Katinka Waelbers

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

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

The Family of the Future: How Technologies Can Lead to Moral Change

We increasingly rely on technological artefacts for supporting or replacing personal interactions. But such delegation is not always unproblematic: ever so often unexpected alterations in our relationships occur. More particularly: new technologies tend to destabilize established norms and values. What does this techno-moral change imply for the normative project that is responsible innovation? Is it possible to anticipate these alterations, at least to some extent? In this article we develop a heuristic matrix that identifies patterns and mechanisms of techno-moral change. We then present as a case study the ambient intelligence systems that are currently developed to coordinate the domestic lives of family members to explain how understanding these patterns and mechanisms can help to discuss future techno-moral change.

Will We Accept Responsibility

This study began by explaining how philosophers such as Sunstein and Thaler argue that if technologies are mediating our actions (whether we design them to do so or not), we should take responsibility to make sure that this mediation is for the better. However, this suggestion suffers from two conflicting findings. As Latour made clear, the human-technology interaction is a complex black box of which the outcomes are often hard to predict. We cannot simply design the mediating role. Furthermore, the technological change of our actions prevents us from being autonomous, rational agents, who are free to determine our own course of actions. These conflicting notions led to the main question of this study: Can practitioners—such as scientists, engineers, commissions, R&D institutes, etc.—take responsibility for the social roles of technologies if these technologies mediate our actions (and therefore limit our autonomy) in ways that are hard to predict?

Becoming Responsible for Techno-Social Practices

This chapter picks up the first challenge. It aims to develop an integrated anthropological and ethical position that recognizes people as living and acting in techno-social networks. Simultaneously, the ethical position aims to empower people to take responsibility for their own roles in these techno-social networks. In this way, it becomes feasible to take a forward-looking responsibility for the social role of technologies, because the essential aspects of ethical theory are brought back into ANT. To put it the other way around, a forward-looking responsibility for the social impact of technologies will be made feasible by incorporating the lessons of ANT in ethics.

Actor-Networks and Taking Responsibility

The first question of this study stressed that for dealing with the problem of whether we can take responsibility, it needs to become clear what it actually means to say that technologies play a social role. As clarified in Chap. 2, Actor Network Theory (ANT) teaches three important lessons: first, in exerting social power, the actions of humans and technologies are comparable. Second, the origin of action is dislocal, meaning that not just one human or technology determines the outcome, but that agency is the result of interactions between multiple humans and technologies. Third, the techno-social networks are constantly evolving as the human-technology associations are continuously formed, changed and broken off.

Responsibility for the Social Role of Technologies

Technologies influence the way people act: when listening to an mp3 player or a mobile phone, people are less inclined to talk to for instance shop keepers at stations, and behave more “autistic” when using public transport. Internet and mobile phones have deeply influenced the way people communicate with each other and how they define, begin and maintain friendships. Some of these influences are desirable: people of European countries are more involved with wars, starvations and natural disasters that take place in other, less rich parts of the world, just by watching television. Consequently, they are more inclined to provide (financial) aid. But watching too much television is also to blame for the lack of sufficient exercise, and as a consequence many people in the west become obese by eating snacks while watching television.

Tools for a Forward-Looking Responsibility

In this chapter, we arrive at the final question of this study: what would enable and support practitioners exercising a forward-looking responsibility for future social roles of technologies? Chapters 4 and 5 discussed the first two challenges formulated in Sect. 3.5. The first challenge was to show how people can accept a forward-looking responsibility for our actions while also rejecting the autonomous and atomist subject of the deontological and utilitarian theories. To take on this challenge, Chap. 4 explained how ANT can be morally enriched by recognizing that moral practices are part of the human-technology networks. Furthermore, it explores how people can make their actions their own in the networks and practices, even though these actions are biologically, socially and technologically embedded. The second challenge was to understand mediation theory in a manner that made it feasible to appreciate the different forms of causation. To meet this challenge, Chap. 5, reformulated mediation theory with Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on practices, reasons and reasoning to show that technologies alter our actions by mediating the reasons for action—the perceptions, options for actions and moral beliefs.

Case Study: Taking Responsibility for Future Driving

How can we take responsibility in practice? The previous chapter introduced a toolbox that supports imagining the future social role of technologies: five questions were offered to structure imaginative reflection, some examples of reflective, intersubjective and empirical (behavioral) research methods were explained to support the desired imagination, and some starting points for the collective evaluation of the possible social role of technologies were presented. However, these tools aim to be widely applicable, and, consequently, they need to be clarified and specified for real-life cases. Clarifying and specifying has to be done intersubjectively to obtain a comprehensive and well prioritized evaluation (meaning organizing strategic conferences, consensus conferences, dialogue workshops, and interviews). This chapter explains briefly how the toolbox can generate questions for an intersubjective study on the intelligent car of the future. In other words, the aim of this chapter is to show how applying the toolbox can generate new insights and questions on expected and unexpected social impacts.

Human Practices in Technological Contexts

After having dealt with the first challenge in the previous chapter, this chapter focuses on the second challenge: conceptualizing different forms of technological mediation to understand how technologies alter human action on a more detailed level. Meeting this challenge calls for reformulating Bruno Latour’s mediation theory so as to incorporate insights from Alasdair MacIntyre as outlined in the previous chapter. Most important in this respect is MacIntyre’s notion of practices, his idea of being biologically vulnerable and socially interdependent, and his distinction between practical reasoning and having reasons.