Paul T. Durbin

Technology and responsibility

Responsibility and Technology: The Expanding Relationship.- Philosophical Anthropology and the Problem of Responsibility in Technology.- Technoscience: Nihilistic Power versus a New Ethical Consciousness.- Phenomenology and the Autonomy of Technology.- The Autonomy of Technology.- Technique and Responsibility: Think Globally, Act Locally, according to Jacques Ellul.- Increasing Responsibility as Technological Destiny? Human Reproductive Technology and the Problem of Meta-Responsibility.- Commercializing Reproductive Technologies: Ethical Issues.- Incontinence and Biomedicine: Examples from Puyallup Indian Medical Ethnohistory.- Homo Generator: The Challenge of Gene Technology.- The Modern Babylon Culture.- Religion, Technology, and Human Autonomy.- Societal Role of Dutch Freshwater Ecologists in Environmental Policies.- Risk Assessment as Social Research.- Toward a Philosophy of Engineering and Science in R &.D Settings.- Engineers as Social Activists: A Defense.- The Real Risks of RiskCost-Benefit Analysis.- Responsibility and Technology: A Select, Annotated Bibliography.- Index of Names.

Broad and narrow interpretations of philosophy of technology

I The Nature of Philosophy of Technology.- In Search of a New Prometheus.- Defining Horizons: A Reply to Joseph C. Pitt.- Process Themes in Frederick Ferres Philosophy of Technology.- Clarifying and Applying Intelligence: A Reply to Peter Limper.- II Deficiencies in Engineering Ethics.- Imagination for Engineering Ethicists.- Engineering Ethics and Political Imagination.- III Systems Theories.- Computer and World Picture: A Critical Appraisal of Herbert A. Simon.- Changes in Cognitive and Value Orientations in System Design.- IV Historical, Cultural, and Political Critiques.- Democratic Socialism and Technological Change.- Philosophy, Engineering, and Western Culture.- Alternatives for Evaluating the Effects of Genetic Engineering on Human Development.- The Alarmist View of Technology.- An Interpretation of Jacques Elluls Dialectical Method.

Engineering professional ethics in a broader dimension

Abstract In this paper, I try to foment change in terms of engineering and its professional societies as a guild. What I suggest is the need to modify a guild mentality. Many professional groups continue to defend their right to sanction misbehaving members as though we were back in the sixteenth century. The first effect of the change I propose would be to minimise the sanctioning of individual wrongdoers; what would become more important instead would be to maximise service to the larger society as an ethical norm. All engineering codes of ethics seem to include service to humanity as a paramount responsibility. What I advocate is that this needs not only to be given more prominence but to be implemented concretely in specific ways. When engineering professionals get involved in this way, they will of course bring to bear on the problems their expertise. But expertise does not automatically confer a privileged position relative to citizen activists on a particular issue. Finally, I argue that this modification would depend on significant behavioural changes: engineers and their professional societies would need to broaden their outlook, moving beyond a focus on individual misconduct to broader social responsibilities. And this seems to me to amount to a better definition of engineering ethics.

Engineering Ethics and Social Responsibility: Reflections on Recent Development in the Usa

My view is based on some experience with these efforts; but in any case, common sense should tell us that there are several possible roles for philosophers to play when it comes to examining ethics and engineering. One can, for instance, play the role of external gadfly. where &dquo;external&dquo; refers to a position entirely outside the engineering community. This community, as I am defining it here, ought to include not only engineers (in the strict sense) but engineering managers and technicians as well as many other related technical workers from chemists and applied physicists to econometricians engaged in technological planning or forecasting.

Multiple Facets of Philosophy and Engineering

Is there a philosophy of engineering (singular)? My answer is no, though I don’t intend that to discourage anyone who would want to produce one. I use the metaphor of a diamond with many facets to bolster my negative answer, but also to suggest the complexity if anyone were to do so. And this is not just my opinion. I base my view on a variety of discussions of engineering in the literature of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. And, following the guidelines of engineer Billy Vaughn Koen, I mark the time period as 1975–2005, from the beginning of the society until the SPT conference in Delft in 2005. The diamond metaphor seems useful to me, to suggest looking at the phenomenon of engineering both from the inside – the inner crystalline structure, so to speak – and from the outside of external criticism. Among inner facets, I look at engineering as a guild, with its own self-selected guidelines, professional associations, educational system, and place within the larger society in which it thrives. I hope that what I say reflects changes in the world of engineering, outside philosophical circles, in the same time period, not only in my home country of the USA but in the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, Spain (and indirectly in other countries, including Poland, Russia, China and Japan, among others), with which SPT has had contacts. But my primary focus is on what philosophers (and a few engineers) have said in publications associated with SPT.

Philosophy, activism, and computer and information specialists revisited

A number of themes have been on my mind in recent months, and I have made them centerpieces of a number of things I have written lately. In a Ubiquity essay Durbin (ACM Ubiquity 8(45):26, 2007a), I said that I am happy that there are computer professionals who are activists, joining with others to solve the technosocial problems that vex our society, including problems of the computer and information professions. I here moved beyond that to make a new claim about needed changes.

Research in Sts Studies

The challenge is there: the social problems of technology--problems related to the environment, the energy crisis, traffic problems, social engineering--so discipline-spanning in their interactions with other realms of life ... are, at bottom, problems of social and political values .... They cannot be solved, in any realistic and adequate way, without the collaboration of philosopher-generalists, broad humanists, and social science generalists working with engineers and technological experts .... The more multidisciplinary technological problems become, the more important such programs [in science, technology, and society] will turn out to be. Hans Lenk, Research in Philosophy & Technology 7 (1984): 50, 52.

Albert Borgmann: Real American ethics: taking responsibility for our country

This book, Real American Ethics, by Borgmann (2006), is another of his masterpieces, in my opinion. The emphasis is on a ‘‘real’’ ethic, unlike other attempts to produce ethical approaches or systems that he finds not to be down-toearth enough. In this review I try to show why I am less welcoming of his approach than I once was. He does acknowledge recent deficiencies in the American character, where he focuses on ‘‘partisan passion.’’ And, were he to rewrite the book in a second edition today, he would surely see this reflected in the acute polarization of American politics today. The fact that he calls it ‘‘American’’ needs a little explanation. His defense of why he chose the ‘‘American’’ part is this. He says there is something uniquely American, a ‘‘fusing’’ of friendship, grace, justice, stewardship, wisdom, courage... and ‘‘design’’ in (North) Americans, so that is what he tries to emulate. But I should note that he now thinks all of those virtues have unfortunately been ‘‘shrunk’’ by technology. And here he is thinking of his earlier approach (Borgmann 1984), where I am reminded of his distinction between ‘‘devices’’ and ‘‘focal things and practices.’’ (I should note that this review is a condensation of one I wrote a few years ago as part of an essay on globalization. It is available on my departmental Web site at the University of Delaware.) Borgmann’s book soon turns to ethical theory and what it might do to help us focus on these issues. Clearly, Borgmann’s favorite theory is Rawlsian justice, but that is, for him, too general and falls short of the needs of a ‘‘real’’ ethics. He next contrasts such theories with the practice of virtue ethics, though he laments that its defenders too often get lost in theoretical discussion rather than offering models of actual practice. Under this heading he makes a standard distinction (based on Aristotle) between personal and political virtue. Under personal virtues, he emphasizes wisdom (for him, especially Platonic), courage (he says the heroic kind championed by Aristotle is rarely called for today), friendship, and ‘‘economy.’’ There Borgmann asks himself an important question:

Brain research and the social self in a technological culture

Abstract The paper does not claim to be a novel contribution to any field. It simply opposes claims by philosophers of consciousness—I take Daniel Dennett as an example (though no more than that) that non-conscious robot-like neurons (Dennett’s phrase) can, taken together, add up to an explanation of (even the illusion of) consciousness. To this I oppose G. H. Mead’s so-called social behaviorism. My argument, such as it is, proceeds in well-defined stages: 1. I first introduce the history of anti-reductionism among philosophers, including those of the analytical persuasion, especially among North American philosophers; 2. the “new archaeology” of hominid prehistory is then introduced to show how some eminent archeologists oppose the reductionist view that large brains—deduced from finds of larger and larger skulls—constitute the best explanation we have for the advent of Homo sapiens; 3. the heart of my paper is then a reference to—not a proper summary of—Terence Deacon’s masterful book, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain—where the idea of co-evolution of human communication and brain development (along with other physiological traits such as a proper voice box) is put forward as a better—as co-evolutionary—explanation of human symbolic behavior than the standard ones (including Dennett’s); 4. I then make equally brief summaries of confirming evidence of such co-evolution; 5. this is followed by similar summaries of the alleged science of historical linguistics—none of it explaining the beginning, but only the development of human languages in non-reductionist terms; 6. I then introduce Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality to make a central claim: that even reductionist science—whether genetic reductionism or brain-studies-based reductionism—is and must be socially constructed; and 7. I conclude with a preference for a Meadian (similar to a Deweyan) social responsibility activism. One note relative to item number 1: I make no claim here to discuss Merleau-Ponty or any other well-known anti-reductionist; this is in answer to one referee of the paper.

A contrarian view of postmodern society and information technologies

In this short paper—little more than a note, even a short “contrarian” sermon for this anniversary volume—what I do is argue that even the allegedly most “revolutionary” inventions of our computer-driven age are not revolutionary in the sense that their impacts are “driving” society. Some of them are genuinely revolutionary, I admit, but in the reverse direction. The inventions don’t “impact societies”; rather, particular communities within society use the technical languages that are at their core, invent them, embed them in machines, and so on. It is not inventions but particular groups within modern—and so-called postmodern—societies that have invented and use technical languages which are embedded in gadgets that are said to “drive” modern or postmodern societies. And they do so only in one sense: they were invented and are used by various communities in our kinds of societies for a variety of ends. And if this is so, and if we feel those ends are undemocratic or positively anti-democratic, I conclude that we should resist them any way we can, even politically.