacon wrote extensively on the method of science and conducted physical experiments himself, Butler, being a clergyman, lacked such first-hand knowledge. Ernst Kapp, who was the first to use the term ‘philosophy of technology’ in his book Eine Philosophie der Technik (1877 [2018]), was a philologist and historian. Most of the authors who wrote critically about technology and its socio-cultural role during the twentieth century were philosophers of a general outlook, such as Martin Heidegger (1954 [1977]), Hans Jonas (1979 [1984]), Arnold Gehlen (1957 [1980]), Günther Anders (1956), and Andrew Feenberg (1999). Others had a background in one of the other humanities or in social science, such as literary criticism and social research in the case of Lewis Mumford (1934), law in the case of Jacques Ellul (1954 [1964]), political science in the case of Langdon Winner (1977, 1980, 1983) and literary studies in the case of Albert Borgmann (1984). The form of philosophy of technology constituted by the writings of these and others has been called by Carl Mitcham (1994) “humanities philosophy of technology”, because it takes its point of departure from the humanities and the social sciences rather than from the practices of science and engineering, and it approaches technology accepting “the primacy of the humanities over technologies” (1994: 39), since technology originates from the goals and values of humans.

Humanities philosophers of technology tend to take the phenomenon of technology itself largely for granted; they treat it as a ‘black box’, a given, a unitary, monolithic, inescapable phenomenon. Their interest is not so much to analyze and understand this phenomenon itself but to grasp its relations to morality (Jonas, Gehlen), politics (Winner), the structure of society (Mumford), human culture (Ellul), the human condition (Hannah Arendt), or metaphysics (Heidegger). In this, these philosophers are almost all openly critical of technology: all things considered, they tend to have a negative judgment of the way technology has affected human society and culture, or at least they single out for consideration the negative effects of technology on human society and culture. This does not necessarily mean that technology itself is pointed out as the principal cause of these negative developments. In the case of Heidegger, in particular, the paramount position of technology in modern society is rather a symptom of something more fundamental, namely a wrongheaded attitude towards Being which has been on the rise for almost 25 centuries. It is therefore questionable whether Heidegger should be considered as a philosopher of technology, although within the humanities view he is considered to be among the most important ones. Much the same could be said about Arendt, in particular her discussion of technology in The Human Condition (1958), although her position in the canon of humanities philosophy of technology is not as prominent as is Heidegger’s.

To be sure, the work of these founding figures of humanities philosophy of technology has been taken further by a second and third generation of scholars—in particular the work of Heidegger remains an important source of inspiration—but who in doing so have adopted a more neutral rather than overall negative view of technology and its meaning for human life and culture. Notable examples are Ihde (1979, 1993) and Verbeek (2000 [2005]).

In its development, humanities philosophy of technology continues to be influenced not so much by developments in philosophy (e.g., philosophy of science, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind) but by developments in the social sciences and humanities. Although, for example, Ihde and those who take their point of departure with him, position their work as phenomenologist or postphenomenologist, there does not seem to be much interest in either the past or the present of this diffuse notion in philosophy, and in particular not much interest in the far from easy question to what extent Heidegger can be considered a phenomenologist. Of particular significance has been the emergence of ‘Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) in the 1980s, which studies from a broad social-scientific perspective how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture. We discuss authors from humanities philosophy of technology in Section 3 on ‘Ethical and Social Aspects of Technology’, but do not present separately and in detail the wide variety of views existing in this field. For a detailed treatment Mitcham’s 1994 book still provides an excellent overview. A recent coverage of humanities philosophy of technology is available in Coeckelbergh’s (2020a) textbook. Olsen, Selinger and Riis (2008) and Vallor (2022) offer wide-ranging collections of contributions; Scharff and Dusek (2003 [2014]) and Kaplan (2004 [2009]) present comprehensive anthologies of texts from this tradition.

Mitcham contrasts ‘humanities philosophy of technology’ to ‘engineering philosophy of technology’, where the latter refers to philosophical views developed by engineers or technologists as “attempts … to elaborate a technological philosophy” (1994: 17). Mitcham discusses only a handful of people as engineering philosophers of technology: Ernst Kapp, Peter Engelmeier, Friedrich Dessauer, and much more briefly Jacques Lafitte, Gilbert Simondon, Hendrik van Riessen, Juan David García Bacca, R. Buckminster Fuller and Mario Bunge. The label ‘engineering philosophy of technology’ raises serious questions: many of the persons discussed hardly classify as engineers or technologists. It is also not very clear how the notion of ‘a technological philosophy’ should be understood. As philosophers, these authors seem all to be rather isolated figures, whose work shows little overlap and who seem to be sharing mainly the absence of a ‘working relation’ with established philosophical disciplines. It is not so clear what sorts of questions and concerns underlie the notion of ‘engineering philosophy of technology’. A larger role for systematic philosophy could bring it quite close to some examples of humanities philosophy of technology, for instance the work of Jacques Ellul, where the analyses would be rather similar and the remaining differences would be ones of attitude or appreciation.

In the next section we discuss in more detail a form of philosophy of technology that we consider to occupy, currently, the position of alternative to the humanities philosophy of technology. It emerged in the 1960s and gained momentum in the past twenty to twenty-five years. This form of the philosophy of technology, which may be called ‘analytic’, is not primarily concerned with the relations between technology and society but with technology itself. It expressly does not look upon technology as a ‘black box’ but as a phenomenon that should be studied in detail. It does not regard technology as such as a practice but as something grounded in a practice, basically the practice of engineering. It analyses this practice, its goals, its concepts and its methods, and it relates its findings to various themes from philosophy.

In seeing technology as grounded in a practice sustained by engineers, similar to the way philosophy of science focuses on the practice of science as sustained by scientists, analytic philosophy of technology could be thought to amount to the philosophy of engineering. Indeed many of the issues related to design, discussed below in Sections 2.3 and 2.4 , could be singled out as forming the subject matter of a philosophy of engineering. The metaphysical issues discussed in Section 2.5 could not, however, and analytic philosophy of technology is therefore significantly broader than philosophy of engineering. The very title of Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences (Meijers 2009), an extensive up-to-date overview, which contains contributions to all of the topics treated in the next section, suggests that technology and engineering do not coincide, but the book does not specifically address what distinguishes technology from engineering and how they are related. In fact, the existence of humanities philosophy of technology and analytic philosophy of technology next to one another reflects a basic ambiguity in the notion of technology that the philosophical work that has been going on has hardly succeeded in clarifying.

Technology can be said to have two aspects or dimensions, which can be referred to as instrumentality and productivity . Instrumentality covers the totality of human endeavours to control their lives and their environments by interfering with the world in an instrumental way, by using things in a purposeful and clever way. Productivity covers the totality of human endeavours to bring into existence new things through which certain things can be realized in a controlled and clever way. For the study of the dimension of instrumentality, it is in principle irrelevant whether the things that are made use of in controlling our lives and environments have been produced by us first; if we somehow could rely on natural objects to always be available to serve our purposes, the analysis of instrumentality and its consequences for how we live our lives would not necessarily be affected. Likewise, for the analysis of what is involved in the making of artifacts, and how the notion of artifact and of something new being brought into existence are to be understood, it is to a large extent irrelevant how human life, culture and society are changed as a result of the artifacts that are in fact produced. Notwithstanding its fundamental character, the ambiguity noted here seems hardly to be confronted directly in the literature. It is addressed by Lawson (2008, 2017) and by Franssen and Koller (2016).

Humanities philosophy of technology has been interested predominantly in the instrumentality dimension, whereas analytic philosophy of technology has focused on the productivity dimension. But technology as one of the basic phenomena of modern society, if not the most basic one, clearly is constituted by the processes centering on and involving both dimensions. It has proved difficult, however, to come to an overarching approach in which the interaction between these two dimensions of technology are adequately dealt with—no doubt partly due to the great differences in philosophical orientation and methodology associated with the two traditions and their separate foci. To improve this situation is arguably the most urgent challenge that the field of philosophy of technology as a whole is facing, since the continuation of the two orientations leading their separate lives threatens its unity and coherence as a discipline in the first place. Indeed, during the past ten to fifteen years the philosophy of engineering has established itself as a subdiscipline within the philosophy of technology, for which a comprehensive handbook was edited recently by Michelfelder and Doorn (2021).

After presenting the major issues of philosophical relevance in technology and engineering that are studied by analytic philosophers of technology in the next section, we discuss the problems and challenges that technology poses for the society in which it is practiced in the third and final section.

2. Analytic Philosophy of Technology

It may come as a surprise to those new to the topic that the fields of philosophy of science and philosophy of technology show such great differences, given that few practices in our society are as closely related as science and engineering. Experimental science is nowadays crucially dependent on technology for the realization of its research set-ups and for gathering and analyzing data. The phenomena that modern science seeks to study could never be discovered without producing them through technology.

Theoretical research within technology has come to be often indistinguishable from theoretical research in science, making engineering science largely continuous with ‘ordinary’ or ‘pure’ science. This is a relatively recent development, which started around the middle of the nineteenth century, and is responsible for great differences between modern technology and traditional, craft-like techniques. The educational training that aspiring scientists and engineers receive starts off being largely identical and only gradually diverges into a science or an engineering curriculum. Ever since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, characterized by its two major innovations, the experimental method and the mathematical articulation of scientific theories, philosophical reflection on science has focused on the method by which scientific knowledge is generated, on the reasons for thinking scientific theories to be true, or approximately true, and on the nature of evidence and the reasons for accepting one theory and rejecting another. Hardly ever have philosophers of science posed questions that did not have the community of scientists, their concerns, their aims, their intuitions, their arguments and choices, as a major target. In contrast it is only recently that the philosophy of technology has discovered the community of engineers.

It might be claimed that it is up to the philosophy of technology, and not the philosophy of science, to target first of all the impact of technology—and with it science—on society and culture, because science affects society only through being applied as technology. This, however, will not do. Right from the start of the scientific revolution, science affected human culture and thought fundamentally and directly, not with a detour through technology, and the same is true for later developments such as relativity, atomic physics and quantum mechanics, the theory of evolution, genetics, biochemistry, and the increasingly dominating scientific world view overall. All the same philosophers of science for a long time gave the impression that they left questions addressing the normative, social and cultural aspects of science gladly to other philosophical disciplines, or to historical studies. This has changed only during the past few decades, by scholars either focusing on these issues from the start (e.g. Longino 1990, 2002) or shifting their focus toward them (e.g. Kitcher 2001, 2011).

There is a major difference between the historical development of modern technology as compared to modern science which may at least partly explain this situation, which is that science emerged in the seventeenth century from philosophy itself. The answers that Galileo, Huygens, Newton, and others gave, by which they initiated the alliance of empiricism and mathematical description that is so characteristic of modern science, were answers to questions that had belonged to the core business of philosophy since antiquity. Science, therefore, kept the attention of philosophers. Philosophy of science can be seen as a transformation of epistemology in the light of the emergence of science. The foundational issues—the reality of atoms, the status of causality and probability, questions of space and time, the nature of the quantum world—that were so lively discussed during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century are an illustration of this close relationship between scientists and philosophers. No such intimacy has ever existed between philosophers and engineers or technologists. Their worlds still barely touch. To be sure, a case can be made that, compared to the continuity existing between natural philosophy and science, a similar continuity exists between central questions in philosophy having to do with human action and practical rationality and the way technology approaches and systematizes the solution of practical problems. To investigate this connection may indeed be considered a major theme for philosophy of technology, and more is said on it in Sections 2.3 and 2.4 . This continuity appears only by hindsight, however, and dimly, as the historical development is at most a slow convening of various strands of philosophical thinking on action and rationality, not a development into variety from a single origin. Significantly it is only the academic outsider Ellul who has, in his idiosyncratic way, recognized in technology the emergent single dominant way of answering all questions concerning human action, comparable to science as the single dominant way of answering all questions concerning human knowledge (Ellul 1954 [1964]). But Ellul was not so much interested in investigating this relationship as in emphasizing and denouncing the social and cultural consequences as he saw them. It is all the more important to point out that humanities philosophy of technology cannot be differentiated from analytic philosophy of technology by claiming that only the former is interested in the social context of technology. There are studies which are rooted in analytic philosophy of science but address in particular the relation of technology to society and culture, and equally the relevance of social relations to technological practices, without taking an evaluative stand with respect to technology; an example is Preston 2012.

The close relationship between the practices of engineering and science may easily keep the important differences between the technology and science from view. The predominant position of science in the philosophical field of vision made it difficult for philosophers to recognize that technology merits special attention for involving issues that do not emerge in science. This view resulting from this lack of recognition is often presented, perhaps somewhat dramatically, as coming down to a claim that technology is ‘merely’ applied science.

A questioning of the relation between science and technology was the central issue in one of the earliest discussions among analytic philosophers of technology. In 1966, in a special issue of the journal Technology and Culture , Henryk Skolimowski argued that technology is something quite different from science (Skolimowski 1966). As he phrased it, science concerns itself with what is, whereas technology concerns itself with what is to be. A few years later, in his well-known book The Sciences of the Artificial (1969), Herbert Simon emphasized this important distinction in almost the same words, stating that the scientist is concerned with how things are but the engineer with how things ought to be. Although it is difficult to imagine that earlier philosophers were blind to this difference in orientation, their inclination, in particular in the tradition of logical empiricism, to view knowledge as a system of statements may have led to a conviction that in technology no knowledge claims play a role that cannot also be found in science. The study of technology, therefore, was not expected to pose new challenges nor hold surprises regarding the interests of analytic philosophy.

In contrast, Mario Bunge (1966) defended the view that technology is applied science, but in a subtle way that does justice to the differences between science and technology. Bunge acknowledges that technology is about action, but an action heavily underpinned by theory—that is what distinguishes technology from the arts and crafts and puts it on a par with science. According to Bunge, theories in technology come in two types: substantive theories, which provide knowledge about the object of action, and operative theories, which are concerned with action itself. The substantive theories of technology are indeed largely applications of scientific theories. The operative theories, in contrast, are not preceded by scientific theories but are born in applied research itself. Still, as Bunge claims, operative theories show a dependence on science in that in such theories the method of science is employed. This includes such features as modeling and idealization, the use of theoretical concepts and abstractions, and the modification of theories by the absorption of empirical data through prediction and retrodiction.

In response to this discussion, Ian Jarvie (1966) proposed as important questions for a philosophy of technology what the epistemological status of technological statements is and how technological statements are to be demarcated from scientific statements. This suggests a thorough investigation of the various forms of knowledge occurring in either practice, in particular, since scientific knowledge has already been so extensively studied, of the forms of knowledge that are characteristic of technology and are lacking, or of much less prominence, in science. A distinction between ‘knowing that’—traditional propositional knowledge—and ‘knowing how’—non-articulated and even impossible-to-articulate knowledge—had been introduced by Gilbert Ryle (1949) in a different context. The notion of ‘knowing how’ was taken up by Michael Polanyi under the name of tacit knowledge and made a central characteristic of technology (Polanyi 1958); the current state of the philosophical discussion is presented in this encyclopedia’s entry on knowledge how . However, emphasizing too much the role of unarticulated knowledge, of ‘rules of thumb’ as they are often called, easily underplays the importance of rational methods in technology. An emphasis on tacit knowledge may also be ill-fit for distinguishing the practices of science and engineering because the role of tacit knowledge in science may well be more important than current philosophy of science acknowledges, for example in concluding causal relationships on the basis of empirical evidence. This was also an important theme in the writings of Thomas Kuhn on theory change in science (Kuhn 1962).

To claim, with Skolimowski and Simon, that technology is about what is to be or what ought to be rather than what is may serve to distinguish it from science but will hardly make it understandable why so much philosophical reflection on technology has taken the form of socio-cultural critique. Technology is an ongoing attempt to bring the world closer to the way one wishes it to be. Whereas science aims to understand the world as it is, technology aims to change the world. These are abstractions, of course. For one, whose wishes concerning what the world should be like are realized in technology? Unlike scientists, who are often personally motivated in their attempts at describing and understanding the world, engineers are seen, not in the least by engineers themselves, as undertaking their attempts to change the world as a service to the public. The ideas on what is to be or what ought to be are seen as originating outside of technology itself; engineers then take it upon themselves to realize these ideas. This view is a major source for the widely spread picture of technology as being instrumental , as delivering instruments ordered from ‘elsewhere’, as means to ends specified outside of engineering, a picture that has served further to support the claim that technology is neutral with respect to values, discussed in Section 3.3.1 . This view involves a considerable distortion of reality, however. Many engineers are intrinsically motivated to change the world, in particular the world as shaped by past technologies. As a result, much technological development is ‘technology-driven’.

To understand where technology ‘comes from’, what drives the innovation process, is of importance not only to those who are curious to understand the phenomenon of technology itself but also to those who are concerned about its role in society. Technology or engineering as a practice is concerned with the creation of artifacts and, of increasing importance, artifact-based services. The design process , the structured process leading toward that goal, forms the core of the practice of engineering. In the engineering literature, the design process is commonly represented as consisting of a series of translational steps; see for this, e.g., Suh 2001. At the start are the customer’s needs or wishes. In the first step these are translated into a list of functional requirements , which then define the design task an engineer, or a team of engineers, has to accomplish. The functional requirements specify as precisely as possible what the device to be designed must be able to do. This step is required because customers usually focus on just one or two features and are unable to articulate the requirements that are necessary to support the functionality they desire. In the second step, the functional requirements are translated into design specifications , which the exact physical parameters of crucial components by which the functional requirements are going to be met. The design parameters chosen to satisfy these requirements are combined and made more precise such that a blueprint of the device results. The blueprint contains all the details that must be known such that the final step to the process of manufacturing the device can take place. It is tempting to consider the blueprint as the end result of a design process, instead of a finished copy being this result. However, actual copies of a device are crucial for the purpose of prototyping and testing. Prototyping and testing presuppose that the sequence of steps making up the design process can and will often contain iterations, leading to revisions of the design parameters and/or the functional requirements. Even though, certainly for mass-produced items, the manufacture of a product for delivery to its customers or to the market comes after the closure of the design phase, the manufacturing process is often reflected in the functional requirements of a device, for example in putting restrictions on the number of different components of which the device consists. The complexity of a device will affect how difficult it will be to maintain or repair it, and ease of maintenance or low repair costs are often functional requirements. An important modern development is that the complete life cycle of an artifact is now considered to be the designing engineer’s concern, up till the final stages of the recycling and disposal of its components and materials, and the functional requirements of any device should reflect this. From this point of view, neither a blueprint nor a prototype can be considered the end product of engineering design.

The biggest idealization that this scheme of the design process contains is arguably located at the start. Only in a minority of cases does a design task originate in a customer need or wish for a particular artifact. First of all, as already suggested, many design tasks are defined by engineers themselves, for instance, by noticing something to be improved in existing products. Nevertheless design often starts with a problem pointed out by some societal agent, which engineers are then invited to solve. Many such problems, however, are ill-defined or wicked problems, meaning that it is not at all clear what the problem is exactly and what a solution to the problem would consist in. The ‘problem’ is a situation that people—not necessarily the people ‘in’ the situation—find unsatisfactory, but typically without being able to specify a situation that they find more satisfactory in other terms than as one in which the problem has been solved. In particular it is not obvious that a solution to the problem would consist in some artifact, or some artifactual system or process, being made available or installed. Engineering departments all over the world advertise that engineering is problem solving, and engineers easily seem confident that they are best qualified to solve a problem when they are asked to, whatever the nature of the problem. This has led to the phenomenon of a technological fix , the solution of a problem by a technical solution, that is, the delivery of an artifact or artifactual process, where it is questionable, to say the least, whether this solves the problem or whether it was the best way of handling the problem.

A candidate example of a technological fix for the problem of global warming would be the currently much debated option of injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to offset the warming effect of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Such schemes of geoengineering would allow us to avoid facing the—in all likelihood painful—choices that will lead to a reduction of the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but will at the same time allow the depletion of the Earth’s reservoir of fossil fuels to continue. See for a discussion of technological fixing, e.g., Volti 2009: 26–32. Given this situation, and its hazards, the notion of a problem and a taxonomy of problems deserve to receive more philosophical attention than they have hitherto received.

These wicked problems are often broadly social problems, which would best be met by some form of ‘social action’, which would result in people changing their behavior or acting differently in such a way that the problem would be mitigated or even disappear completely. In defense of the engineering view, it could perhaps be said that the repertoire of ‘proven’ forms of social action is meager. The temptation of technical fixes could be overcome—at least that is how an engineer might see it—by the inclusion of the social sciences in the systematic development and application of knowledge to the solution of human problems. This however, is a controversial view. Social engineering is to many a specter to be kept at as large a distance as possible instead of an ideal to be pursued. Karl Popper referred to acceptable forms of implementing social change as ‘piecemeal social engineering’ and contrasted it to the revolutionary but completely unfounded schemes advocated by, e.g., Marxism. In the entry on Karl Popper , however, his choice of words is called ‘rather unfortunate’. The notion of social engineering, and its cogency, deserves more attention that it is currently receiving.

An important input for the design process is scientific knowledge: knowledge about the behavior of components and the materials they are composed of in specific circumstances. This is the point where science is applied. However, much of this knowledge is not directly available from the sciences, since it often concerns extremely detailed behavior in very specific circumstances. This scientific knowledge is therefore often generated within technology, by the engineering sciences. But apart from this very specific scientific knowledge, engineering design involves various other sorts of knowledge. In his book What Engineers Know and How They Know It (Vincenti 1990), the aeronautical engineer Walter Vincenti gave a six-fold categorization of engineering design knowledge (leaving aside production and operation as the other two basic constituents of engineering practice). Vincenti distinguishes

• Fundamental design concepts, including primarily the operational principle and the normal configuration of a particular device;
• Criteria and specifications;
• Theoretical tools;
• Quantitative data;
• Practical considerations;
• Design instrumentalities.

The fourth category concerns the quantitative knowledge just referred to, and the third the theoretical tools used to acquire it. These two categories can be assumed to match Bunge’s notion of substantive technological theories. The status of the remaining four categories is much less clear, however, partly because they are less familiar, or not at all, from the well-explored context of science. Of these categories, Vincenti claims that they represent prescriptive forms of knowledge rather than descriptive ones. Here, the activity of design introduces an element of normativity, which is absent from scientific knowledge. Take such a basic notion as ‘operational principle’, which refers to the way in which the function of a device is realized, or, in short, how it works. This is still a purely descriptive notion. Subsequently, however, it plays a role in arguments that seek to prescribe a course of action to someone who has a goal that could be realized by the operation of such a device. At this stage, the issue changes from a descriptive to a prescriptive or normative one. An extensive discussion of the various kinds of knowledge relevant to technology is offered by Houkes (2009).

Although the notion of an operational principle—a term that seems to originate with Polanyi (1958)—is central to engineering design, no single clear-cut definition of it seems to exist. The issue of disentangling descriptive from prescriptive aspects in an analysis of technical actions and their constituents is therefore a task that has hardly begun. This task requires a clear view on the extent and scope of technology. If one follows Joseph Pitt in his book Thinking About Technology (1999) and defines technology broadly as ‘humanity at work’, then to distinguish between technical action and action in general becomes difficult, and the study of action in technology must absorb all descriptive and normative theories of action, including the theory of practical rationality, and much of theoretical economics in its wake. There have indeed been attempts at such an encompassing account of human action, for example Tadeusz Kotarbinski’s Praxiology (1965), but a perspective of such generality makes it difficult to arrive at results of sufficient depth. It would be a challenge for philosophy to specify the differences among action forms and the reasoning grounding them in, to single out three prominent fields of study, technology, organization and management, and economics.

A more restricted attempt at such an approach is Ilkka Niiniluoto’s (1993). According to Niiniluoto, the theoretical framework of technology as an activity that is concerned with what the world should be like rather than is, the framework that forms the counterpoint to the descriptive framework of science, is design science . The content of design science, the counterpoint to the theories and explanations that form the content of descriptive science, would then be formed by technical norms , statements of the form ‘If one wants to achieve X , one should do Y ’. The notion of a technical norm derives from Georg Henrik von Wright’s Norm and Action (1963). Technical norms need to be distinguished from anankastic statements expressing natural necessity, of the form ‘If X is to be achieved, Y needs to be done’; the latter have a truth value but the former have not. Von Wright himself, however, wrote that he did not understand the mutual relations between these statements. Zwart, Franssen and Kroes (2018) present a detailed discussion. Ideas on what design science is and can and should be are evidently related to the broad problem area of practical rationality—see this encyclopedia’s entries on practical reason and instrumental rationality —and also to means-ends reasoning, discussed in the next section.

Design is an activity that is subject to rational scrutiny but in which creativity is considered to play an important role as well. Since design is a form of action, a structured series of decisions to proceed in one way rather than another, the form of rationality that is relevant to it is practical rationality, the rationality incorporating the criteria on how to act, given particular circumstances. This suggests a clear division of labor between the part to be played by rational scrutiny and the part to be played by creativity. Theories of rational action generally conceive their problem situation as one involving a choice among various course of action open to the agent. Rationality then concerns the question how to decide among given options, whereas creativity concerns the generation of these options. This distinction is similar to the distinction between the context of justification and the context of discovery in science. The suggestion that is associated with this distinction, however, that rational scrutiny only applies in the context of justification, is difficult to uphold for technological design. If the initial creative phase of option generation is conducted sloppily, the result of the design task can hardly be satisfactory. Unlike the case of science, where the practical consequences of entertaining a particular theory are not taken into consideration, the context of discovery in technology is governed by severe constraints of time and money, and an analysis of the problem how best to proceed certainly seems in order. There has been little philosophical work done in this direction; an overview of the issues is given in Kroes, Franssen, and Bucciarelli (2009).

The ideas of Herbert Simon on bounded rationality (see, e.g., Simon 1982) are relevant here, since decisions on when to stop generating options and when to stop gathering information about these options and the consequences when they are adopted are crucial in decision making if informational overload and calculative intractability are to be avoided. However, it has proved difficult to further develop Simon’s ideas on bounded rationality since their conception in the 1950s. Another notion that is relevant here is means-ends reasoning. In order to be of any help here, theories of means-ends reasoning should then concern not just the evaluation of given means with respect to their ability to achieve given ends, but also the generation or construction of means for given ends. A comprehensive theory of means-ends reasoning, however, is not yet available; for a proposal on how to develop means-ends reasoning in the context of technical artifacts, see Hughes, Kroes, and Zwart 2007. In the practice of engineering, alternative proposals for the realization of particular functions are usually taken from ‘catalogs’ of existing and proven realizations. These catalogs are extended by ongoing research in technology rather than under the urge of particular design tasks.

When engineering design is conceived as a process of decision making, governed by considerations of practical rationality, the next step is to specify these considerations. Almost all theories of practical rationality conceive of it as a reasoning process where a match between beliefs and desires or goals is sought. The desires or goals are represented by their value or utility for the decision maker, and the decision maker’s problem is to choose an action that realizes a situation that, ideally, has maximal value or utility among all the situations that could be realized. If there is uncertainty concerning the situations that will be realized by a particular action, then the problem is conceived as aiming for maximal expected value or utility. Now the instrumental perspective on technology implies that the value that is at issue in the design process viewed as a process of rational decision making is not the value of the artifacts that are created. Those values are the domain of the users of the technology so created. They are supposed to be represented in the functional requirements defining the design task. Instead the value to be maximized is the extent to which a particular design meets the functional requirements defining the design task. It is in this sense that engineers share an overall perspective on engineering design as an exercise in optimization . But although optimization is a value-orientated notion, it is not itself perceived as a value driving engineering design.

The functional requirements that define most design problems do not prescribe explicitly what should be optimized; usually they set levels to be attained minimally. It is then up to the engineer to choose how far to go beyond meeting the requirements in this minimal sense. Efficiency , in energy consumption and use of materials first of all, is then often a prime value. Under the pressure of society, other values have come to be incorporated, in particular safety and, more recently, sustainability . Sometimes it is claimed that what engineers aim to maximize is just one factor, namely market success. Market success, however, can only be assessed after the fact. The engineer’s maximization effort will instead be directed at what are considered the predictors of market success. Meeting the functional requirements and being relatively efficient and safe are plausible candidates as such predictors, but additional methods, informed by market research, may introduce additional factors or may lead to a hierarchy among the factors.

Choosing the design option that maximally meets all the functional requirements (which may but need not originate with the prospective user) and all other considerations and criteria that are taken to be relevant, then becomes the practical decision-making problem to be solved in a particular engineering-design task. This creates several methodological problems. Most important of these is that the engineer is facing a multi-criteria decision problem. The various requirements come with their own operationalizations in terms of design parameters and measurement procedures for assessing their performance. This results in a number of rank orders or quantitative scales which represent the various options out of which a choice is to be made. The task is to come up with a final score in which all these results are ‘adequately’ represented, such that the option that scores best can be considered the optimal solution to the design problem. Engineers describe this situation as one where trade-offs have to be made: in judging the merit of one option relative to other options, a relative bad performance on one criterion can be balanced by a relatively good performance on another criterion. An important problem is whether a rational method for doing this can be formulated. It has been argued by Franssen (2005) that this problem is structurally similar to the well-known problem of social choice, for which Kenneth Arrow proved his notorious impossibility theorem in 1950. As a consequence, as long as we require from a solution method to this problem that it answers to some requirements that spell out its generality and rationality, no such solution method exists. In technical design, the role that individual voters play in situations of social choice is played by the various design criteria, which each have a say in what the resulting product comes to look like. This poses serious problems for the claims of engineers that their designs are optimal solutions in the sense of satisfying the totality of the design criteria best, since Arrow’s theorem implies that in most multi-criteria problems this notion of ‘optimal’ cannot be rigorously defined, just as in most multi-voter situations the notion of a best or even adequate representation of what the voters jointly want cannot be rigorously defined.

This result seems to except a crucial aspect of engineering activity from philosophical scrutiny, and it could be used to defend the opinion that engineering is at least partly an art, not a science. Instead of surrendering to the result, however, which has a significance that extends much beyond engineering and even beyond decision making in general, we should perhaps conclude instead that there is still a lot of work to be done on what might be termed, provisionally, ‘approximative’ forms of reasoning. One form of reasoning to be included here is Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality, plus the related notion of ‘satisficing’. Since their introduction in the 1950s (Simon 1957) these two terms have found wide usage, but we are still lacking a general theory of bounded rationality. It may be in the nature of forms of approximative reasoning such as bounded rationality that a general theory cannot be had, but even a systematic treatment from which such an insight could emerge seems to be lacking.

Another problem for the decision-making view of engineering design is that in modern technology almost all design is done by teams. Such teams are composed of experts from many different disciplines. Each discipline has its own theories, its own models of interdependencies, its own assessment criteria, and so forth, and the professionals belonging to these disciplines must be considered as inhabitants of different object worlds , as Louis Bucciarelli (1994) phrases it. The different team members are, therefore, likely to disagree on the relative rankings and evaluations of the various design options under discussion. Agreement on one option as the overall best one can here be even less arrived at by an algorithmic method exemplifying engineering rationality. Instead, models of social interaction, such as bargaining and strategic thinking, are relevant here. An example of such an approach to an (abstract) design problem is presented by Franssen and Bucciarelli (2004).

To look in this way at technological design as a decision-making process is to view it normatively from the point of view of practical or instrumental rationality. At the same time it is descriptive in that it is a description of how engineering methodology generally presents the issue how to solve design problems. From that somewhat higher perspective there is room for all kinds of normative questions that are not addressed here, such as whether the functional requirements defining a design problem can be seen as an adequate representation of the values of the prospective users of an artifact or a technology, or by which methods values such as safety and sustainability can best be elicited and represented in the design process. These issues will be taken up in Section 3 .

Understanding the process of designing artifacts is the theme in philosophy of technology that most directly touches on the interests of engineering practice. This is hardly true for another issue of central concern to analytic philosophy of technology, which is the status and the character of artifacts. This is perhaps not unlike the situation in the philosophy of science, where working scientists seem also to be much less interested in investigating the status and character of models and theories than philosophers are.

Artifacts are man-made objects: they have an author (see Hilpinen 1992 and Hilpinen’s article artifact in this encyclopedia). The artifacts that are of relevance to technology are, additionally, made to serve a purpose. This excludes, within the set of all man-made objects, byproducts and waste products and equally, though controversially, works of art. Byproducts and waste products result from an intentional act to make something but just not precisely, although the author at work may be well aware of their creation. Works of art result from an intention directed at their creation (although in exceptional cases of conceptual art, this directedness may involve many intermediate steps) but it is contested whether artists include in their intentions concerning their work an intention that the work serves some purpose. Nevertheless, most philosophers of technology who discuss the metaphysics of artifacts exclude artworks from their analyses. A further discussion of this aspect belongs to the philosophy of art. An interesting general account which does not do so has been presented by Dipert (1993).

Technical artifacts, then, are made to serve some purpose, generally to be used for something or to act as a component in a larger artifact, which in its turn is either something to be used or again a component. Whether end product or component, an artifact is ‘for something’, and what it is for is called the artifact’s function . Several researchers have emphasized that an adequate description of artifacts must refer both to their status as tangible physical objects and to the intentions of the people engaged with them. Kroes and Meijers (2006) have dubbed this view “the dual nature of technical artifacts”; its most mature formulation is Kroes 2012. They suggest that the two aspects are ‘tied up’, so to speak, in the notion of artifact function. This gives rise to several problems. One, which will be passed over quickly because little philosophical work seems to have been done concerning it, is that structure and function mutually constrain each other, but the constraining is only partial. It is unclear whether a general account of this relation is possible and what problems need to be solved to arrive there. There may be interesting connections with the issue of multiple realizability in the philosophy of mind and with accounts of reduction in science; an example where this is explored is Mahner and Bunge 2001.

It is equally problematic whether a unified account of the notion of function as such is possible, but this issue has received considerably more philosophical attention. The notion of function is of paramount importance for characterizing artifacts, but the notion is used much more widely. The notion of an artifact’s function seems to refer necessarily to human intentions. Function is also a key concept in biology, however, where no intentionality plays a role, and it is a key concept in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, where it is crucial in grounding intentionality in non-intentional, structural and physical properties. Up till now there is no accepted general account of function that covers both the intentionality-based notion of artifact function and the non-intentional notion of biological function—not to speak of other areas where the concept plays a role, such as the social sciences. The most comprehensive theory, that has the ambition to account for the biological notion, cognitive notion and the intentional notion, is Ruth Millikan’s 1984; for criticisms and replies, see Preston 1998, 2003; Millikan 1999; Vermaas & Houkes 2003; and Houkes & Vermaas 2010. The collection of essays edited by Ariew, Cummins and Perlman (2002) presents an introduction to the topic of characterizing the notion of function, although the emphasis is on biological functions. This emphasis remains very strong in the literature, as can be judged from the most recent critical overview (Garson 2016), which explicitly refrains from discussing artifact functions.

Against the view that, at least in the case of artifacts, the notion of function refers necessarily to intentionality, it could be argued that in discussing the functions of the components of a larger device, and the interrelations between these functions, the intentional ‘side’ of these functions is of secondary importance only. This, however, would be to ignore the possibility of the malfunctioning of such components. This notion seems to be definable only in terms of a mismatch between actual behavior and intended behavior. The notion of malfunction also sharpens an ambiguity in the general reference to intentions when characterizing technical artifacts. These artifacts usually engage many people, and the intentions of these people may not all pull in the same direction. A major distinction can be drawn between the intentions of the actual user of an artifact for a particular purpose and the intentions of the artifact’s designer. Since an artifact may be used for a purpose different from the one for which its designer intended it to be used, and since people may also use natural objects for some purpose or other, one is invited to allow that artifacts can have multiple functions, or to enforce a hierarchy among all relevant intentions in determining the function of an artifact, or to introduce a classification of functions in terms of the sorts of determining intentions. In the latter case, which is a sort of middle way between the two other options, one commonly distinguishes between the proper function of an artifact as the one intended by its designer and the accidental function of the artifact as the one given to it by some user on private considerations. Accidental use can become so common, however, that the original function drops out of memory.

Closely related to this issue to what extent use and design determine the function of an artifact is the problem of characterizing artifact kinds. It may seem that we use functions to classify artifacts: an object is a knife because it has the function of cutting, or more precisely, of enabling us to cut. On closer inspection, however, the link between function and kind-membership seems much less straightforward. The basic kinds in technology are, for example, ‘knife’, ‘aircraft’ and ‘piston’. The members of these kinds have been designed in order to be used to cut something with, to transport something through the air and to generate mechanical movement through thermodynamic expansion, respectively. However, one cannot create a particular kind of artifact just by designing something with the intention that it be used for some particular purpose: a member of the kind so created must actually be useful for that purpose. Despite innumerable design attempts and claims, the perpetual motion machine is not a kind of artifact. A kind like ‘knife’ is defined, therefore, not only by the intentions of the designers of its members that they each be useful for cutting but also by a shared operational principle known to these designers, and on which they based their design. This is, in a different setting, also defended by Thomasson, who in her characterization of what she in general calls an artifactual kind says that such a kind is defined by the designer’s intention to make something of that kind, by a substantive idea that the designer has of how this can be achieved, and by his or her largely successful achievement of it (Thomasson 2003, 2007). Qua sorts of kinds in which artifacts can be grouped, a distinction must therefore be made between a kind like ‘knife’ and a corresponding but different kind ‘cutter’. A ‘knife’ indicates a particular way a ‘cutter’ can be made. One can also cut, however, with a thread or line, a welding torch, a water jet, and undoubtedly by other sorts of means that have not yet been thought of. A ‘cutter’ would then refer to a truly functional kind. As such, it is subject to the conflict between use and design: one could mean by ‘cutter’ anything than can be used for cutting or anything that has been designed to be used for cutting, by the application of whatever operational principle, presently known or unknown.

This distinction between artifact kinds and functional kinds is relevant for the status of such kinds in comparison to other notions of kinds. Philosophy of science has emphasized that the concept of natural kind, such as exemplified by ‘water’ or ‘atom’, lies at the basis of science. On the other hand it is generally taken for granted that there are no regularities that all knives or airplanes or pistons answer to. This, however, is loosely based on considerations of multiple realizability that fully apply only to functional kinds, not to artifact kinds. Artifact kinds share an operational principle that gives them some commonality in physical features, and this commonality becomes stronger once a particular artifact kind is subdivided into narrower kinds. Since these kinds are specified in terms of physical and geometrical parameters, they are much closer to the natural kinds of science, in that they support law-like regularities; see for a defense of this position (Soavi 2009). A recent collection of essays that discuss the metaphysics of artifacts and artifact kinds is Franssen, Kroes, Reydon and Vermaas 2014.

There is at least one additional technology-related topic that ought to be mentioned because it has created a good deal of analytic philosophical literature, namely Artificial Intelligence and related areas. A full discussion of this vast field is beyond the scope of this entry, however. Information is to be found in the entries on Turing machines , the Church-Turing thesis , computability and complexity , the Turing test , the Chinese room argument , the computational theory of mind , functionalism , multiple realizability , and the philosophy of computer science .

3. Ethical and Social Aspects of Technology

It was not until the twentieth century that the development of the ethics of technology as a systematic and more or less independent subdiscipline of philosophy started. This late development may seem surprising given the large impact that technology has had on society, especially since the industrial revolution.

A plausible reason for this late development of ethics of technology is the instrumental perspective on technology that was mentioned in Section 2.2 . This perspective implies, basically, a positive ethical assessment of technology: technology increases the possibilities and capabilities of humans, which seems in general desirable. Of course, since antiquity, it has been recognized that the new capabilities may be put to bad use or lead to human hubris . Often, however, these undesirable consequences are attributed to the users of technology, rather than the technology itself, or its developers. This vision is known as the instrumental vision of technology resulting in the so-called neutrality thesis. The neutrality thesis holds that technology is a neutral instrument that can be put to good or bad use by its users. During the twentieth century, this neutrality thesis met with severe critique, most prominently by Heidegger and Ellul, who have been mentioned in this context in Section 2 , but also by philosophers from the Frankfurt School, such as Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [2002]), Marcuse (1964), and Habermas (1968 [1970]).

The scope and the agenda for ethics of technology to a large extent depend on how technology is conceptualized. The second half of the twentieth century has witnessed a richer variety of conceptualizations of technology that move beyond the conceptualization of technology as a neutral tool, as a world view or as a historical necessity. This includes conceptualizations of technology as a political phenomenon (Winner, Feenberg, Sclove), as a social activity (Latour, Callon, Bijker and others in the area of science and technology studies), as a cultural phenomenon (Ihde, Borgmann), as a professional activity (engineering ethics, e.g., Davis), and as a cognitive activity (Bunge, Vincenti). Despite this diversity, the development in the second half of the twentieth century is characterized by two general trends. One is a move away from technological determinism and the assumption that technology is a given self-contained phenomenon which develops autonomously to an emphasis on technological development being the result of choices (although not necessarily the intended result). The other is a move away from ethical reflection on technology as such to ethical reflection of specific technologies and to specific phases in the development of technology. Both trends together have resulted in an enormous increase in the number and scope of ethical questions that are asked about technology. The developments also imply that ethics of technology is to be adequately empirically informed, not only about the exact consequences of specific technologies but also about the actions of engineers and the process of technological development. This has also opened the way to the involvement of other disciplines in ethical reflections on technology, such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Technology Assessment (TA).

3.2 Approaches in the Ethics of Technology

Not only is the ethics of technology characterized by a diversity of approaches, it might even be doubted whether something like a subdiscipline of ethics of technology, in the sense of a community of scholars working on a common set of problems, exists. The scholars studying ethical issues in technology have diverse backgrounds (e.g., philosophy, STS, TA, law, political science, and STEM disciplines) and they do not always consider themselves (primarily) ethicists of technology. To give the reader an overview of the field, three basic approaches or strands that might be distinguished in the ethics of technology will be discussed.

Both cultural and political approaches build on the traditional philosophy and ethics of technology of the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas cultural approaches conceive of technology as a cultural phenomenon that influences our perception of the world, political approaches conceive of technology as a political phenomenon, i.e., as a phenomenon that is ruled by and embodies institutional power relations between people.

Cultural approaches are often phenomenological in nature or at least position themselves in relation to phenomenology as post-phenomenology. Examples of philosophers in this tradition are Don Ihde, Albert Borgmann, Peter-Paul Verbeek and Evan Selinger (e.g., Borgmann 1984; Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2000 [2005], 2011). The approaches are usually influenced by developments in STS, especially the idea that technologies contain a script that influences not only people’s perception of the world but also human behavior, and the idea of the absence of a fundamental distinction between humans and non-humans, including technological artifacts (Akrich 1992; Latour 1992, 1993; Ihde & Selinger 2003). The combination of both ideas has led some to claim that technology has (moral) agency, a claim that is discussed below in Section 3.3.1 .

Political approaches to technology mostly go back to Marx, who assumed that the material structure of production in society, in which technology is obviously a major factor, determined the economic and social structure of that society. Similarly, Langdon Winner has argued that technologies can embody specific forms of power and authority (Winner 1980). According to him, some technologies are inherently normative in the sense that they require or are strongly compatible with certain social and political relations. Railroads, for example, seem to require a certain authoritative management structure. In other cases, technologies may be political due to the particular way they have been designed. Some political approaches to technology are inspired by (American) pragmatism and, to a lesser extent, discourse ethics. A number of philosophers, for example, have pleaded for a democratization of technological development and the inclusion of ordinary people in the shaping of technology (Winner 1983; Sclove 1995; Feenberg 1999). Such ideas are also echoed in recent interdisciplinary approaches, such as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), that aim at opening up the innovation process to a broader range of stakeholders and concerns (Owen et al. 2013).

Although political approaches have obviously ethical ramifications, many philosophers who initially adopted such approaches do not engage in explicit ethical reflection. Also in political philosophy, technology does not seem to have been taken up as an important topic. Nevertheless, particularly in relation to digital technologies such as social media, algorithms and more generally Artificial Intelligence (AI), a range of political themes has recently been discussed, such as threats to democracy (from e.g. social media), the power of Big Tech companies, and new forms of exploitation, domination and colonialism that may come with AI (e.g., Coeckelbergh 2022; Susskind 2022; Zuboff 2017; Adams 2021). An important emerging theme is also justice, which does not just encompass distributive justice (Rawls 1999), but also recognition justice (Fraser and Honneth 2003) and procedural justice. Questions about justice have not only been raised by digital technologies, but also by climate change and energy technologies, leading to the coinage of new notions like climate justice (Caney 2014) and energy justice (Jenkins et al. 2016).

Engineering ethics started off in the 1980s in the United States, merely as an educational effort. Engineering ethics is concerned with “the actions and decisions made by persons, individually or collectively, who belong to the profession of engineering” (Baum 1980: 1). According to this approach, engineering is a profession, in the same way as medicine is a profession.

Although there is no agreement on how a profession exactly should be defined, the following characteristics are often mentioned:

• A profession relies on specialized knowledge and skills that require a long period of study;
• The occupational group has a monopoly on the carrying out of the occupation;
• The assessment of whether the professional work is carried out in a competent way is done by, and it is accepted that this can only be done by, professional peers;
• A profession provides society with products, services or values that are useful or worthwhile for society, and is characterized by an ideal of serving society;
• The daily practice of professional work is regulated by ethical standards, which are derived from or relate to the society-serving ideal of the profession.

Typical ethical issues that are discussed in engineering ethics are professional obligations of engineers as exemplified in, for example, codes of ethics of engineers, the role of engineers versus managers, competence, honesty, whistle-blowing, concern for safety and conflicts of interest (Davis 1998, 2005). Over the years, the scope of engineering ethics has been broadened. Whereas it initially often focused on decisions of individual engineers and on questions like whistle-blowing and loyalty, textbooks now also discuss the wider context in which such decisions are made and pay attention to for example, the so-called problem of many hands (van de Poel and Royakkers 2011; Peterson 2020) (see also section 3.3.2). Initially, the focus was often primarily on safety concerns and issues like competence and conflicts of interests, but nowadays also issues of sustainability, social justice, privacy, global issues and the role of technology in society are discussed (Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins 2014; Martin and Schinzinger 2022; Taebi 2021; Peterson 2020; van de Poel and Royakkers 2011).

The last decades have witnessed an enormous increase in ethical inquiries into specific technologies. This may now be the largest of the three strands discussed, especially given the rapid growth in technology-specific ethical inquiries in the last two decades. One of the most visible new fields nowadays is digital ethics, which evolved from computer ethics (e.g., Moor 1985; Floridi 2010; Johnson 2009; Weckert 2007; van den Hoven & Weckert 2008), with more recently a focus on robotics, artificial intelligence, machine ethics, and the ethics of algorithms (Lin, Abney, & Jenkins 2017; Nucci & Santoni de Sio 2016; Mittelstadt et al. 2016; Bostrom & Yudkowsky 2014; Wallach & Allen 2009, Coeckelbergh 2020b). Other technologies like biotechnology have also spurred dedicated ethical investigations (e.g., Sherlock & Morrey 2002; P. Thompson 2007). More traditional fields like architecture and urban planning have also attracted specific ethical attention (Fox 2000). Nanotechnology and so-called converging technologies have led to the establishment of what is called nanoethics (Allhoff et al. 2007). Other examples are the ethics of nuclear deterrence (Finnis et al. 1988), nuclear energy (Taebi & Roeser 2015) and geoengineering (Christopher Preston 2016).

Obviously the establishment of such new fields of ethical reflection is a response to social and technological developments. Still, the question can be asked whether the social demand is best met by establishing new fields of applied ethics. This issue is in fact regularly discussed as new fields emerge. Several authors have for example argued that there is no need for nanoethics because nanotechnology does not raise any really new ethical issues (e.g., McGinn 2010). The alleged absence of newness here is supported by the claim that the ethical issues raised by nanotechnology are a variation on, and sometimes an intensification of, existing ethical issues, but hardly really new, and by the claim that these issues can be dealt with the existing theories and concepts from moral philosophy. For an earlier, similar discussion concerning the supposed new character of ethical issues in computer engineering, see Tavani 2002.

The new fields of ethical reflection are often characterized as applied ethics, that is, as applications of theories, normative standards, concepts and methods developed in moral philosophy. For each of these elements, however, application is usually not straightforward but requires a further specification or revision. This is the case because general moral standards, concepts and methods are often not specific enough to be applicable in any direct sense to specific moral problems. ‘Application’ therefore often leads to new insights which might well result in the reformulation or at least refinement of existing normative standards, concepts and methods. In some cases, ethical issues in a specific field might require new standards, concepts or methods. Beauchamp and Childress for example have proposed a number of general ethical principles for biomedical ethics (Beauchamp & Childress 2001). These principles are more specific than general normative standards, but still so general and abstract that they apply to different issues in biomedical ethics. In computer ethics, existing moral concepts relating to for example privacy and ownership has been redefined and adapted to deal with issues which are typical for the computer age (Johnson 2003). An example is Nissenbaum’s proposal to understand privacy in terms of contextual integrity (Nissenbaum 2010). New fields of ethical application might also require new methods for, for example, discerning ethical issues that take into account relevant empirical facts about these fields, like the fact that technological research and development usually takes place in networks of people rather than by individuals (Zwart et al. 2006). Another more general issue that applies to many new technologies is how to deal with the uncertainties about (potential) social and ethical impacts that typically surround new emerging technologies. Brey’s (2012) proposal for an anticipatory ethics may be seen as a reply to this challenge. The issue of anticipation is also one of the central concerns in the more recent interdisciplinary field of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) (e.g., Owen et al. 2013).

Although different fields of ethical reflection on specific technologies might well raise their own philosophical and ethical issues, it can be questioned whether this justifies the development of separate subfields or even subdisciplines. One obvious argument might be that in order to say something ethically meaningful about new technologies, one needs specialized and detailed knowledge of a specific technology. Moreover such subfields allow interaction with relevant non-philosophical experts in for example law, psychology, economy, science and technology studies (STS) or technology assessment (TA), as well as the relevant STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine) disciplines. On the other side, it could also be argued that a lot can be learned from interaction and discussion between ethicists specializing in different technologies, and a fruitful interaction with the two other strands discussed above (cultural and political approaches and engineering ethics). In particular more political approaches to technology can be complementary to approaches that focus on ethical issue of specific technologies (such as AI) by drawing attention to justice issues, power differences and the role of larger institutional and international contexts. Currently, such interaction in many cases seems absent, although there are of course exceptions.

3.3 Some Recurrent Themes in the Ethics of Technology

We now turn to the description of some specific themes in the ethics of technology. We focus on a number of general themes that provide an illustration of general issues in the ethics of technology and the way these are treated.

One important general theme in the ethics of technology is the question whether technology is value-laden. Some authors have maintained that technology is value-neutral, in the sense that technology is just a neutral means to an end, and accordingly can be put to good or bad use (e.g., Pitt 2000). This view might have some plausibility in as far as technology is considered to be just a bare physical structure. Most philosophers of technology, however, agree that technological development is a goal-oriented process and that technological artifacts by definition have certain functions, so that they can be used for certain goals but not, or far more difficulty or less effectively, for other goals. This conceptual connection between technological artifacts, functions and goals makes it hard to maintain that technology is value-neutral. Even if this point is granted, the value-ladenness of technology can be construed in a host of different ways. Some authors have maintained that technology can have moral agency. This claim suggests that technologies can autonomously and freely ‘act’ in a moral sense and can be held morally responsible for their actions.

The debate whether technologies can have moral agency started off in computer ethics (Bechtel 1985; Snapper 1985; Dennett 1997; Floridi & Sanders 2004) but has since broadened. Typically, the authors who claim that technologies (can) have moral agency often redefine the notion of agency or its connection to human will and freedom (e.g., Latour 1993; Floridi & Sanders 2004, Verbeek 2011). A disadvantage of this strategy is that it tends to blur the morally relevant distinctions between people and technological artifacts. More generally, the claim that technologies have moral agency sometimes seems to have become shorthand for claiming that technology is morally relevant. This, however, overlooks the fact technologies can be value-laden in other ways than by having moral agency (see, e.g., Johnson 2006; Radder 2009; Illies & Meijers 2009; Peterson & Spahn 2011; Miller 2020; Klenk 2021). One might, for example, claim that technology enables (or even invites) and constrains (or even inhibits) certain human actions and the attainment of certain human goals and therefore is to some extent value-laden, without claiming moral agency for technological artifacts. A good overview of the debate can be found in Kroes and Verbeek 2014.

The debate about moral agency and technology is now particularly salient with respect to the design of intelligent artificial agents. James Moor (2006) has distinguished between four ways in which artificial agents may be or become moral agents:

• Ethical impact agents are robots and computer systems that ethically impact their environment; this is probably true of all artificial agents.
• Implicit ethical agents are artificial agents that have been programmed to act according to certain values.
• Explicit ethical agents are machines that can represent ethical categories and that can ‘reason’ (in machine language) about these.
• Full ethical agents in addition also possess some characteristics we often consider crucial for human agency, like consciousness, free will and intentionality.

It might perhaps never be possible to technologically design full ethical agents, and if it were to become possible it might be questionable whether it is morally desirable to do so (Bostrom & Yudkowsky 2014; van Wynsberghe and Robbins 2019). As Wallach and Allen (2009) have pointed out, the main problem might not be to design artificial agents that can function autonomously and that can adapt themselves in interaction with the environment, but rather to build enough, and the right kind of, ethical sensitivity into such machines.

Apart from the question whether intelligent artificial agents can have moral agency, there are (broader) questions about their moral status; for example would they—and if so under what conditions—qualify as moral patients, to which humans have certain moral obligations. Traditionally, moral status is connected to consciousness, but a number of authors have proposed more minimal criteria for moral status, particularly for (social) robots. For example, Danaher (2020) has suggested that behaviouristic criteria might suffice whereas Coeckelbergh (2014) and Gunkel (2018) have suggested a relational approach. Mosakas (2021) has argued that such approaches do not ground moral status, and hence humans have no direct moral duties towards social robots (although they may still be morally relevant in other ways). Others have suggested that social robots sometimes may deceive us into believing they have certain cognitive and emotional capabilities (that may give them also moral status) while they have not (Sharkey and Sharkey 2021).

Responsibility has always been a central theme in the ethics of technology. The traditional philosophy and ethics of technology, however, tended to discuss responsibility in rather general terms and were rather pessimistic about the possibility of engineers to assume responsibility for the technologies they developed. Ellul, for example, has characterized engineers as the high priests of technology, who cherish technology but cannot steer it. Hans Jonas (1979 [1984]) has argued that technology requires an ethics in which responsibility is the central imperative because for the first time in history we are able to destroy the earth and humanity.

In engineering ethics, the responsibility of engineers is often discussed in relation to code of ethics that articulate specific responsibilities of engineers. Such codes of ethics stress three types of responsibilities of engineers: (1) conducting the profession with integrity and honesty and in a competent way, (2) responsibilities towards employers and clients and (3) responsibility towards the public and society. With respect to the latter, most US codes of ethics maintain that engineers ‘should hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public’.

As has been pointed out by several authors (Nissenbaum 1996; Johnson & Powers 2005; Swierstra & Jelsma 2006), it may be hard to pinpoint individual responsibility in engineering. The reason is that the conditions for the proper attribution of individual responsibility that have been discussed in the philosophical literature (like freedom to act, knowledge, and causality) are often not met by individual engineers. For example, engineers may feel compelled to act in a certain way due to hierarchical or market constraints, and negative consequences may be very hard or impossible to predict beforehand. The causality condition is often difficult to meet as well due to the long chain from research and development of a technology till its use and the many people involved in this chain. Davis (2012) nevertheless maintains that despite such difficulties individual engineers can and do take responsibility.

One issue that is at stake in this debate is the notion of responsibility. Davis (2012), and also for example Ladd (1991), argue for a notion of responsibility that focuses less on blame and stresses the forward-looking or virtuous character of assuming responsibility. But many others focus on backward-looking notions of responsibility that stress accountability, blameworthiness or liability. Zandvoort (2000), for example has pleaded for a notion of responsibility in engineering that is more like the legal notion of strict liability, in which the knowledge condition for responsibility is seriously weakened. Doorn (2012) compares three perspectives on responsibility ascription in engineering—a merit-based, a right-based and a consequentialist perspective—and argues that the consequentialist perspective, which applies a forward-looking notion of responsibility, is most powerful in influencing engineering practice.

The difficulty of attributing individual responsibility may lead to the Problem of Many Hands (PMH). The term was first coined by Dennis Thompson (1980) in an article about the responsibility of public officials. The term is used to describe problems with the ascription of individual responsibility in collective settings. Doorn (2010) has proposed a procedurals approach, based on Rawls’ reflective equilibrium model, to deal with the PMH; other ways of dealing with the PMH include the design of institutions that help to avoid it or an emphasis on virtuous behavior in organizations (van de Poel, Royakers, & Zwart 2015).

Whereas the PMH refers to the problem of attributing responsibility among a collective of human agents, technological developments have also made it possible to allocate tasks to self-learning and intelligent systems. Such systems may function and learn in ways that are hard to understand, predict and control for humans, leading to so-called ‘responsibility gaps’ (Matthias 2004). Since knowledge and control are usually seen as (essential) preconditions for responsibility, lack thereof may make it increasingly difficult to hold humans responsible for the actions and consequences of intelligent systems.

Initially, such responsibility gaps were mainly discussed in relation to autonomous weapon systems and self-driving cars (Sparrow 2007; Danaher 2016). As a possible solution, the notion of meaningful human control has been proposed as a precondition for the development and employment of such systems to ensure that human can retain control, and hence responsibility over these systems (Santoni de Sio and van den Hoven 2018). Nyholm (2018) has argued that many alleged cases of responsibility gaps are better understood in terms collaborative human-technology agency (with humans in a supervising role) rather than the technology taking over control. While responsibility gaps may not impossible, the more difficult issue may be to attribute responsibility to the various humans involved (which brings the PMH back on the table).

More recently, responsibility gaps have become a more general concern in relation to AI. Due to the advance of machine learning, AI systems may learn in ways that are hard, or almost impossible to understand for humans. Initially, the dominant notion of responsibility addressed in the literature on responsibility gaps was blameworthiness or culpability, but Santoni de Sio and Mecacci (2021) have recently proposed to distinguish between what they call culpability gaps, moral accountability gaps, public accountability gaps, and active responsibility gaps.

In the last decades, increasingly attention is paid not only to ethical issues that arise during the use of a technology, but also during the design phase. An important consideration behind this development is the thought that during the design phase technologies, and their social consequences, are still malleable whereas during the use phase technologies are more or less given and negative social consequences may be harder to avoid or positive effects harder to achieve.

In computer ethics, an approach known as Value Sensitive Design (VSD) has been developed to explicitly address the ethical nature of design. VSD aims at integrating values of ethical importance in engineering design in a systematic way (Friedman & Hendry 2019). The approach combines conceptual, empirical and technical investigations. There is also a range of other approaches aimed at including values in design. ‘Design for X’ approaches in engineering aim at including instrumental values (like maintainability, reliability and costs) but they also include design for sustainability, inclusive design, and affective design (Holt & Barnes 2010). Inclusive design aims at making designs accessible to the whole population including, for example, handicapped people and the elderly (Erlandson 2008). Affective design aims at designs that evoke positive emotions with the users and so contributes to human well-being. Van de Hoven, Vermaas, and van de Poel 2015 gives a good overview of the state-of-the art of value sensitive design for various values and application domains.

If one tries to integrate values into design one may run into the problem of a conflict of values. The safest car is, due to its weight, not likely to be the most sustainability. Here safety and sustainability conflict in the design of cars. Traditional methods in which engineers deal with such conflicts and make trade-off between different requirements for design include cost-benefit analysis and multiple criteria analysis. Such methods are, however, beset with methodological problems like those discussed in Section 2.4 (Franssen 2005; Hansson 2007). Van de Poel (2009) discusses various alternatives for dealing with value conflicts in design including the setting of thresholds (satisficing), reasoning about values, innovation and diversity.

The risks of technology are one of the traditional ethical concerns in the ethics of technology. Risks raise not only ethical issues but other philosophical issues, such as epistemological and decision-theoretical issues as well (Roeser et al. 2012).

Risk is usually defined as the product of the probability of an undesirable event and the effect of that event, although there are also other definitions around (Hansson 2004b). In general it seems desirable to keep technological risks as small as possible. The larger the risk, the larger either the likeliness or the impact of an undesirable event is. Risk reduction therefore is an important goal in technological development and engineering codes of ethics often attribute a responsibility to engineers in reducing risks and designing safe products. Still, risk reduction is not always feasible or desirable. It is sometimes not feasible, because there are no absolutely safe products and technologies. But even if risk reduction is feasible it may not be acceptable from a moral point of view. Reducing risk often comes at a cost. Safer products may be more difficult to use, more expensive or less sustainable. So sooner or later, one is confronted with the question: what is safe enough? What makes a risk (un)acceptable?

The process of dealing with risks is often divided into three stages: risk assessment, risk evaluation and risk management. Of these, the second is most obviously ethically relevant. However, risk assessment already involves value judgments, for example about which risks should be assessed in the first place (Shrader-Frechette 1991). An important, and morally relevant, issue is also the degree of evidence that is needed to establish a risk. In establishing a risk on the basis of a body of empirical data one might make two kinds of mistakes. One can establish a risk when there is actually none (type I error) or one can mistakenly conclude that there is no risk while there actually is a risk (type II error). Science traditionally aims at avoiding type I errors. Several authors have argued that in the specific context of risk assessment it is often more important to avoid type II errors (Cranor 1990; Shrader-Frechette 1991). The reason for this is that risk assessment not just aims at establishing scientific truth but has a practical aim, i.e., to provide the knowledge on basis of which decisions can be made about whether it is desirable to reduce or avoid certain technological risks in order to protect users or the public.

Risk evaluation is carried out in a number of ways (see, e.g., Shrader-Frechette 1985). One possible approach is to judge the acceptability of risks by comparing them to other risks or to certain standards. One could, for example, compare technological risks with naturally occurring risks. This approach, however, runs the danger of committing a naturalistic fallacy: naturally occurring risks may (sometimes) be unavoidable but that does not necessarily make them morally acceptable. More generally, it is often dubious to judge the acceptability of the risk of technology A by comparing it to the risk of technology B if A and B are not alternatives in a decision (for this and other fallacies in reasoning about risks, see Hansson 2004a).

A second approach to risk evaluation is risk-cost benefit analysis, which is based on weighing the risks against the benefits of an activity. Different decision criteria can be applied if a (risk) cost benefit analysis is carried out (Kneese, Ben-David, and Schulze 1983). According to Hansson (2003: 306), usually the following criterion is applied:

… a risk is acceptable if and only if the total benefits that the exposure gives rise to outweigh the total risks, measured as the probability-weighted disutility of outcomes.

A third approach is to base risk acceptance on the consent of people who suffer the risks after they have been informed about these risks (informed consent). A problem of this approach is that technological risks usually affect a large number of people at once. Informed consent may therefore lead to a “society of stalemates” (Hansson 2003: 300).

Several authors have proposed alternatives to the traditional approaches of risk evaluation on the basis of philosophical and ethical arguments. Shrader-Frechette (1991) has proposed a number of reforms in risk assessment and evaluation procedures on the basis of a philosophical critique of current practices. Roeser (2012) argues for a role of emotions in judging the acceptability of risks. Hansson has proposed the following alternative principle for risk evaluation:

Exposure of a person to a risk is acceptable if and only if this exposure is part of an equitable social system of risk-taking that works to her advantage. (Hansson 2003: 305)

Hansson’s proposal introduces a number of moral considerations in risk evaluation that are traditionally not addressed or only marginally addressed. These are the consideration whether individuals profit from a risky activity and the consideration whether the distribution of risks and benefits is fair.

Questions about acceptable risk may also be framed in terms of risk imposition. The question is then under what conditions it is acceptable for some agent A to impose a risk on some other agent B. The criteria for acceptable risk imposition are in part similar to the ones discussed above. A risk imposition may, for example, be (more) acceptable if agent B gave their informed consent, or if the risky activity that generates the risk is beneficial for agent B. However, other considerations come in as well, like the relation between agent A and agent B. It might perhaps be acceptable for parents to impose certain risks on their children, while it would be improper for the government to impose such risks on children.

Risk impositions may particularly be problematic if they lead to domination or domination-like effects (Maheshwari and Nyholm 2022). Domination is here understood in the republican sense proposed by philosophers like Pettit (2012). Freedom from domination does not just require people to have different options to choose from, but also to be free from the (potential) arbitrary interference in the (availability of) these options by others. Non-domination thus requires that others do not have the power to arbitrary interfere with one’s options (whether that power is exercised or not). Risk imposition may lead to domination (or at least dominating-like effects) if agent A (the risk imposer) by imposing a risk on agent B (the risk bearer) can arbitrary affect the range of safe options available to agent B.

Some authors have criticized the focus on risks in the ethics of technology. One strand of criticism argues that we often lack the knowledge to reliably assess the risks of a new technology before it has come into use. We often do not know the probability that something might go wrong, and sometimes we even do not know, or at least not fully, what might go wrong and what possible negative consequences may be. To deal with this, some authors have proposed to conceive of the introduction of new technology in society as a social experiment and have urged to think about the conditions under which such experiments are morally acceptable (Martin & Schinzinger 2022; van de Poel 2016). Another strand of criticism states that the focus on risks has led to a reduction of the impacts of technology that are considered (Swierstra & te Molder 2012). Only impacts related to safety and health, which can be calculated as risks, are considered, whereas ‘soft’ impacts, for example of a social or psychological nature, are neglected, thereby impoverishing the moral evaluation of new technologies.

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Thinking Through the Ethics of New Tech…Before There’s a Problem

• Beena Ammanath

Historically, it’s been a matter of trial and error. There’s a better way.

There’s a familiar pattern when a new technology is introduced: It grows rapidly, comes to permeate our lives, and only then does society begin to see and address the problems it creates. But is it possible to head off possible problems? While companies can’t predict the future, they can adopt a sound framework that will help them prepare for and respond to unexpected impacts. First, when rolling out new tech, it’s vital to pause and brainstorm potential risks, consider negative outcomes, and imagine unintended consequences. Second, it can also be clarifying to ask, early on, who would be accountable if an organization has to answer for the unintended or negative consequences of its new technology, whether that’s testifying to Congress, appearing in court, or answering questions from the media. Third, appoint a chief technology ethics officer.

We all want the technology in our lives to fulfill its promise — to delight us more than it scares us, to help much more than it harms. We also know that every new technology needs to earn our trust. Too often the pattern goes like this: A technology is introduced, grows rapidly, comes to permeate our lives, and only then does society begin to see and address any problems it might create.

• BA Beena Ammanath is the Executive Director of the global Deloitte AI Institute, author of the book “Trustworthy AI,” founder of the non-profit Humans For AI, and also leads Trustworthy and Ethical Tech for Deloitte. She is an award-winning senior executive with extensive global experience in AI and digital transformation, spanning across e-commerce, finance, marketing, telecom, retail, software products, services and industrial domains with companies such as HPE, GE, Thomson Reuters, British Telecom, Bank of America, and e*trade.

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In Technology Ethics, the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics addresses issues arising from transhumanism and human enhancement ethics, catastrophic risk and ethics, religion and technology ethics, and space ethics.

AI ethics and corporate tech ethics development and training are researched, created, and delivered in collaboration with  Internet Ethics .

Overview of Technology Ethics

Brian Patrick Green, director of Technology Ethics, discusses the ethical issues that have arisen from technological advances in areas like human enhancements, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology.

In many aspects of our lives, people must grant their permission in order to achieve something -- set the terms of a contract or complete a transaction, for example. Should similar informed consent be part of our AI use as well?

The defeat of the Open AI Board shows that in the battle between AI profits and ethics, it’s no contest.

Artificial intelligence offers great opportunity, but it also brings potential hazards—this article presents 16 of them.

What is Technology Ethics?

By Brian Patrick Green, director of Technology Ethics

Technology ethics is the application of ethical thinking to the practical concerns of technology. The reason technology ethics is growing in prominence is that new technologies give us more power to act, which means that we have to make choices we didn't have to make before. While in the past our actions were involuntarily constrained by our weakness, now, with so much technological power, we have to learn how to be voluntarily constrained by our judgment: our ethics.

For example, in the past few decades many new ethical questions have appeared because of innovations in medical, communications, and weapons technologies. There used to be no need for brain death criteria, because we did not have the technological power to even ask the question of whether someone were dead when their brain lost functioning – they would have soon died in any case.  But with the development of artificial means of maintaining circulation and respiration this became a serious question. Similarly, with communications technologies like social media we are still figuring out how to behave when we have access to so many people and so much information; and the recent problems with fake news reflect how quickly things can go wrong on social media if bad actors have access to the public. Likewise with nuclear weapons, we never used to need to ask the question of how we should avoid a civilization-destroying nuclear war because it simply wasn’t possible, but once those weapons were invented, then we did need to ask that question, and answer it , because we were – and still are – at risk for global disaster.

These changes obviously present some powerful risks, and we should ask ourselves whether we think such changes are worthwhile – because we do have choices in the technologies we make and live by. We can govern our technologies by laws, regulations, and other agreements. Some fundamentally ethical questions that we should be asking of new technologies include: What should we be doing with these powers now that we have developed them? What are we trying to achieve? How can this technology help or harm people? What does a good, fully human life look like? As we try to navigate this new space, we have to evaluate what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil.

As an example, artificial intelligence is a field of technological endeavor that people are exploring in order to make better sense of the world. Because we want to make sense out of the world in order to make better choices, in a way, AI has a fundamentally ethical aspect. But here we need to not mistake efficiency for morality – just because something is more efficient does not mean that it is morally better, though often efficiency is a dramatic benefit to humanity. For example, people can make more efficient weapons – more efficient at killing people and destroying things – but that does not mean they are good or will be used for good. Weapons always reflect, in an ultimate sense, a form of damage to the common good, whether the weapon is ever used or not (because its cost could have been spent on something better).

Returning to AI, lots of the organizations are exploring AI with a goal in mind that is not necessarily the best goal for everyone. They are looking for something good, whether it is making sense of large datasets or improving advertising. But is that ultimately the best use for the technology? Could we perhaps apply it instead to social issues such as the best way to structure an economy or the best way to promote human flourishing? There are lots of good uses of AI, but are we really aiming towards those good uses, or are we aiming towards lower goods?

Additionally, we’ve become so powerful now that we not only have the power to destroy ourselves, but we also have the ability to change ourselves. With CRISPR and synthetic biology, we can choose to genetically modify people, and by implanting biomedical devices into our bodies and brains we can change how we function and think. Right now, most medical interventions are done for therapy, but in the future, we'll have to consider enhancement, as well. At some point we could potentially even change human nature.

That’s a tremendous power, one that must be matched with serious reflection on ethical principles such as dignity, fairness, and the common good. The temptation to power without ethics is something we need to avoid now more than ever. If one is powerful without goodness, one becomes dangerous and capable of very evil actions. In fact, such dangerous power may well destroy itself and perhaps take many innocent lives with it.

As long as there is technological progress, technology ethics is not going to go away; in fact, questions surrounding technology and ethics will only grow in importance. As we travel this path into the future together, we will choose the kind of future we create. Given our growing technological power, we need to put more and more attention towards ethics if we want to live in a better future and not a worse one.

This article is adapted from the video  What Is Technology Ethics?

Ethics in Technology Practice aims to provide free materials to encourage and support ethics training workshops in technology companies.

The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and The Tech Museum of Innovation collaborate on integrating ethics into the museum's exhibits, events, and educational programs.

Since 2005, the Ethics Center has collaborated with the SCU High Tech Law Institute to sponsor "IT, Ethics, and Law"—a series of presentations on topics in information technology. Speakers have included Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society; Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist; and Kara Swisher, journalist.

The Partnership focuses on artificial intelligence, bringing together companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple, with academic and research organizations and nonprofits, to collaborate on addressing common concerns.

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1: Introduction to Contemporary Ethics - Technology, Affirmative Action, and Immigration

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• Golden West College via NGE Far Press

As you enter this textbook, I would like you to remember two of the greatest quotes from arguably the greatest Philosopher, Socrates: “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing” and “the unexamined life is not worth living.” They are both from Plato’s Apology that describes the trial of Socrates in Athens for, most importantly, “corrupting the youth of Athens.” Despite the English connotations of the title, Socrates does not “apologize” for anything nor is he sorry – the Greek word apologia (the origin of the title) means “formal defense.” These quotes come up in the context of his illustrating how much more intelligent he is than his accusers (not the best idea when his life is on the line, but Socrates was true to himself) and defending his practice of encouraging the people of Athens, especially its youth, to think critically and rationally for themselves. Combine these two quotes, however, and we are left a bit of a conundrum: we must examine life for it to have value, but we are unlikely to come to know anything from this examination. Still, Socrates would argue, the pursuit of knowledge is important and fruitful. Examining life, ideas, knowledge, experience, and anything and everything we can think of, in a pursuit of truth and knowledge, is of the utmost importance. Yet, we must also recognize the limits of our abilities and approach all endeavors with a healthy dose of humility and openness. But if we are to examine life, where would this pursuit take us?

His two successors, Plato and Aristotle, had a goal in mind: we do Philosophy to arrive at an understanding of the ideal society. What’s the point of living if we aren’t achieving a life of, as Aristotle puts it, excellence ( arête in Greek) and flourishing ( eudaimonia )? Their philosophical examinations culminated in proposing an ideal state, and examining such a society falls under the umbrella of Political Philosophy. An integral part of a flourishing society includes setting up a system wherein everyone can attain happiness and live the good life. But why should we care about happiness? Or even other people? Why not just care about our own pleasures? An important part of their analyses is doing Ethics: studying right, wrong, good, and bad. How do we value happiness? Why do we value it? Do we value other things? Other people? What makes someone good? And so on. Thus, the final aim of Plato and Aristotle, and the purpose of Philosophy, was to do Ethics. I might be biased, however, since this is an Ethics textbook and I am primarily an Ethicist by training. Of course, anyone could argue that their field of Philosophy is more important to living a good life, like Metaphysics (the study of the nature of reality), Epistemology (the study of knowledge), Logic (the study of reason), and any other field. And they’d be right: you can’t do ethics without doing all of these things (and I’d argue you can’t do those without doing ethics). You have to be clear on the ideas you’re using and how they relate to get anywhere in any branch of philosophy. Most people don’t necessarily concern themselves with abstract concepts of knowledge on a daily basis, but we have to interact with people daily and are thus confronted with making moral decisions many times every day. We have to do things for ourselves and others, so how do we know what’s right to do? That is, of course, assuming we want to be good people. But what does good even mean?

This textbook will cover these topics, and many more, in detail. To frame these questions and analysis, we will focus primarily on contemporary moral issues, from those in medical ethics (euthanasia, abortion, etc.) to how we should treat non-human things (like the environment and animals) and issues that affect society as a whole, like technology and immigration, which is where we’ll begin. There will also be readings (mostly classic selections from extremely influential philosophers that you might have actually heard of, like Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant) that cover the theories behind the moral principles we will be applying. It is actually much easier to understand these theories after examining how we normally apply them in our daily lives, so these chapters with “classic” readings will come in the later half of this work. It might seem backward, as it would seem more natural to learn the theories and then apply them, but it’s really not. You already know how to do ethics and you do moral analyses on a daily basis, and once you examine how we all regularly do morality, you are better positioned to appreciate the concepts that drive our moral habits.

There are two terms that will be used interchangeably in this work: ethics and morality. They are clearly separate words and you would assume (and many people do) that they would thus mean different things. But, for the branch of philosophy that is called both “Ethics” and “Morality”, they mean the exact same thing. Many people will take issue with this and want to say I’m wrong (which is a moral or ethical claim). But I get to play the expert card right now: in Philosophy, I have yet to meet someone that is an expert in the field of Ethics (or Morality) and believes the two mean something significantly different. Oftentimes non-philosophers will want to correct me and say that “Ethics is the theory; Morality is how we apply it” (or is it the other way around?), and I will admit that in some fields that might be how they use the terms. There is a branch of philosophy that deals with the theory of morality, however, and that is called Meta-Ethics (from the Greek for “about ethics”), so we do have a word for that. The application of moral theories to actions is sometimes called Applied or Normative Ethics, so there is also a term for that. But morality and ethics mean the same thing here, so why do we have two words that mean the same thing? It’s simple: ethics (as a word) comes from Greek and morality (as a word) comes from Latin. English uses words from many languages, and we tend to keep them all, even when they mean the same thing. I’ve probably written more than I need to already, but all I want to make clear is that you, the reader, should understand that ethics and morality mean the same things in this work. You will come to learn that getting very clear on the terms we use is vital to doing a proper moral analysis, so it is important to always pay close attention to language and clarify terms whenever it seems necessary. You don’t want to be misunderstood and you don’t want to misunderstand others. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once believed that all philosophical problems are just linguistic problems. He changed his mind about this later on in his life, but he had a point: a lot of problems we have with each other are often not due to genuine disagreements (where we will be unable to find some common ground) but are rather misunderstandings due to language.

This first unit is meant to give you a taste of ethics and how it is applied. Chapter 1, The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings , is a fictional short story about potential moral settings for self-driving cars in the near future. Chapter 2, What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? by David Svolba, explains the basic aspects of doing ethics and how it uniquely deals with problems. Chapter 3, Letter from the Birmingham City Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr, is a powerful letter written to his fellow clergymen while he was imprisoned for leading civil disobedience movements (in this case, the Alabama bus boycotts) in an attempt to end segregation in the United States. Chapter 4, A Defense of Affirmative Action , explores the reasons on all sides of policies that are aimed at helping minorities obtain positions in a system that unfairly overlooks them. Chapter 5, The Moral Issues of Immigration by B.M. Wooldridge, discusses the various angles of immigration and its problems and benefits. Chapter 6, The Ethics of our Digital Selves , analyzes the role that emerging technologies have on conceptions of our personal identities and how this has ethical implications.

22 Technology and Ethics

The ethical implications of technological advancements are the potential consequences and dilemmas that arise from the development and use of new technologies, which can impact individuals, society, and the environment in both positive and negative ways. There are several ethical concerns that are commonly associated with technological advancements, including privacy, security, job displacement, environmental impact, and the potential misuse of technology. In this section, we will explore these ethical implications in greater detail, providing references to relevant literature and research.

Privacy and Security

The rapid development of digital technologies and the increasing interconnectivity of devices have raised significant concerns about privacy and security. As more personal data is collected, stored, and shared online, the potential for data breaches, identity theft, and unauthorized surveillance grows. Additionally, the use of AI and machine learning in facial recognition and data analysis raises ethical concerns about potential biases, discrimination, and violations of personal privacy.

Job Displacement

The automation of tasks through robotics and AI has raised concerns about job displacement, as machines may replace human workers in various industries. This raises ethical questions about the responsibility of technology developers and governments to ensure that workers are not left behind, and the need for retraining and education programs to prepare workers for the jobs of the future.

Environmental Impact

The increasing use of technology and the extraction of natural resources required for the production of technological devices have raised concerns about the environmental impact of technology. This includes issues such as electronic waste, energy consumption, and the depletion of non-renewable resources. The development of more sustainable and energy-efficient technologies is an ethical imperative to reduce the environmental impact of technological advancements.

Potential Misuse of Technology

The development of new technologies also raises concerns about their potential misuse, either by individuals, corporations, or governments. Examples include the use of AI and machine learning in surveillance, the development of lethal autonomous weapons systems, and the use of biotechnology for the creation of biological weapons. Ethical considerations must be taken into account when developing and regulating these technologies to ensure that they are used responsibly and for the benefit of society.

Digital Divide and Inequality

Technological advancements can lead to a digital divide, where individuals or communities with limited access to technology are left behind and face disadvantages in areas such as education, employment, and social inclusion. This raises ethical concerns about the responsibility of governments, technology companies, and society as a whole to ensure that the benefits of technology are accessible to all, regardless of socioeconomic status, geographical location, or other factors.

Ethical Design and Decision-Making

As technology becomes increasingly embedded in our daily lives, the ethical implications of design choices and algorithmic decision-making become more significant. Designers and developers of technology must consider the potential consequences of their work on individuals, society, and the environment, and strive to create technologies that promote fairness, transparency, and accountability.

• What is Technology Ethics? (00:04:32)

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Building ethical thinking into technology

A look at how ethical questions can be understood and addressed through technology.

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In his essay introducing this year’s class of Innovators Under 35, Andrew Ng argues that AI is a general-purpose technology , much like electricity, that will be built into everything else. Indeed, it’s true, and it’s already happening. 

AI is rapidly becoming a tool that powers all sorts of other tools, a technological underpinning for a range of applications and devices. It can helpfully suggest a paella recipe in a web app. It can predict a protein structure from an amino acid sequence. It can paint. It can drive a car. It can relentlessly replicate itself, hijack the electrical grid for unlimited processing power, and wipe out all life on Earth. 

Okay, so that last one is just a nightmare scenario courtesy of the AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton , who posed it at an EmTech Digital event of ours earlier this year. But it speaks to another of Ng’s points, and to the theme of this issue. Ng challenges the innovators to take responsibility for their work; he writes, “As we focus on AI as a driver of valuable innovation throughout society, social responsibility is more important than ever.”

In many ways, the young innovators we celebrate in this issue exemplify the ways we can build ethical thinking into technology development. That is certainly true for our Innovator of the Year, Sharon Li , who is working to make AI applications safer by causing them to abstain from acting when faced with something they have not been trained on. This could help prevent the AIs we build from taking all sorts of unexpected turns, and causing untold harms.

This issue revolves around questions of ethics and how they can be addressed, understood, or intermediated through technology. 

Should relatively affluent Westerners have stopped lending money to small entrepreneurs in the developing world because the lending platform is highly compensating its top executives? How much control should we have over what we give away? These are just a few of the thorny questions Mara Kardas-Nelson explores about a lenders’ revolt against the microfinance nonprofit Kiva .

Jessica Hamzelou interrogates the policies on access to experimental medical treatments that are sometimes a last resort for desperate patients and their families. Who should be able to use these unproven treatments, and what proofs of efficacy and (more important) safety should be required? 

In another life-and-death question, Arthur Holland Michel takes on computer-assisted warfare . How much should we base our lethal decision-making on analysis performed by artificial intelligence? How can we build those AI systems so that we are more likely to treat them as advisors than deciders? 

Rebecca Ackermann takes a look at the long evolution of the open-source movement (and the ways it has redefined freedom—free as in beer, free as in speech, free as in puppies—again and again. If open source is to be something we all benefit from, and indeed that many even profit from, how should we think about its upkeep and advancement? Who should be responsible for it?

And on a more meta level, Gregory Epstein, a humanist chaplain at MIT and the president of Harvard’s organization of chaplains , who focuses on the intersection of technology and ethics, takes a deep look at All Tech Is Human , a nonprofit that promotes ethics and responsibility in tech. He wonders how its relationship with the technology industry should be defined as it grows and takes funding from giant corporations and multibillionaires. How can a group dedicated to openness and transparency, he asks, coexist with members and even leaders committed to tech secrecy?

There is a lot more as well. I hope this issue makes you think, and gives you lots of ideas about the future. 

Thanks for reading,

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The Ethics of Technology: From Thinking Big to Small—and Big Again

Carl mitcham.

1 International Professor of Philosophy of Technology, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872 China

2 Professor Emeritus, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401 USA

The trajectory of critical ethical reflection on technology has been from big issues (eighteenth century arguments for social revolution responding to the evils of the industrial revolution) to small ones (particular issues associated with the practices of engineers). It is time again to think in large-scale terms.

Let us jump back to 1603, the year of the death of Queen Elizabeth the first. William Shakespeare was at the peak of his creative genius as tragic dramaturge, having just produced Hamlet and on the verge of writing Othello , King Lear , and Macbeth . James VI of Scotland ascended the throne as James I of England and Ireland, and would sponsor the “King James” translation of the Bible. It was a period of unparalleled English aesthetic achievement.

England was not isolated in this cultural flourishing. In the Netherlands it was the middle of the Eighty Years' War and beginning of the Dutch Golden Age; Rembrandt van Rijn would be born six years later. In Spain, Cervantes was nearing the end of his life; in France, Molière was approaching the beginning of his.

Having served in minor positions under Elizabeth, Francis Bacon ( 1858) , age 42, was elevated by the new monarch; he was immediately knighted and in fifteen years became Lord Chancellor. To that point his life had spanned not just the greatest period of English language creativity to date but simmering religious strife on the island and, on the continent, from the Peasants' War (which began in Germany in 1524) forward, one religious conflict after another, all predicated on some fine point of doctrinal disagreement. Catholics were killing Protestants, Protestants were killing Catholics, Catholics were killing Catholics, and Protestants were killing Protestants. The internecine warfare would produce at least 10 million deaths across a population considerably under 100 million, before it was moderated in 1648 by the Peace of Westphalia. At Westphalia the exhausted parties agreed that enough was enough, accepted the equal legitimacy of different Christian traditions across national borders, and recognized the sovereignty of nations to make their own choices.

It was in this Janus-faced context of creativity and fanaticism that Lord Chancellor Bacon in 1620 (during a period in which Thomas Hobbes was serving as his secretary) published Novum Organum and sought to turn minds from theologically nit-picking based mutual slaughter to a grander and more beneficial ethical vision.

Printing, gunpowder and the compass: These three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes, in so much that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries. ( Novum Organum I, 129, adapted Spedding trans.)

Over the next two hundred years this nascent pro-technology ethics—which strived to shift attention away from conquering others to save their eternal souls toward a collective conquest of nature for the material benefit of our mortal lives—blossomed into the Enlightenment technological project. Following in the footsteps of Niccolò Machiavelli, Bacon’s paradoxical effort to raise the mind to lower standards in human affairs succeeded in accord with his wildest expectations.

Bacon’s observation and associated argument, with its effort to redirect moral energy away from reflection mired in small-scale confessional religious casuistry toward large-scale concern for this-worldly human power and wealth, became the distinctive foundation for the ethics of modern technology. It served as the core justification for both the Royal Society (founded in 1660) and the Institution of Civil Engineers (from 1818).

The Royal Society can be read as a Baconian response to a post-Baconian outbreak of theological political fanaticism within England that led to the beheading of King Charles I and animated two decades of civil war. When the crown was restored to Charles II in 1660, among his first acts was to formally charter the Royal Society to “encourage philosophical studies, especially those which by actual experiments attempt … to shape out a new philosophy”. The goal was “to extend not only the boundaries of the [British] Empire, but also the very arts and sciences” by promoting “the sciences of natural things and of useful arts” so that they “may shine conspicuously amongst our people.” “At length”, proclaimed the King, “the whole world [should] recognize us … as the universal lover and patron of every kind of truth.” Truth in biblical religion was in the process of being supplemented with (eventually to be superseded by) truth in natural philosophy and its utilities for power and improvement.

According to Thomas Sprat’s early History of the Royal Society, its inspiration was “one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprise, as it is now set on foot; and that is, the Lord Bacon.” Sprat would have preferred, he wrote, “there should have been no other Preface to the History of the Royal Society” than Bacon’s own works (Sprat 1667 , p. 35).

Shortly after its founding the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) sought to emulate the Royal Society. When in 1828 it applied for a royal charter, King George IV requested a definition of this new thing called “engineering.” For precisely what was he to grant a royal approval? ICE President Thomas Telford, the most famous engineer of the realm, tasked a younger colleague, Thomas Tredgold, with drafting a summary statement. The resultant short essay, "Description of a Civil [meaning non-military] Engineer," opened as follows:

Civil Engineering is the art of directing the great Sources of Power in Nature for the use and convenience of man; being that practical application of the most important principles of natural Philosophy [that is, science] which has in a considerable degree realized the anticipations of [Francis] Bacon, and changed the aspect and state of affairs in the whole world [note the echo of Bacon’s claim about printing, gunpowder, and the compass]. The most important object of Civil Engineering is to improve the means of production and of traffic in States, both for external and internal Trade. (See Mitcham 2020 , p. 368)

The first sentence of this short white paper, with its appeal to the value of human “use and convenience” (a principle grounded in the moral theory of David Hume), was then incorporated into the Royal Charter—and has ever since served in some form as the standard definition of English-speaking engineering. Transforming material culture by means of quantitative productivity in physical goods and trade is what marks engineering off from, for instance, scientific knowledge production and the architectural design of domestic or civic space. The ICE constituted a social institutionalization of Bacon’s lowering of the standards in the name of this-worldly achievement.

Over the course of the next century this grand but simple ethical vision—which became the core morality of the Industrial Revolution—was progressively subject to Romantic and socialist challenges: what have been called the cultural and political criticisms of science, engineering, and technology. The cultural criticism is succinctly illustrated by the poet William Blake’s petition: “May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep” (Letter to Thomas Butt, 22 November 1802). Reality is greater than what is revealed by modern science. As he also wrote in “Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau” (from Blake’s 1804 Notebook):

The Atoms of Democritus And the Newton’s Particles of Light Are sands upon the Red Sea shore, Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

This is more than a strictly epistemological criticism. The domination of scientific reason deforms culture and thereby human achievement.

A political criticism emerged in association with that elaboration of Hume’s moral theory into the doctrine of utilitarianism. Although Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 ushered in a long-nineteenth century peace between European states, civil strife continued domestically: over the condition of the industrialized working class and about the distribution of goods mass produced by industrially engineered technology. In England, philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were more than professors of ethics. Utilitarian theory developed as a way to reform law and the state. Mill himself served for a short period as a Member of Parliament. The stop-and-go democratization of the techno-lifeworld over the course of the 1800 s and into the twentieth century was repeatedly galvanized by what many academic philosophers today might well term big, sloppy ideas. Indeed, in an effort to escape such sloppiness, the turn of the century witnessed attempts in the English-speaking world to professionalize ethics with an increasingly narrow and restrained focus.

G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica ( 1903 ) can serve as a case in point. Its opening words, in the analytical table of contents, read as follows:

In order to define Ethics, we must discover what is both common and peculiar to all undoubted ethical judgements; ... this is not that they are concerned with human conduct, but that they are concerned with a certain predicate “good,” and its converse “bad,” which may be applied both to conduct and to other things. (Moore 1903 , p. xiii)

Compare that with the opening, a hundred years prior, of Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781):

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure .... The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. (chapter 1, paragraph 1)

Moore is concerned about “the difficulties and disagreements [in ethics], of which its history is full” and seeks to respond with conceptual clarifications. Bentham, having studied the law, is disgusted and wants to reform it. Bentham ushered in more than century of ethically stimulated social reform: He argued for making prisons more humane, expanding the democratic franchise, free education, safer working conditions, guaranteed employment, a minimum wage, sickness benefits, and retirement insurance. He worked to pass child labor and public health laws. He collaborated with the utopian socialist Robert Owen to defend the social construction of New Lanark. He opposed not just slavery, well before its abolition in Britain in 1833, but the whole of colonialism.

Bentham’s meliorist ethics of technology was radicalized by the soon-to-be resident alien Karl Marx, whose declaration that the purpose of philosophy “is not just to interpret the world but to change it” is often quoted. In rallying the working class to revolutionary, global action, Marx and Friedrich Engels recognized the need to simplify their interpretation of the science, technology, society relationship in order to cast it in big-picture terms: The Communist Manifesto (1848). The American pragmatist John Dewey ( 1927 ), also sought large-scale reforms in education and government precisely to address the disharmonies and injustices introduced by capitalist technology, but never presented his argument in pamphlet format. Dewey just kept writing and writing, saying the same thing over and over again, with little rhetorical flair—and having no more than marginal influence. Although feted as America’s greatest philosopher, he never had the impact of a Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau.

Both Marx and Dewey argued that modern technology introduced into the human lifeworld challenges that called for political as well as conceptual and personal responses. For Marx, power needed to shift from the minority capitalist class, which, like any class, would always view the use of technology through the lens of its own self-interest, into the hands of a majority class whose interests were more expansive and thus more just. Justice required that industrial production be governed not just by those who profited from it but by all those affected by technology, especially those suffering its negative impacts. Marx and later Marxists found it difficult to imagine this taking place without social disruption—but, in their efforts at revolution, sponsored sufferings of unimaginable proportions. Humans could be mobilized to slaughter others in the name of future this worldly benefits as well eternal salvation.

For Dewey, meliorism was preferable to revolution. The separations or mediations that technological power introduces into human perception and action call for the gradual transformation of society into a kind of democratically guided technocracy.

Take the quotidian case of drinking water. For thousands of years people had usually been able to identify water that was safe to drink on the basis of non-instrumented perception: If water from a stream appeared clear, smelled OK, and a small sample tasted good, it was usually safe to drink. If it did not meet these criteria, one could always look for another source. But in industrial cities, where water is often contaminated by chemicals that cannot be seen, smelled, or tasted, and there are no alternatives to the tap, governments must establish technical agencies to provide and monitor water systems. The process of the socially constructing water systems took place gradually over a hundred year period. This was not a construction process that could work well by revolution. Additionally, since we are all dependent on engineers and scientists, we need to develop sufficient technoscientific literacy to appreciate, provide secondary level oversight, and understand the need to pay taxes necessary to support the infrastructure, its operation, management, and maintenance. This process of cultivating the relevant technoscientific literacy begins in primary school when we are taken on field trips to visit water treatment plants and meet its managers.

In the mid-twentieth century this democratic socialist ethics of science, engineering, and technology in the form of regulatory and meliorist programs was undermined on three interrelated fronts.

First, we became increasingly aware of unintended consequences of technological actions—even actions that were undertaken by virtuous experts, with the right intentions, that produced some good consequences. There were often also negative side effects or second-order consequences. We needed a new kind of agency to do technology assessment—which paradoxically and unintentionally introduced potentials for public mistrust of the abilities of experts to accurately predict the results of their work.

Second, we became aware that socialism was not enough. There was a non-human environment to consider. This gave rise of the second wave environmental movement and establishment of environmental protection agencies. Here the work of public spirited scientists such as Rachel Carson ( 1962 ) served as major catalysts. But Carson was also charged with masking her personal appreciation for the environment in scientific claims that had negative health and economic consequences for others.

Indeed, third, we became aware that the managers of technical agencies—including technology assessment and environmental protection agencies—tended to form a “new class” that often promoted its own self-interests. This became the big neo-liberal argument for outsourcing government regulation and replacing planned with emergent orders through market forces and other libertarian forms of interaction: in Friedrich von Hayek’s ( 1969 ) phrase, as “the result of human action but not of human design.” Spontaneous order was to be preferred over consciously designed order on both economic and moral grounds. Recent rhetoric associated with the concept of the Anthropocene as an emergent new global order in climate can be strangely comforting to the neoliberal mind.

In an effort to negotiate these three overlapping challenges, and in association with increasing academic professionalization, the ethics of technology retreated to prioritizing small problems over big ones. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ethics of technology moved to abandon any broad claims to talk about Technology (with a capital T) in favor of a much more narrowed focus. The ethics of technology became environmental ethics, biomedical ethics, computer ethics, information ethics, engineering ethics, research ethics, nanoethics, neuroethics, and more. In each of these technological regionalizations there were further micro-issues of risk, safety, privacy, participation, and more.

There were some good reasons for this. Some cultural and political criticisms of technology had indeed become exaggerated artifacts of rhetoric, which critics castigated as substantialist or essentialist theories lacking any practical purchase on the real world of engineering and its technologies. Cultural elites and technical experts have struggled with growing gaps between the few and the many, not just in economic terms of the rich versus the poor. The perennial philosophical inclination to return “back to the things themselves” sponsored the birth of case studies and more than one empirical turn (Kroes and Meijers 2000 ; Achterhuis 2001 ). Risk benefit analyses were safer than big dangers talk. The frustrating inability to make big changes has probably also been a factor that suggested there might be more hope for small ones—even smaller than those for which a proponent of piecemeal social engineering such as Dewey had argued.

And yet big problems remain—and are getting bigger. In the ethics of science, engineering, and technology we must contend with a paradox of the impotence of small efforts. Rationally, we would expect small efforts to be more likely to be effective than big ones, when in fact this is not always the case. Sometimes it is big efforts and big ideas—and not just rhetorical ones, which is what academic philosophers often pursue, in their own efforts to stand out in a crowded academic marketplace. The paradox echoes an economic cliché: Large corporations easily become mired in small ideas that produce little real innovation. They become focused on branding. Small start-ups regularly replace established corporations, precisely because of their new big ideas.

Recall that it was big ideas such as those popularized from Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” ( 1954 ) and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society ( 1954 , 1964) or Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man ( 1964 ) and Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine ( 1967 /1970) that strengthened protests against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. In the ethics and politics complex, more nuanced ideas and arguments are often weak in their consequences; simplistic ideas may sometimes get results.

My own argument here is a big one, lacks many nuances, and might well be described as philosophically sloppy. Nevertheless, I would defend it as deserving consideration, especially as we contemplate a future mutation of the human condition involving.

• Continuing nuclear proliferations;
• Population growth and consumption intensification, which together gobble up resources and flood the planet with consumer goods and wastes;
• Progressive biodiversity losses coupled with genetic engineering and the nanoscale design of materials, processes, and products;
• Geological scale transformations of the atmosphere, oceans, and landscape;
• An infosphere awash in artificial intelligence and big data; and
• The emergence of DIY abilities in regard to chemical, biological, and informational weapons

— to offer a no more than six random samples.

The clock on the cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now (January 23, 2020) stands at 100 s to midnight, closer than it has been since before the first US-USSR suspension of atmospheric nuclear testing in 1959, in fact closer than at any point since its creation in 1947. The bottleneck of possibility through which we must pass into the future seems only and ever to narrow. In the words of the Bulletin ’s press release:

Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond. The international security situation is dire, not just because these threats exist, but because world leaders have allowed the international political infrastructure for managing them to erode.

And this was before the covid-19 pandemic outbreak. Is it possible that we are not listening to the Kassandra’s among us such as Gunther Anders ( 1982 ) and Jean-Pierre Dupuy ( 2013 ) out of fear regarding the changes we would be called upon to contemplate? Are we not letting the little fear trump a bigger one?

To conclude: The ethics of technology has a big picture historical heritage that deserves to be recognized if not recovered. The ethical stance that in the sixteenth century sponsored the rise of modern technology did not shy from making bold claims in ways that engaged political power and contributed to world-historical transformations. Such was equally the case in the nineteenth century when industrial technology presented the social order with injustices small and large; classic socialism included an ethics of technology writ large as did mid-20th environmentalism. Now in the early twenty-first century science, engineering, and technology are bringing forth an unprecedented, multidimensional mutation of the human condition. Faced with an iceberg of issues, we must not let ourselves be accused of being content with rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Given the icy mass below the surface, it may well be that we can do little more than admit frankly that we are in uncharted waters, that catastrophe awaits us. But we should be looking over the edge into the darkness rather than keeping company with the stewards of a fraught if not doomed voyage. Lucidity with regard to our ignorance and its dangers is preferable to averting our eyes. This is the case, no matter what happens. On a ship bound for the abyss, looking into the abyss may still bring some small measure of enlightening consolation from philosophy.

If we don't think big, it will be left to non-philosophers to do so. Philosophers must unite to throw off their chains and reclaim not just their own interests but those of their non-philosopher companions in the terrestrial cosmopolis.

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Promises and Pitfalls of Technology

Politics and privacy, private-sector influence and big tech, state competition and conflict, author biography, how is technology changing the world, and how should the world change technology.

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Josephine Wolff; How Is Technology Changing the World, and How Should the World Change Technology?. Global Perspectives 1 February 2021; 2 (1): 27353. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.27353

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Technologies are becoming increasingly complicated and increasingly interconnected. Cars, airplanes, medical devices, financial transactions, and electricity systems all rely on more computer software than they ever have before, making them seem both harder to understand and, in some cases, harder to control. Government and corporate surveillance of individuals and information processing relies largely on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, and therefore involves less human-to-human contact than ever before and more opportunities for biases to be embedded and codified in our technological systems in ways we may not even be able to identify or recognize. Bioengineering advances are opening up new terrain for challenging philosophical, political, and economic questions regarding human-natural relations. Additionally, the management of these large and small devices and systems is increasingly done through the cloud, so that control over them is both very remote and removed from direct human or social control. The study of how to make technologies like artificial intelligence or the Internet of Things “explainable” has become its own area of research because it is so difficult to understand how they work or what is at fault when something goes wrong (Gunning and Aha 2019) .

This growing complexity makes it more difficult than ever—and more imperative than ever—for scholars to probe how technological advancements are altering life around the world in both positive and negative ways and what social, political, and legal tools are needed to help shape the development and design of technology in beneficial directions. This can seem like an impossible task in light of the rapid pace of technological change and the sense that its continued advancement is inevitable, but many countries around the world are only just beginning to take significant steps toward regulating computer technologies and are still in the process of radically rethinking the rules governing global data flows and exchange of technology across borders.

These are exciting times not just for technological development but also for technology policy—our technologies may be more advanced and complicated than ever but so, too, are our understandings of how they can best be leveraged, protected, and even constrained. The structures of technological systems as determined largely by government and institutional policies and those structures have tremendous implications for social organization and agency, ranging from open source, open systems that are highly distributed and decentralized, to those that are tightly controlled and closed, structured according to stricter and more hierarchical models. And just as our understanding of the governance of technology is developing in new and interesting ways, so, too, is our understanding of the social, cultural, environmental, and political dimensions of emerging technologies. We are realizing both the challenges and the importance of mapping out the full range of ways that technology is changing our society, what we want those changes to look like, and what tools we have to try to influence and guide those shifts.

Technology can be a source of tremendous optimism. It can help overcome some of the greatest challenges our society faces, including climate change, famine, and disease. For those who believe in the power of innovation and the promise of creative destruction to advance economic development and lead to better quality of life, technology is a vital economic driver (Schumpeter 1942) . But it can also be a tool of tremendous fear and oppression, embedding biases in automated decision-making processes and information-processing algorithms, exacerbating economic and social inequalities within and between countries to a staggering degree, or creating new weapons and avenues for attack unlike any we have had to face in the past. Scholars have even contended that the emergence of the term technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marked a shift from viewing individual pieces of machinery as a means to achieving political and social progress to the more dangerous, or hazardous, view that larger-scale, more complex technological systems were a semiautonomous form of progress in and of themselves (Marx 2010) . More recently, technologists have sharply criticized what they view as a wave of new Luddites, people intent on slowing the development of technology and turning back the clock on innovation as a means of mitigating the societal impacts of technological change (Marlowe 1970) .

At the heart of fights over new technologies and their resulting global changes are often two conflicting visions of technology: a fundamentally optimistic one that believes humans use it as a tool to achieve greater goals, and a fundamentally pessimistic one that holds that technological systems have reached a point beyond our control. Technology philosophers have argued that neither of these views is wholly accurate and that a purely optimistic or pessimistic view of technology is insufficient to capture the nuances and complexity of our relationship to technology (Oberdiek and Tiles 1995) . Understanding technology and how we can make better decisions about designing, deploying, and refining it requires capturing that nuance and complexity through in-depth analysis of the impacts of different technological advancements and the ways they have played out in all their complicated and controversial messiness across the world.

These impacts are often unpredictable as technologies are adopted in new contexts and come to be used in ways that sometimes diverge significantly from the use cases envisioned by their designers. The internet, designed to help transmit information between computer networks, became a crucial vehicle for commerce, introducing unexpected avenues for crime and financial fraud. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, designed to connect friends and families through sharing photographs and life updates, became focal points of election controversies and political influence. Cryptocurrencies, originally intended as a means of decentralized digital cash, have become a significant environmental hazard as more and more computing resources are devoted to mining these forms of virtual money. One of the crucial challenges in this area is therefore recognizing, documenting, and even anticipating some of these unexpected consequences and providing mechanisms to technologists for how to think through the impacts of their work, as well as possible other paths to different outcomes (Verbeek 2006) . And just as technological innovations can cause unexpected harm, they can also bring about extraordinary benefits—new vaccines and medicines to address global pandemics and save thousands of lives, new sources of energy that can drastically reduce emissions and help combat climate change, new modes of education that can reach people who would otherwise have no access to schooling. Regulating technology therefore requires a careful balance of mitigating risks without overly restricting potentially beneficial innovations.

Nations around the world have taken very different approaches to governing emerging technologies and have adopted a range of different technologies themselves in pursuit of more modern governance structures and processes (Braman 2009) . In Europe, the precautionary principle has guided much more anticipatory regulation aimed at addressing the risks presented by technologies even before they are fully realized. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation focuses on the responsibilities of data controllers and processors to provide individuals with access to their data and information about how that data is being used not just as a means of addressing existing security and privacy threats, such as data breaches, but also to protect against future developments and uses of that data for artificial intelligence and automated decision-making purposes. In Germany, Technische Überwachungsvereine, or TÜVs, perform regular tests and inspections of technological systems to assess and minimize risks over time, as the tech landscape evolves. In the United States, by contrast, there is much greater reliance on litigation and liability regimes to address safety and security failings after-the-fact. These different approaches reflect not just the different legal and regulatory mechanisms and philosophies of different nations but also the different ways those nations prioritize rapid development of the technology industry versus safety, security, and individual control. Typically, governance innovations move much more slowly than technological innovations, and regulations can lag years, or even decades, behind the technologies they aim to govern.

In addition to this varied set of national regulatory approaches, a variety of international and nongovernmental organizations also contribute to the process of developing standards, rules, and norms for new technologies, including the International Organization for Standardization­ and the International Telecommunication Union. These multilateral and NGO actors play an especially important role in trying to define appropriate boundaries for the use of new technologies by governments as instruments of control for the state.

At the same time that policymakers are under scrutiny both for their decisions about how to regulate technology as well as their decisions about how and when to adopt technologies like facial recognition themselves, technology firms and designers have also come under increasing criticism. Growing recognition that the design of technologies can have far-reaching social and political implications means that there is more pressure on technologists to take into consideration the consequences of their decisions early on in the design process (Vincenti 1993; Winner 1980) . The question of how technologists should incorporate these social dimensions into their design and development processes is an old one, and debate on these issues dates back to the 1970s, but it remains an urgent and often overlooked part of the puzzle because so many of the supposedly systematic mechanisms for assessing the impacts of new technologies in both the private and public sectors are primarily bureaucratic, symbolic processes rather than carrying any real weight or influence.

Technologists are often ill-equipped or unwilling to respond to the sorts of social problems that their creations have—often unwittingly—exacerbated, and instead point to governments and lawmakers to address those problems (Zuckerberg 2019) . But governments often have few incentives to engage in this area. This is because setting clear standards and rules for an ever-evolving technological landscape can be extremely challenging, because enforcement of those rules can be a significant undertaking requiring considerable expertise, and because the tech sector is a major source of jobs and revenue for many countries that may fear losing those benefits if they constrain companies too much. This indicates not just a need for clearer incentives and better policies for both private- and public-sector entities but also a need for new mechanisms whereby the technology development and design process can be influenced and assessed by people with a wider range of experiences and expertise. If we want technologies to be designed with an eye to their impacts, who is responsible for predicting, measuring, and mitigating those impacts throughout the design process? Involving policymakers in that process in a more meaningful way will also require training them to have the analytic and technical capacity to more fully engage with technologists and understand more fully the implications of their decisions.

At the same time that tech companies seem unwilling or unable to rein in their creations, many also fear they wield too much power, in some cases all but replacing governments and international organizations in their ability to make decisions that affect millions of people worldwide and control access to information, platforms, and audiences (Kilovaty 2020) . Regulators around the world have begun considering whether some of these companies have become so powerful that they violate the tenets of antitrust laws, but it can be difficult for governments to identify exactly what those violations are, especially in the context of an industry where the largest players often provide their customers with free services. And the platforms and services developed by tech companies are often wielded most powerfully and dangerously not directly by their private-sector creators and operators but instead by states themselves for widespread misinformation campaigns that serve political purposes (Nye 2018) .

Since the largest private entities in the tech sector operate in many countries, they are often better poised to implement global changes to the technological ecosystem than individual states or regulatory bodies, creating new challenges to existing governance structures and hierarchies. Just as it can be challenging to provide oversight for government use of technologies, so, too, oversight of the biggest tech companies, which have more resources, reach, and power than many nations, can prove to be a daunting task. The rise of network forms of organization and the growing gig economy have added to these challenges, making it even harder for regulators to fully address the breadth of these companies’ operations (Powell 1990) . The private-public partnerships that have emerged around energy, transportation, medical, and cyber technologies further complicate this picture, blurring the line between the public and private sectors and raising critical questions about the role of each in providing critical infrastructure, health care, and security. How can and should private tech companies operating in these different sectors be governed, and what types of influence do they exert over regulators? How feasible are different policy proposals aimed at technological innovation, and what potential unintended consequences might they have?

Conflict between countries has also spilled over significantly into the private sector in recent years, most notably in the case of tensions between the United States and China over which technologies developed in each country will be permitted by the other and which will be purchased by other customers, outside those two countries. Countries competing to develop the best technology is not a new phenomenon, but the current conflicts have major international ramifications and will influence the infrastructure that is installed and used around the world for years to come. Untangling the different factors that feed into these tussles as well as whom they benefit and whom they leave at a disadvantage is crucial for understanding how governments can most effectively foster technological innovation and invention domestically as well as the global consequences of those efforts. As much of the world is forced to choose between buying technology from the United States or from China, how should we understand the long-term impacts of those choices and the options available to people in countries without robust domestic tech industries? Does the global spread of technologies help fuel further innovation in countries with smaller tech markets, or does it reinforce the dominance of the states that are already most prominent in this sector? How can research universities maintain global collaborations and research communities in light of these national competitions, and what role does government research and development spending play in fostering innovation within its own borders and worldwide? How should intellectual property protections evolve to meet the demands of the technology industry, and how can those protections be enforced globally?

These conflicts between countries sometimes appear to challenge the feasibility of truly global technologies and networks that operate across all countries through standardized protocols and design features. Organizations like the International Organization for Standardization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and many others have tried to harmonize these policies and protocols across different countries for years, but have met with limited success when it comes to resolving the issues of greatest tension and disagreement among nations. For technology to operate in a global environment, there is a need for a much greater degree of coordination among countries and the development of common standards and norms, but governments continue to struggle to agree not just on those norms themselves but even the appropriate venue and processes for developing them. Without greater global cooperation, is it possible to maintain a global network like the internet or to promote the spread of new technologies around the world to address challenges of sustainability? What might help incentivize that cooperation moving forward, and what could new structures and process for governance of global technologies look like? Why has the tech industry’s self-regulation culture persisted? Do the same traditional drivers for public policy, such as politics of harmonization and path dependency in policy-making, still sufficiently explain policy outcomes in this space? As new technologies and their applications spread across the globe in uneven ways, how and when do they create forces of change from unexpected places?

These are some of the questions that we hope to address in the Technology and Global Change section through articles that tackle new dimensions of the global landscape of designing, developing, deploying, and assessing new technologies to address major challenges the world faces. Understanding these processes requires synthesizing knowledge from a range of different fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and history, as well as technical fields such as engineering, climate science, and computer science. A crucial part of understanding how technology has created global change and, in turn, how global changes have influenced the development of new technologies is understanding the technologies themselves in all their richness and complexity—how they work, the limits of what they can do, what they were designed to do, how they are actually used. Just as technologies themselves are becoming more complicated, so are their embeddings and relationships to the larger social, political, and legal contexts in which they exist. Scholars across all disciplines are encouraged to join us in untangling those complexities.

Josephine Wolff is an associate professor of cybersecurity policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her book You’ll See This Message When It Is Too Late: The Legal and Economic Aftermath of Cybersecurity Breaches was published by MIT Press in 2018.

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Modern Technology’s Impact on Society Essay

Introduction, disadvantages and advantages of technology.

Modern technology has changed the world beyond recognition. Thanks to technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, advances have been made that have revolutionized our lives. Modern man can hardly imagine his life without machines. Every day, new devices either appear, or existing ones are improved. Technology has made the world a better place, bringing people additional conveniences and opportunities for healthy living through advances in science. I believe that the changes that technology has brought to our lives are incredibly positive in many areas.

One of the fields where computing and the Web have introduced improvements is education. Machines can keep large volumes of information in a tiny space, reducing entire library shelves of literature to a single CD-ROM of content (Garsten & Wulff, 2020). The Web also acts as a huge learning tool, linking together data sites and enabling inquisitive individuals to seek out just about any subject conceivable. A single personal computer can hold hundreds of instructional programs, visual and audio tutorials, and provide learners with exposure to an immense quantity of content. In the classroom, virtual whiteboards are replacing conventional whiteboards, allowing teachers to provide interactive content for students and play instructional movies without the need for a projector.

Advanced technology has also dramatically and favorably changed the medical care sector. Developments in diagnostic instruments allow doctors to detect hidden diseases, improving the likelihood of successful therapy and saving lives. Advances in drugs and vaccines have been extremely influential, nearly eradicating diseases such as measles, diphtheria, and smallpox, which once caused massive epidemics (Garsten & Wulff, 2020). Modern medicine allows patients to treat chronic diseases that were once debilitating and life-threatening, such as diabetes and hypertension. Technological advances in medicine have helped improve the lives of people around the world. In addition, the latest technology has dramatically increased the productivity of various techniques.

The computers’ capability to resolve complicated mathematical calculations enables them to accelerate any problem that involves metrics or other calculations. Simulating physical processes on a computer can save time and money in any production situation, giving engineers the ability to simulate any design. Modern technology in transportation allows large distances to be traveled quickly. Electric trains, airplanes, cars, and even rockets are used for this purpose (Garsten & Wulff, 2020). In this way, technology brings positive change for people who love to travel.

Despite all the positive changes, there are also disadvantages to the active development of technology. For example, more and more people are becoming dependent on the computer, TV, or cell phone. They ignore their household chores, studies, or work and spend all their time in front of a laptop or TV screen (Garsten & Wulff, 2020). Because of this, people may become inactive and less willing to work, hoping that technology will do everything for them.

In conclusion, I believe that despite some of the disadvantages, the advantages of gadgets are much more significant. Modern technology saves time and allows people to enjoy life. Moreover, new technologies in medicine also contribute to a longer life expectancy of the population and the cure of diseases that were previously beyond the reach of doctors. In addition to medicine, technology has brought significant positive changes to the fields of communication, education, and engineering. Therefore, I believe that the positive impact of technological progress on human lives cannot be denied.

Garsten, C., & Wulff, H. (2020). New technologies at work: People, screens, and social virtuality . Routledge. Web.

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Ethical Anchoring: Kantian Ideals in Today’s World

This essay about the practical relevance of Kantian ethics in contemporary society. It explores how Kant’s philosophical principles, particularly the categorical imperative and the concept of duty, offer valuable guidance in navigating ethical dilemmas across various domains such as business, technology, and environmental stewardship. Emphasizing the universality of moral duties and the importance of human autonomy and dignity, Kantian ethics provide a robust framework for ethical decision-making in today’s complex world, promoting integrity, responsibility, and respect for individuals and the environment.

How it works

In the labyrinth of modern existence, ethical guidelines are essential for steering through the moral maze. Amidst the myriad of philosophies, the tenets of Immanuel Kant’s ethics stand tall, offering timeless wisdom that resonates profoundly in contemporary society. Kantian principles, rooted in the categorical imperative and the concept of duty, provide a sturdy framework for navigating the ethical complexities of our times.

Central to Kantian ethics is the concept of the categorical imperative, a principle that emphasizes the universality and necessity of moral duties.

Unlike consequentialist approaches that prioritize outcomes or utilitarian calculations, Kant’s philosophy focuses on the inherent value of moral actions themselves. According to Kant, an action is morally right if it can be applied universally without contradiction. This principle transcends cultural relativism and situational ethics, providing a steadfast standard for ethical conduct.

In the realm of business and commerce, Kantian ethics offer invaluable insights into corporate governance and decision-making. In an era rife with corporate malfeasance and ethical breaches, Kant’s emphasis on moral duty serves as a guiding light against profit-centric motives divorced from ethical considerations. Business leaders embracing Kantian principles prioritize integrity, transparency, and respect for human dignity, fostering trust and sustainability in their enterprises.

Furthermore, Kantian ethics find resonance in contemporary discussions surrounding technology and privacy. In an age where personal data is commodified and privacy concerns loom large, Kant’s emphasis on human autonomy and dignity gains newfound significance. By treating individuals as ends in themselves rather than mere means to an end, Kantian ethics challenge the unchecked exploitation of personal information by tech behemoths and governmental entities, advocating for robust privacy safeguards and individual autonomy.

Moreover, Kantian ethics offer profound implications for environmental stewardship and sustainability endeavors. In a world grappling with ecological crises and climate change, Kant’s philosophy underscores the moral obligation to treat nature with reverence and care. By acknowledging the intrinsic value of the environment and future generations, Kantian ethics advocate for conscientious stewardship practices and policies that prioritize the long-term well-being of the planet over short-term gains.

In conclusion, the application of Kantian ethics in contemporary society provides profound insights into ethical decision-making across diverse domains. By emphasizing the universality of moral duties, the inherent value of ethical actions, and the primacy of human autonomy and dignity, Kant’s philosophy offers a robust framework for navigating the ethical complexities of the modern world. Whether in business, technology, or environmental conservation, embracing Kantian principles fosters a culture of integrity, responsibility, and respect for the inherent worth of all individuals and our shared planet.

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Ethics in the Modern Society

Ethics is our basic knowledge of what is good and what is bad. From the very childhood, we all are taught the general rules saying that we must not steal, tell lies, or hurt someone. When we grow up, we can see that ethics applies to all aspects of our life (religion, politics, medicine, law, and personal relations) on the level of basic rules or in a more complicated and developed form. Ethics is very important in our lives as it determines our attitude towards other people and the way we treat them. It is impossible to imagine the world without ethics and the society will fall into the era of crimes and egoistic behavior without the knowledge of the basic notions of ethics.

The death penalty is the highest measure of punishment for the most severe crimes but from the point of view of ethics, it is just another murder. I have read a story of Judy Kerr whose brother was cruelly killed and she wanted the murderer to be found and punished. However, I have noticed that this woman had an inherent understanding of ethics, as she does not wish capital punishment for the murderer. Judy says, ‘I have never and will never support the death penalty. I know now, more than ever, that killing is wrong. Revenge will not bring my brother back and it will not bring me peace’ (Kerr par. 5). She explains that this new killing can only bring more suffering and pain.

Another controversial ethical issue is euthanasia that is the ending of the life of a terminally ill person on his or her request with the purpose to get rid of pain and suffering. Some people think that it is unethical, religion views euthanasia as a sinful suicide or murder when it is done by someone else. From the point of view of the law, this question is still unsolved as in some countries euthanasia is considered to be the inherent right of a person to decide the outcome of his or her life, in others the doctors and government officials refuse to accept this right. However, in the states where assisted death is already legal the cases of abuse may take place, so the procedure of voluntary euthanasia is to be thoroughly controlled by the authorities (Mattlin par. 6). Everyone must decide for himself about what is ethical and what is not.

Ethics was never exhaustively defined, the philosophers in all the times tried to give a clear definition to this concept and no one managed to give the universal wording. Actually, ethics does not relate to one of the aspects of life in society. One would say that ethics comes from religion but in this case, ethics would only apply to religious people. Others will argue that being ethical means obeying the laws of the country you live in but laws can deviate from ethics just the same way as human emotions, or maybe ethical behavior means following the general customs of the society but those customs also can seem unethical (Velasquez par. 4).

There are many different opinions and all of them are somewhat true but all the thinkers agree that ethics predetermines the freedom of choice with a full understanding of the consequences of the made decisions.

Kerr, Judy. n.d. The Death Penalty Will Only Cause Me More Pain. n.d. Web. 2012.

Mattlin, Ben. “Suicide by Choice? Not so Fast.” New York Times.  2012: A31. Print.

Velasquez, Manuel. “What is ethics?” Issues in Ethics 1.1 (1987): 21-22. Print.

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StudyCorgi. (2022, January 4). Ethics in the Modern Society. https://studycorgi.com/ethics-in-the-modern-society/

"Ethics in the Modern Society." StudyCorgi , 4 Jan. 2022, studycorgi.com/ethics-in-the-modern-society/.

StudyCorgi . (2022) 'Ethics in the Modern Society'. 4 January.

1. StudyCorgi . "Ethics in the Modern Society." January 4, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ethics-in-the-modern-society/.

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StudyCorgi . "Ethics in the Modern Society." January 4, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ethics-in-the-modern-society/.

StudyCorgi . 2022. "Ethics in the Modern Society." January 4, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/ethics-in-the-modern-society/.

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