Technology and Values: Essential Readings - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1405149000 ISBN 13: 9781405149006

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009

Synopsis

This anthology features essays and book excerpts on technology and values written by preeminent figures in the field from the early 20th century to the present. It offers an in-depth range of readings on important applied issues in technology as well.

• Useful in addressing questions on philosophy, sociology, and theory of technology
• Includes wide-ranging coverage on metaphysics, ethics, and politics, as well as issues relating to gender, biotechnology, everyday artifacts, and architecture
• A good supplemental text for courses on moral or political problems in which contemporary technology is a unit of focus
• An accessible and thought-provoking book for beginning and advanced undergraduates; yet also a helpful resource for graduate students and academics

About this title

About the Author

Craig Hanks is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University-San Marcos, where he is past-chair of the Institutional Review Board. He was previously at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He specializes in philosophy of technology and applied philosophy, and has taught courses on engineering ethics, environmental ethics, biomedical ethics, and philosophy of technology. He is author of Refiguring Critical Theory (2002) and editor of Inner Space/Outer Space: The Humanities, Technology and the Postmodern World (1993); his monograph, Technological Musings: Reflections on Technology and Values, is forthcoming.

From the Back Cover

Technology and Values is a comprehensive anthology featuring essays and book excerpts written by pre-eminent figures in the field. With writings spanning the early twentieth century up to present day, this is a collection of in-depth readings on key technological issues – everything from biomedical and environmental concerns to the everyday use of computers and other forms of technology.

A one-of-a-kind resource tool, it is specifically designed to help readers make the important connections between abstract themes and concrete applications for both the individual and society. Accessible to the undergraduate, yet thorough enough for graduates and academics, this is an ideal text for courses in technology and society, philosophy of technology, and numerous other technology-related classes.

A one-of-a-kind resource tool, it is specifically designed to help readers make the important connections between abstract themes and concrete applications for both the individual and society. Accessible to the undergraduate, yet thorough enough for graduates and academics, this is an ideal text for courses in technology and society, philosophy of technology, and numerous other technology-related classes.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Technology and Values

Essential Readings

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2008 Craig Hanks
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4051-4900-6

Chapter One

Toward a Philosophy of Technology

Hans Jonas

Hans Jonas (1903-93) was a German-born philosopher who fled Germany in 1933 to escape the Nazi regime. After many years in Palestine/Israel, and briefer periods in England and Canada, he spent 1955-76 as a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Jonas was a student of Heidegger's, and he shares with Heidegger the view that technology is "the focal fact of modern life." In this piece, Jonas invites us to consider technology according to three dimensions: the "formal dynamics," the "material content," and the importance of valuation. The first is a consideration of technology according to its internal logic, a consideration of technology as a whole. The second is technology in use, and includes not only the history of particular artifacts (consider Henry Petroski's wonderful book The Pencil (1989)) but also the phenomenology of everyday interactions with technology (for example, see Douglas Browning's essay in chapter 22). The third dimension is where we take a critical distance on our tools and lives and ask where we are going and why. This is the aspect of understanding technology that most directly draws on the tradition of Western Philosophy that started with Socrates. In his book, The Imperative of Responsibility, Jonas argues that because of both the temporal reach and the power of contemporary technologies, traditional ethical theories are insufficient. Drawing on examples that range from nuclear war to human biotechnologies, he notes that we have the capacity to unleash broad ranging changes in our world, the full impacts of which will not be known for generations. This concern about the scope of our technological capabilities is a feature that Jonas' work shares with that of Lowrance (chapter 3). Because of this, we have obligations to know and to exercise caution that are new in human history.

Are there philosophical aspects to technology? Of course there are, as there are to all things of importance in human endeavor and destiny. Modern technology touches on almost everything vital to man's existence - material, mental, and spiritual. Indeed, what of man is not involved? The way he lives his life and looks at objects, his intercourse with the world and with his peers, his powers and modes of action, kinds of goals, states and changes of society, objectives and forms of politics (including warfare no less than welfare), the sense and quality of life, even man's fate and that of his environment: all these are involved in the technological enterprise as it extends in magnitude and depth. The mere enumeration suggests a staggering host of potentially philosophic themes.

To put it bluntly: if there is a philosophy of science, language, history, and art; if there is social, political, and moral philosophy; philosophy of thought and of action, of reason and passion, of decision and value - all facets of the inclusive philosophy of man - how then could there not be a philosophy of technology, the focal fact of modern life? And at that a philosophy so spacious that it can house portions from all the other branches of philosophy? It is almost a truism, but at the same time so immense a proposition that its challenge staggers the mind. Economy and modesty require that we select, for a beginning, the most obvious from the multitude of aspects that invite philosophical attention.

The old but useful distinction of "form" and "matter" allows us to distinguish between these two major themes: (1) the formal dynamics of technology as a continuing collective enterprise, which advances by its own "laws of motion"; and (2) the substantive content of technology in terms of the things it puts into human use, the powers it confers, the novel objectives it opens up or dictates, and the altered manner of human action by which these objectives are realized.

The first theme considers technology as an abstract whole of movement; the second considers its concrete uses and their impact on our world and our lives. The formal approach will try to grasp the pervasive "process properties" by which modern technology propels itself - through our agency, to be sure - into ever-succeeding and superseding novelty. The material approach will look at the species of novelties themselves, their taxonomy, as it were, and try to make out how the world furnished with them looks. A third, overarching theme is the moral side of technology as a burden on human responsibility, especially its long-term effects on the global condition of man and environment. This - my own main preoccupation over the past years - will only be touched upon.

The Formal Dynamics of Technology

First some observations about technology's form as an abstract whole of movement. We are concerned with characteristics of modern technology and therefore ask first what distinguishes it formally from all previous technology. One major distinction is that modern technology is an enterprise and process, whereas earlier technology was a possession and a state. If we roughly describe technology as comprising the use of artificial implements for the business of life, together with their original invention, improvement, and occasional additions, such a tranquil description will do for most of technology through mankind's career (with which it is coeval), but not for modern technology. In the past, generally speaking, a given inventory of tools and procedures used to be fairly constant, tending toward a mutually adjusting, stable equilibrium of ends and means, which - once established - represented for lengthy periods an unchallenged optimum of technical competence.

To be sure, revolutions occurred, but more by accident than by design. The agricultural revolution, the metallurgical revolution that led from the neolithic to the iron age, the rise of cities, and such developments, happened rather than were consciously created. Their pace was so slow that only in the time-contraction of historical retrospect do they appear to be "revolutions" (with the misleading connotation that their contemporaries experienced them as such). Even where the change was sudden, as with the introduction first of the chariot, then of armed horsemen into warfare - a violent, if short-lived, revolution indeed - the innovation did not originate from within the military art of the advanced societies that it affected, but was thrust on it from outside by the (much less civilized) peoples of Central Asia. Instead of spreading through the technological universe of their time, other technical breakthroughs, like Phoenician purple-dyeing, Byzantine "greek fire," Chinese porcelain and silk, and Damascene steel-tempering, remained jealously guarded monopolies of the inventor communities. Still others, like the hydraulic and steam playthings of Alexandrian mechanics, or compass and gunpowder of the Chinese, passed unnoticed in their serious technological potentials.

On the whole (not counting rare upheavals), the great classical civilizations had comparatively early reached a point of technological saturation - the aforementioned "optimum" in equilibrium of means with acknowledged needs and goals - and had little cause later to go beyond it. From there on, convention reigned supreme. From pottery to monumental architecture, from food growing to shipbuilding, from textiles to engines of war, from time measuring to stargazing: tools, techniques, and objectives remained essentially the same over long times; improvements were sporadic and unplanned. Progress therefore - if it occurred at all - was by inconspicuous increments to a universally high level that still excites our admiration and, in historical fact, was more liable to regression than to surpassing. The former at least was the more noted phenomenon, deplored by the epigones with a nostalgic remembrance of a better past (as in the declining Roman world). More important, there was, even in the best and most vigorous times, no proclaimed idea of a future of constant progress in the arts. Most important, there was never a deliberate method of going about it like "research," the willingness to undergo the risks of trying unorthodox paths, exchanging information widely about the experience, and so on. Least of all was there a "natural science" as a growing body of theory to guide such semitheoretical, prepractical activities, plus their social institutionalization. In routines as well as panoply of instruments, accomplished as they were for the purposes they served, the "arts" seemed as settled as those purposes themselves.

Traits of modern technology

The exact opposite of this picture holds for modern technology, and this is its first philosophical aspect. Let us begin with some manifest traits.

1. Every new step in whatever direction of whatever technological field tends not to approach an equilibrium or saturation point in the process of fitting means to ends (nor is it meant to), but, on the contrary, to give rise, if successful, to further steps in all kinds of direction and with a fluidity of the ends themselves. "Tends to" becomes a compelling "is bound to" with any major or important step (this almost being its criterion); and the innovators themselves expect, beyond the accomplishment, each time, of their immediate task, the constant future repetition of their inventive activity.

2. Every technical innovation is sure to spread quickly through the technological world community, as also do theoretical discoveries in the sciences. The spreading is in terms of knowledge and of practical adoption, the first (and its speed) guaranteed by the universal intercommunication that is itself part of the technological complex, the second enforced by the pressure of competition.

3. The relation of means to ends is not unilinear but circular. Familiar ends of long standing may find better satisfaction by new technologies whose genesis they had inspired. But equally - and increasingly typical - new technologies may suggest, create, even impose new ends, never before conceived, simply by offering their feasibility. (Who had ever wished to have in his living room the Philharmonic orchestra, or open heart surgery, or a helicopter defoliating a Vietnam forest? or to drink his coffee from a disposable plastic cup? or to have artificial insemination, test-tube babies, and host pregnancies? or to see clones of himself and others walking about?) Technology thus adds to the very objectives of human desires, including objectives for technology itself. The last point indicates the dialectics or circularity of the case: once incorporated into the socioeconomic demand diet, ends first gratuitously (perhaps accidentally) generated by technological invention become necessities of life and set technology the task of further perfecting the means of realizing them.

4. Progress, therefore, is not just an ideological gloss on modern technology, and not at all a mere option offered by it, but an inherent drive which acts willynilly in the formal automatics of its modus operandi as it interacts with society. "Progress" is here not a value term but purely descriptive. We may resent the fact and despise its fruits and yet must go along with it, for - short of a stop by the fiat of total political power, or by a sustained general strike of its clients or some internal collapse of their societies, or by self-destruction through its works (the last, alas, the least unlikely of these) - the juggernaut moves on relentlessly, spawning its always mutated progeny by coping with the challenges and lures of the now. But while not a value term, "progress" here is not a neutral term either, for which we could simply substitute "change." For it is in the nature of the case, or a law of the series, that a later stage is always, in terms of technology itself, superior to the preceding stage. Thus we have here a case of the entropy-defying sort (organic evolution is another), where the internal motion of a system, left to itself and not interfered with, leads to ever "higher," not "lower" states of itself. Such at least is the present evidence. If Napoleon once said, "Politics is destiny," we may well say today, "Technology is destiny."

These points go some way to explicate the initial statement that modern technology, unlike traditional, is an enterprise and not a possession, a process and not a state, a dynamic thrust and not a set of implements and skills. And they already adumbrate certain "laws of motion" for this restless phenomenon. What we have described, let us remember, were formal traits which as yet say little about the contents of the enterprise. We ask two questions of this descriptive picture: why is this so, that is, what causes the restlessness of modern technology; what is the nature of the thrust? And, what is the philosophical import of the facts so explained?

The nature of restless technology

As we would expect in such a complex phenomenon, the motive forces are many, and some causal hints appeared already in the descriptive account. We have mentioned pressure of competition - for profit, but also for power, security, and so forth - as one perpetual mover in the universal appropriation of technical improvements. It is equally operative in their origination, that is, in the process of invention itself, nowadays dependent on constant outside subsidy and even goal-setting: potent interests see to both. War, or the threat of it, has proved an especially powerful agent. The less dramatic, but no less compelling, everyday agents are legion. To keep one's head above the water is their common principle (somewhat paradoxical, in view of an abundance already far surpassing what former ages would have lived with happily ever after). Of pressures other than the competitive ones, we must mention those of population growth and of impending exhaustion of natural resources. Since both phenomena are themselves already by-products of technology (the first by way of medical improvements, the second by the voracity of industry), they offer a good example of the more general truth that to a considerable extent technology itself begets the problems which it is then called upon to overcome by a new forward jump. (The Green Revolution and the development of synthetic substitute materials or of alternate sources of energy come under this heading.) These compulsive pressures for progress, then, would operate even for a technology in a noncompetitive, for example, a socialist setting.

A motive force more autonomous and spontaneous than these almost mechanical pushes with their "sink or swim" imperative would be the pull of the quasi-utopian vision of an ever better life, whether vulgarly conceived or nobly, once technology had proved the open-ended capacity for procuring the conditions for it: perceived possibility whetting the appetite ("the American dream," "the revolution of rising expectations"). This less palpable factor is more difficult to appraise, but its playing a role is undeniable. Its deliberate fostering and manipulation by the dream merchants of the industrial-mercantile complex is yet another matter and somewhat taints the spontaneity of the motive, as it also degrades the quality of the dream. It is also moot to what extent the vision itself is post hoc rather than ante hoc, that is, instilled by the dazzling feats of a technological progress already underway and thus more a response to than a motor of it.

Groping in these obscure regions of motivation, one may as well descend, for an explanation of the dynamism as such, into the Spenglerian mystery of a "Faustian soul" innate in Western culture, that drives it, nonrationally, to infinite novelty and unplumbed possibilities for their own sake; or into the Heideggerian depths of a fateful, metaphysical decision of the will for boundless power over the world of things - a decision equally peculiar to the Western mind: speculative intuitions which do strike a resonance in us, but are beyond proof and disproof.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1405149000
• ISBN 13: 9781405149006
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560
• Editor: Hanks Craig