Peter P.C.C. Verbeek

Morality in Design: Design Ethics and the Morality of Technological Artifacts

A core issue in the philosophy of technology has been the non-neutrality of technology. Most scholars in the field agree that technologies actively help to shape culture and society, rather than being neutral means for realizing human ends. How to take seriously this non-neutrality of technology in ethics? Engineering ethics mainly focuses on the moral decisions and responsibilities of designers, and remains too external to the moral significance of technologies themselves. Yet, analyses of the non-neutrality of technology make it plausible to ascribe some morality to artifacts. First of all, technologies substantially contribute to the coming about of actions and of decisions about how to act. Second, their role cannot be entirely reduced to the intentions behind their design and use. This paper investigates what these observations imply for ethical theory, and for the ethics of design.

Ambient Intelligence and Persuasive Technology: The Blurring Boundaries Between Human and Technology

The currently developing fields of Ambient Intelligence and Persuasive Technology bring about a convergence of information technology and cognitive science. Smart environments that are able to respond intelligently to what we do and that even aim to influence our behaviour challenge the basic frameworks we commonly use for understanding the relations and role divisions between human beings and technological artifacts. After discussing the promises and threats of these technologies, this article develops alternative conceptions of agency, freedom, and responsibility that make it possible to better understand and assess the social roles of Ambient Intelligence and Persuasive Technology. The central claim of the article is that these new technologies urge us to blur the boundaries between humans and technologies also at the level of our conceptual and moral frameworks.

Beyond checklists: toward an ethical-constructive technology assessment

While many technology assessments (TAs) formally conducted by TA organizations in Europe and the USA have examined the implications of new technologies for ‘quantifiable risks’ regarding safety, health or the environment, they have largely ignored the ethical implications of those technologies. Recently, ethicists and philosophers have tried to fill this gap by introducing tools for ethical technology assessment (eTA). The predominant approaches in eTA typically rely on a checklist approach, narrowing down the moral assessment of new technologies to evaluating a list of pre-defined ethical issues. In doing so, they often remain external to processes of technology development. In order to connect the ethics of technology more closely with processes of technology development, this paper introduces a set of principles for an ethical-constructive technology assessment approach (eCTA), reflecting on insights developed in the philosophy of technology and Science and Technology Studies, and drawing on examples of telecare technologies. This approach bases itself on an analysis of the implications of technology processes at the micro-level, particularly for human–technology relations. The eCTA approach augments the current approach of the ethics of new and emerging science and technology at the meso- and macro-levels of institutional practices

Some misunderstandings about the moral significance of technology

The discussion about moral agency and technology is troubled by some severe misunderstandings. Too often, the claim that technologies are involved in moral agency is misread for the claim that technologies are moral agents themselves. Much of the discussion then focuses on the question whether not only humans but also technologies can have intentionality, freedom, responsibility, and, ultimately, moral agency. From the perspective of mediation theory, this discussion remains caught in a dualist paradigm that locates human beings and technological artifacts in two separate realms, humans being intentional and free, technologies being instrumental and mute. Against the question to what extent technologies can be moral agents, mediation theory makes it possible to investigate how intentionality, freedom, and agency are in fact the result of intricate connections and interactions between human beings and technological artifacts. Rather than checking if technologies can meet a pre-given criterion of moral agency, we need to re-conceptualize the phenomenon of moral agency itself in order to understand the roles of technologies in our daily lives.

Introduction: The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts

In recent decades, discussions about the question of how to morally assess technology and its influence on human beings have taken a new, intriguing twist. Issues about the moral status of technology -in the sense of whether technology itself or its influence on human life may be evaluated as morally good or bad- have a long history. But recently, various proposals have been put forward to ascribe some form of moral agency to technology, more in particular to technical artefacts.

The Struggle for Technology: Towards a Realistic Political Theory of Technology

Pieter Lemmens’ neo-Marxist approach to technology urges us to rethink how to do political philosophy of technology. First, Lemmens’ high level of abstraction raises the question of how empirically informed a political theory of technology needs to be. Second, his dialectical focus on a “struggle” between humans and technologies reveals the limits of neo-Marxism. Political philosophy of technology needs to return “to the things themselves”. The political significance of technologies cannot be reduced to its origins in systems of production or social organization, but requires study at the micro-level, where technologies help to shape engagement, interaction, power, and social awareness.

An Annotated Portfolio on Doing Postphenomenology Through Research Products

In this paper, we argue for framing the crafting and studying of research products as doing philosophy through things. We do this by creating an annotated portfolio of such Research through Design (RtD) artifact inquiries as postphenomenological inquiries. In our annotated portfolio, we first provide an account of the postphenomenological commitments of 1) taking empirical work as the basis of the inquiry, 2) analyzing structures of human-technology relations and 3) studying technological mediation. Secondly, we trace these commitments across six RtD artifact inquiries. We conclude with a discussion on how research products can be seen as an experimental way of doing postphenomenology and how HCI design researchers can work with that. As a result, the presented philosophical framing can be leveraged in HCI research to form a deeper and more dimensional understanding of the human-technology relations we craft and study. This also adds a methodological path to moving beyond foci of use, utility, interaction, and human-centeredness.

Designing the Public Sphere: Information Technologies and the Politics of Mediation

After a few decades of living with Information and Communication Technologies, we have got so much used to their presence in our daily lives, that we hardly realize that the societal and cultural revolution they are causing has only just begun. While most discussions still focus on privacy issues and on the impact of social media on interpersonal relations, a whole new generation of ICTs is currently entering the world, with potentially revolutionary impacts that require careful analysis and evaluation. Many everyday objects are currently being equipped with forms of ‘ubiquitous computing’ or ‘ambient intelligence’. At the same time, ‘augmented reality’ technologies are rapidly gaining influence. ICTs will result in smart environments, and new social relations. Rather than merely assessing and criticizing these developments ‘from the outside’, we must to learn to accompany them critically ‘from within’. The public sphere requires ‘technologies of the self’: the capability to understand technological mediations, to take them into account in technological design, and to shape our existence in interaction with them. The real choice is not between accepting of rejecting new ICTs, but between critical engagement and powerless opposition.