How can we best theorize technology and the good society? This paper responds to this issue by showing how our assumptions about the meaning of the social and the political influence our evaluations of the impact of new technologies on society, and how, conversely, new technologies also shape the concepts we use to evaluate them. In the course of the argument, the paper also recommends that philosophers of technology use the resources of political philosophy to tackle the challenge of understanding and evaluating technology and society.
The paper shows that, on the one hand, evaluations of the impact of technology on society could benefit from more fundamental and critical reflection on their often salient (descriptive) social-ontological and (normative) political-ideological assumptions. These need to be made explicit and discussed; philosophers of technology can learn from social philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and STS, and political philosophy. For example, whether we start from the assumption that society is the sum of individuals, or from a more rational, communal, or organic view of the social, will influence our view of responsibility for technology and will lead to different views of responsible research and innovation (e.g. individual consent versus participation and communal innovation). And our evaluation of technology’s impact on society will differ if we define the social in strictly human terms or if we include technology and materiality in the social, as influential approaches in STS and anthropology do. The choice we make here will have implications for our thinking about for example technology and responsibility (e.g. targeting individual humans or evaluating the entire socio-technical system). Moreover, it would be very helpful to use more resources from political philosophy to deal with the problem of technology and the good society. For instance, there is excellent thinking about justice, equality, and other political principles which, unfortunately, is not often used to discuss the societal impact of technology. Consider for instance how thinking about the ethics of human enhancement is often limited to ethical theory (an exception is Coeckelbergh 2013). But here too it is important to reflect on fundamental assumptions made, including the very term political. For instance, since Aristotle the political has been defined in human terms, even, as Arendt shows, in explicit opposition to materiality and necessity. But other conceptualizations of the political are possible. The precise conceptualization we choose will have implications for how we deal with technology in society, for example whether we see technology as politically neutral or as political will influence how we deal with technological risk.
On the other hand, it is argued that our (conceptualizations of) political-philosophical principles and thinking about the social are themselves not entirely technology-independent and up to choice, but are influenced by human-technological experience and practices. For instance, our experience with the internet may give rise to specific conceptualizations of the social and the political (e.g. in terms of networks or global citizenship), which in turn shape particular uses of the technology, and social robotics may suggest particular conceptualization of the social and of society (e.g. behaviourist view of the social, a sexist view of human relations, and a consumerist view of care and society), which in turn may shape particular practices, e.g. in health care. Furthermore, the very meaning of ethical and political principles such as privacy and security may be redefined by electronic information and communication technologies. Hence when we make assumptions about society and politics when we evaluate technologies, we need to be aware that the object of our reflection also influenced our thinking about it; in this epistemology the object shapes the subject. Again this has implications for our evaluations of what technology does to society. It means, in particular, that such evaluations should not be reduced to “applied ethics” or applied political philosophy, if that means that we have a fixed and permanent set of principles which are applied to the fluid, impermanent world of technology and society. For the purpose of evaluation we can use principles, but they are only conceptual tools, and tools – as we know – change. For example, what we mean by privacy may be different in an age when we are continuously connected via social media. Hence an evaluation of technology in terms of privacy needs to be aware of the instability of this concept and reflect on it.
| Period | 4 Feb 2016 → 6 Feb 2016 |
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| Held at | Social Trends Institute Barcelona, Spain |
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