Philos. Technol. (2012) 25:605–631
DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0058-z
E R R AT U M
Erratum to: Book Symposium on Peter Paul Verbeek’s
Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing
the Morality of Things. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011
Evan Selinger & Don Ihde & Ibo van de Poel & Martin Peterson &
Peter-Paul Verbeek
Published online: 12 January 2012
# Springer-Verlag 2012
Erratum to: Philos. Technol.
DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0054-3
The original version of this article was inadvertently published with an incorrect title,
author group and layout. The correct title, author group and layout appear here.
Confronting the Moral Dimensions of Technology Through Mediation Theory
Evan Selinger
Dept. Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
e-mail: evan.selinger@rit.edu
The online version of the original article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13347-011-0054-3.
E. Selinger (*)
Dept. Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA
e-mail: evan.selinger@rit.edu
D. Ihde
Dept. Philosophy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
e-mail: dihde@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
I. van de Poel
Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands
e-mail: i.r.vandepoel@tudelft.nl
M. Peterson
Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
e-mail: M.Peterson@tue.nl
P.-P. Verbeek
Dept. Philosophy, Twente University, Enschede, the Netherlands
e-mail: p.p.c.c.verbeek@utwente.nl
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Playing Philosophical Pictionary with Verbeek
Martin Heidegger famously claimed that great thinkers spend their lives exploring a
single thought: its history nuances, misappropriations, and implications. While not as
narrowly—or, in my opinion, myopically—focused, most contemporary principals in
the philosophy of technology pursue recognizable research programs. Since these
programs are distinctive, peers and graduate students can associate complex arguments with leading concepts. Such concepts circulate widely enough to become
common terms in database searches, and informatics scholars in principle can use
them as tools for determining and visually depicting trends that exemplify a field’s
central preoccupations. Ultimately, the terms become so resonant that they can be the
main pieces in a philosophically adapted game of Pictionary. After writing down a
qualifying term, teams could compete to give the most robust account of the ideas it
designates.
For example, to evoke the “fourth revolution” is to conjure Luciano Floridi’s views
on how the social integration of new technologies can alter experiences and conceptions of reality. Likewise, to talk about “focal practices” is to bring to mind Albert
Borgmann’s understanding of how a special relation to technology can support rather
than thwart pursuit of the good life. Similarly, to mention “critical theory of technology” is invite comments on Andrew Feenberg’s ideas about to increase participation
in decision-making processes concerning the design and development of technology.
On rare occasions, distinctive concepts belong to two metaphorical copyright holders:
Asking if there is a “cyborg” in the house can invite Andy Clark and Donna Harraway
impersonations.
Dutch philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek belongs to this group of Pictionary scholars.
Although one of the youngest principals, he already is Professor of Philosophy of
Technology at the University of Twente, part-time Socrates Chair at Delft University
of Technology, member of the Young Academy (which is part of the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences), recipient of the prestigious VENI and VIDI grants
(from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research), Editor of Techné:
Research in Philosophy and Technology, and member of the Scientific Editorial
Board of Philosophy & Technology. To bring up the topic of “technological mediation” is to stimulate conversation about Verbeek’s “postphenomenological” and
“posthumanist” analyses of technology, i.e., his sense, to be described in more detail
below, of the profound ways that technology influences the forms human practices
exhibit and the correlative interpretations of the world that arise from within technologically oriented activities.
Mediation: Linking What Things Can and Should Do
If one accepts Immanuel Kant’s reasons for organizing his systematic approach
to philosophy by following up the Critique of Pure Reason, which aspires to
clarify the foundation of knowledge, with the Critique of Practical Reason, which
aspires to clarify the foundation of ethics, then Verbeek’s new monograph, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (2011), can be
construed as the logical sequel to his first book, What Things Do: Philosophical
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Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (2005). As a phenomenological
investigation, What Things Do is not an orthodox epistemological treatise. Nevertheless, it clarifies fundamental ways in which the knowing, perceiving, and actionoriented subject’s relation to the world and others is influenced by technological mediation, (which was alluded to above and is described more below).
Moralizing Technology builds directly upon the antecedent work, treating it as
foundational—as capable of being supplemented and expanded, but not significantly
revised. In the new text, Verbeek’s basic task is to analyze how technological
mediation affects moral reasoning and gives rise to new possibilities for moral action,
only some of which are intended by the designers of technologies and technical
systems.
The analogy posited here between Verbeek and Kant is intended only to be
superficially illuminating. Whereas Kant’s uses transcendental analysis to instill a
Copernican Revolution, in What Things Do Verbeek offers a prospective research
vision in which philosophers contribute to shaping technological development
through a division of labor in which their primary responsibility is to identify
the behavior-modifying trajectories embedded in artifacts and technical systems. Slightly altering a term popularized by his former teacher, the eminent
philosopher and public intellectual Hans Achterhuis—who modified Richard
Rorty’s phrase “linguistic turn” and spoke of an “empirical turn” in philosophy of technology—Verbeek initially characterizes his approach as a “thingly
turn” (2005, p.3). In Moralizing Technology, this idiosyncratic parlance is dropped
for the more common empirical turn idiom, and he attempts to defend the value of
two new meta-philosophical orientations: 1) an “ethical turn” that clarifies the causal
and normative implications that follow from thinking about concepts like “moral
agency,” “moral subjectivity,” and the “moral self” from the perspective of technological mediation, and 2) a “third turn” of philosophical orientation that putatively
does not yet exist, but can be gestured to, in outline form. Ostensibly, such inquiry
can be constituted as an “ethics of accompanying technological development” in
which philosophers collaborate with designers, engineers, scientists, and various
members of the public in real time by helping invent the “vocabularies and practices”
that can allow innovation to be maximally transparent and just. Both paradigm shifts
are provocative and complex, and the symposium discussants can address them in
detail.
Scripting Behavior Through Gracefully Aging Design
In both What Things Do and Moralizing Technology mediation theory is exposited
primarily through appropriation of phenomenological and actor network concepts,
but divorced from naturalist enterprises, such as cognitive science, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology. Since Verbeek does not explicitly lament “scientism” as many of his phenomenological predecessors did, it is reasonable to infer that
occlusion of insights from the sciences of the mind and human nature is the result of
contingent analytic preferences, not principled skepticism concerning the limits of
reductionism. Although, endorsing Michel Foucault’s historically conditioned conception of subjectivity in Moralizing Technology invites the question as to whether
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Verbeek believes that universal and invariant features of the mind exist, such as
cognitive bias, cognitive flexibility, and extended cognition, that are causally efficacious in ways that go beyond the social conditioning imposed by disciplinary forces.
In both What Things Do and Moralizing Technology Verbeek treats a special couch
as a paradigm case of mediation theory applied to industrial design. Summarizing
Verbeek’s original analysis thus can go a long way towards illuminating, in phenomenological fashion, the basic idea of technological mediation.
Dutch design firm Eternally Yours aimed for an innovative solution to the problem
of waste as it applies to the context of environmentally unfriendly consumer behavior.
Recognizing that “most of our products are thrown away far before actually being
worn out,” the firm focused its attention on “developing ways to create product
longevity” that would minimize the premature disposal typical of conspicuous consumption societies (2005, p. 373). It thus approached longevity in a manner that went
beyond the business-as-usual approaches to making product repair and upgrade
affordable (a key economic factor in determining a product’s lifespan) and favoring
durable materials (a key technical factor in determining a product’s lifespan). The
emphasis upon user behavior led Eternally Yours to create “gracefully aging” couches
that can induce two powerful psychological responses, bonding and attachment.
Verbeek writes:
[Eternally Yours] searched for forms and materials that could stimulate longevity. Materials were investigated that do not get unattractive when aging but have
“quality of wear.” Leather, for instance, is mostly found more beautiful when it
has been used for some time, whereas a shiny polished chromium surface looks
worn out with the first scratch. An interesting example of a design in this
context is the upholstery of a couch that was designed by Sigrid Smits. In the
velour that was used for it, a pattern was stitched that is initially invisible. When
the couch has been used for a while, the pattern gradually becomes visible.
Instead of aging in an unattractive way, this couch renews itself when getting
old (2005, 373–374).
Verbeek’s analysis of the “stimulating” power of Smits’s design pivots on
the concept of mediation. He sees one significant difference as marking the
crucial demarcation separating ordinary couches from gracefully aging ones—
namely, Eternally Yours designers “inscribe” a plan of sustainable user behavior into the latter. By “inscribe” Verbeek means that Eternally Yours made
deliberate use of what Bruno Latour calls “scripts”. Scripts refer those aspects
of an artifact or system that “delegate” behavioral prescriptions, which Latour
calls “programs of action”. In this case, the following script is said to be
inscribed into the Eternally Yours couch: “Bond with me. Do not throw me
away, I age gracefully.”
Since neither Verbeek nor Latour advocate returning to totemic thinking, the
couch is not anthropomorphized as presenting a script through propositional
injunction. Indeed, neither thinker would characterize the couch, or any object,
as literally speaking a human language. Instead, the script’s behavioral suggestions are recognizable through a mundane and prosaically describable process:
embodied perception. Looking at the couch’s unique design can trigger an
affective response that makes its distinctive meaning apparent in a manner as
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direct as the immediate recognition that a smile expresses happiness. Typical
Dutch customers who acquire Eternally Yours couches perceive the furniture to
be endowed with a special meaning because they see the emergence of a wearand-tear induced pattern as what ecological psychologist J.J. Gibson calls an
“affordance,” i.e., qualities in the object that incline users to see additional use
as more attractive than disposability, and to behave in a manner that accords
with this feeling.
In accordance with Don Ihde’s conception of “multi-stability,” which posits
that the meaning associated with a technology is context specific and subject to
change with alterations in how and where a technology is used, Verbeek
stipulates that the Eternally Yours script is only efficacious because it aligns
with underlying cultural values. To concretize this point, Verbeek proposes a
thought experiment involving a plastic coffee cup. In a culture that views the material to
be worthless, he claims that the cup would have the script, “Throw me away.” By
contrast, in a culture that places high value on plastic, the cup could have a different
script, perhaps “Save me.”
Moralizing Technology: Main Issues
With mediation theory functioning as the main engine of philosophical analysis,
Moralizing Technology raises the following questions:
&
&
&
&
&
How should the moral significance of technology be conceptualized? Are the
intellectual resources found in mainstream meta-ethics and engineering ethics
sufficient for answering this question? What is the most justified way to go
beyond the commonplace instrumentalist perspective, which restricts the moral
status of technologies to the causal role they play in realizing and impeding
human moral intentions?
What conception of subjectivity is appropriate for understanding who human
beings are when they inhabit a lifeworld of ubiquitous technological mediation?
Does such a subject possess sufficient autonomy to qualify as a moral agent? Or,
is the concept of “moral agency” in a need of rethinking so as to better accord
with the phenomenological facts captured by mediation theory analyses of technological use? Should technologies be recognized as a new category of moral
agents?
Is moral reason giving a sufficient response to the fundamental problems posed by
technology? Or, is the conception of the philosopher as the preeminent producer
of archive friendly texts outdated and in need of replacement by a materialist
ethics of social design?
How can mediation theory be applied to the emerging fields of ambient intelligence and persuasive technology?
Do structures of intentionality exist that fall beyond the scope covered by
mediation theory? If so, what is their significance?
To address questions like these, three prominent philosophers of technology
have been selected to be symposium discussants: Don Ihde, Ibo van de Poel,
and Martin Peterson. Ihde is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook
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University, and is one of the most recognizable thinkers in the field.1 His early contributions to philosophy of technology emphasized the embodiment of scientific practice
through theory constraining instrumentation. More recently, he developed a postphenmenological approach to philosophy that highlights multistable pathways towards
technological development. As already acknowledged, to a significant extent Verbeek’s
theory of mediation builds upon phenomenological concepts and ideas that Ihde proposed while studying perception and action. Van de Poel, an Associate Professor in
Ethics and Technology in Delft University, is widely regarded as a leading international
authority on design ethics and the dynamics of technological development. He recently
proposed an innovative approach for addressing the social consequences of new and
emerging technologies. Distinguishing himself from theorists who offer predictive
models calibrated to try to anticipate foreseeable consequences, Van de Poel argues that
the introduction of disruptive technology should be analyzed as a form of “social
experimentation” that may very well exist outside the bounds of informed consent. To
further this research, he received a prestigious VICI grant from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO). Peterson is an Associate Professor of philosophy at
Eindhoven University of Technology. He has written extensively on the philosophy of
risk, showing, among other things, that the precautionary principle is incompatible with a
number of basic rationality postulates. Peterson also has written several articles on the
ethics of cost-benefit analysis, and discussed the possibility of human friendship with
non-human entities from an Aristotelian perspective.
References
Verbeek, P. P. (2005). What Things Do. Philosophical Reflections on Technology,
Agency, and Design (R. P. Crease, Trans.). Penn State: Penn State University Press.
Verbeek, P. P. (2011). Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the
Morality of Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peter Paul Verbeek and a Postphenomenological Mirror
Don Ihde
Dept. Philosophy
Stony Brook University
dihde@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
Moralizing Technology is Peter-Paul Verbeek’s second major original book in the
philosophy of technology. Verbeek, already a full professor (b. 1970) at Twente
University, widely visible in both Europe and North America is a major contender
in this field.
Verbeek’s signature is also one which identifies him with postphenomenological
analysis. His dissertation, later to be revised and expanded as What Things Do
1
All participants reviewed a .pdf copy of the manuscript before the text was published. Their references
refer to this original copy.
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(2005), his chapter in Hans Achterhuis’s American Philosophy of Technology: The
Empirical Turn (2001) had already dealt with postphenomenology, often including
my formulation thereof. It is for that reason that I have titled this response with a
mirror metaphor—our visions of postphenomenology mostly converge and this poses
a problem for my analysis. First, it is hard for me to ‘get distance’ on his position
which is so close to my own. Second, a temptation to turn to a ‘nitty-gritty’ analysis
which concentrates upon where-do-we-differ must also be resisted as this trivializes
what would be important. Third, and worst of all, to end up simply praising Peter Paul
for his conclusions where they are close to mine, becomes an indirect form of selfflattery.
Here the mirror metaphor may help: I have for several decades been interested in
imaging technologies, in which mirrors play important and diverse roles. Mirrors are
‘isomorphic’ optics in their most ordinary forms, reflecting a ‘likeness’ to the viewer—
but not without serious transformations. To my knowledge, there are no perfect, nonneutral isomorphic optics, even mirrors. A very simple phenomenology of mirrorviewing shows this: I stand before the vanity mirror in the bathroom. Already experienced in mirror-viewing, I immediately recognize “myself” in the mirror. But, if I am
about to shave—as an experienced viewer I also may no longer explicitly notice this—
since the mirror does not present me with what would be a bodily face-to-face image,
but rather presents me with an image in which right-side to right-side and left-side to
left-side faces me, a mirror, not bodily, image. Thus I have previously had to learn the
bodily movements to put the shaving cream on my cheeks by adjusting to this rightleft ‘reversal’ as it were. Here we have discovered one of the transformations of
mirror optics. Returning now to the mirror, perhaps we do not note that a symmetrical
up-and-down reversal also occurs. [The symmetry remains analogous to the right/left
phenomenon insofar as top-to-top and bottom-to-bottom remains symmetric. But, I
suggest, the up/down bodily reflection seems less obvious than the right/left reversal?] In short, in both vectors, the mirror does not present us with what would be a
bodily face-to-face. I hope to use this phenomenon to at least indirectly get at a nonmirror perspective on Verbeek’s book.
Verbeek and Postphenomenology
I now return to Moralizing Technology which highlights the unique situation Verbeek
addresses. This context includes a historical-geographical subtheme. As many have
noted—Verbeek included—if one looks at the mostly 20th century origins of a
philosophy of technology, most of the forefathers were European philosophers.
With a few 19th century predecessors such as Karl Marx and Ernst Kapp, most
major thematizations of technology only begin to occur in the 20th century.
Friedrich Dessauer, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Ortega y Gassett and others
began to realize that the impact—largely since the Industrial Revolution—of
technology was having a massive transformational affect upon European culture.
Verbeek’s What Things Do (2005) deals with this set of origins as well [My own
recent, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives (2010)
continues this discussion.] But these beginnings change in the later 20th century. As
most abbreviated histories agree, the often dystopian, usually transcendental
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originary generalizers of the early to mid-20th century, gave way to several transition
generations, including philosophers from the Frankfurt School, pragmatism, and
phenomenology, and then on to students of those generations who are today
dominant. The Achterhuis recognition of an “empirical turn” from technologyoverall to particular technologies, played an important recognition of how philosophy
of technology had begun to look quite different by the late 20th century in both
Europe and North America. But whereas Achterhuis took this transformation from
American philosophers of technology, an equally important set of events was also
occurring in Europe—and most explicitly in the Netherlands! I have sometimes
claimed that “There are more philosophers of technology per capita in Holland than
in any other country of the world!” During a 1998 Dutch lecture tour, I discussed the
Dutch scene with a philosopher of science, one G. De Vries at the University of
Amsterdam. I asked him what the state of philosophy of science was at that time and
his response was that no one reads it anymore since it does not address lifeworld
problems. What then, is read, I queried, and his answer was STS, social
constructionism, and related more empirically tuned studies—“After all, given that
the Netherlands was historically ‘socially constructed’ with its polders and continues
today with the politics of Water Boards, we are all and always have been ‘social
constructionists.’” We are here at the doors of Moralizing Technology with hybrid,
composite and other human-technology combinations which are central to Verbeek’s
thesis. We are also at these doors because there has been a parallel institutional
geographic shift concerning centers for philosophy of technology in recent years.
While there are a number of academic societies which present the research outcomes,
including philosophy of technology, for example the Society for the Social Studies of
Science [4/S] is the largest STS style society, but the smaller Society for Philosophy
and Technology had been the more primary vehicle for philosophy of technology. Its
recent history is telling—while it meets only biennially, on alternate years it meets
outside North America—and recently, the country with the most frequent hosting
record has become the Netherlands,—indeed, the editors of the journal, the governing
board and society officers now include significant numbers of Dutch academicians.
With this shift has also come a perceptible growth rate and conference attendance
increase. In philosophy of technology the Dutch are making their mark.
Moralizing Technology
Moralizing Technology reflects this background. There are two ways in which
precisely this historical-geographic background may be detected. First, one of
Verbeek’s very long interests has been actor network theory, the style of analysis
developed by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon out of France. Although there are
varieties of methods used throughout science-technology studies (STS), actornetwork theory (ANT), pioneered by Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, seems to be
the dominant style of analysis favored by social scientists in Continental Europe.
Verbeek holds that postphenomenology is a complementary type of analysis that can
enhance this dominant approach. Second, although less obvious without careful
reading, Moralizing Technology deals with, discusses and argues with a high concentration of contemporary Dutch thinkers, more cited here than in Verbeek’s
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previous works. Thus a distinctive Dutch ‘tone’ runs through this work. This is the
case not only with thinkers, but also with many of the technological examples used to
illustrate his points therein. Thus Moralizing Technology can also serve as an
introduction to much contemporary Dutch thinking in the philosophy of technology.
I shall deal with Moralizing Technology in three parts, the first places Verbeek at
the forefront of a state-of-the-art philosophy of technology. Verbeek accepts and
continues the generational shift which Hans Achterhuis claims as the “empirical
turn” from earlier dystopian transcendentalism to later examinations of particular
and actual technologies. Verbeek, however, calls for a parallel turn—an ethical turn—
which focuses upon the normative dimensions of technologies, thus ‘moralization.’
The first four chapters of the book undertake this task with aplomb and result in an
excellent analysis of the current state of affairs in philosophy of technology.
Entailed in the empirical turn there were two significant moves away from
classical philosophy of technology: First, by turning to specific, actual technologies
empirical turn philosophers had to deal with materiality, both the materiality of
technological artifacts and the materiality of technological culture. It was not accidental that the groupings of philosophers who took this turn were frequently from the
praxis traditions of philosophy. Without here dealing in detail with the important
moments in the shift to praxis, one can note that Heidegger’s early inversion of the
primacy of science for the primacy of technology played an early role in what later
became the empirical turn. This inversion has recently been recognized by Paul
Forman (2007) who sees science primacy as modernist; technology primacy postmodern. Verbeek picks up and analyzes materiality through Langdon Winner’s “Do
Artifacts have Politics?”, with numbers of Latour’s socialized artifacts illustrations
(speed bumps, door stoppers, etc.), and, of course, with his and my postphenomenological approach which incorporates material artifacts into human-world, humantechnology-world relations along with our varieties of ‘instrumental intentionalities.’
What I find in common in the empirical turn generation is not only the incorporation of a philosophical sensitivity to materiality, but also a framework of interrelational ontologies. Verbeek sees these in Latour, postphenomenology, Winner, and
I would add with somewhat more emphasis, also pragmatism, Donna Haraway and
Andrew Pickering, as well as some post-humanist postmodernists. Amongst all of
this grouping, there emerge descriptive analyses which deny “purities” and affirm
“hybrids, composites, boundary-bending mixtures.” Now while I also have used this
style of description, I have to admit that I am not entirely happy with what appears to
me to be something of a transitional, compromise result. What is positive in this
consensual emergence is the recognition—very nicely described in Moralizing Technology—that in the ways we experience our lifeworld today, myriads of technologies
play roles in our experience of our world, others and ourselves. These must be
recognized and understood in their mediational roles which are also inclusive of
our moral and ethical concerns and formations. Moralizing Technology is rich with
examples in which pre-natal ultrasound scans play a repeat role. The technology that
produces fetal images, Verbeek shows, also makes a whole range of new human-fetal
relations possible. To visually display the fetus—Verbeek recognizes the transformations which any imaging produces—is already to enhance its role in the parentalfetus-set of relations. One outcome is the widening of the range of decidability for
parents in relation to fetus, for example to abort a physically flawed fetus, to deciding
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not to undertake repeat images, a variety of changes in parent-fetus and future parent–
child relations takes shape. This example is particularly appropriate for Verbeek’s call
for the third turn, ethics, precisely because this new set of decisional variations are
already intrinsically ethical.
What complicates empirical and ethical turn dimensions is the contemporary
milieu in which modernity is increasingly seen as a terminal background. Here
Verbeek enters the conversation which had already begun with late 20th century
Haraway, Hayles, Latour and others, amongst whom Verbeek must locate himself.
Verbeek’s readers will recognize that he wants to develop an amodern ethics, one
which is post-humanistic, but not transhuman, and an ethics which allows for
freedom but without the earlier overemphasis upon autonomy which modernist
thought proclaimed. Verbeek tends to emphasize ‘posthumanism’ or nonhumanistic ethics. I can only point to a few of the unique tactics Verbeek employs
in this self-location: He does an excellent job showing how the two dominant versions
of ethical theory—deontologies with Kantian roots, and utilitarianisms with British
roots—both remain subject/object modernist which continues to keep sociality and
technology distinct. Two original interpretations stand out: Peter Sloterdijk pushed
non-humanism away from a letters, and towards a bodily emphasis. Sloterdijk, inverts
Heidegger, claims Verbeek, by re-affirming the bodily aspect of being human. It is a
subtle reversal of the ‘linguistic turn’ while at the same time facing the biotechnological
revolution now occurring. A similar innovative interpretation would reclaim the late
Michel Foucault concerning ethics and freedom. What Verbeek sees in the History of
Sexuality Foucault is effectively the recognition of ontological inter-relationality
between self-construction vis-à-vis systems of power. Drawing also from Gerard
DeVries, this is also an approximation to a neo-virtue ethics which is only gestured
toward in the concluding chapter of Moralizing Technology.
My second look takes account of Chapters 5 and 6 which deal with designing
mediations and the smart technologies of ambient intelligence and persuasive technologies. In short, once one recognizes the inter-relationality of technologies and the
human, both individual and social, Verbeek’s question becomes: can one design to
some degree moralities into artifacts. There is no doubt here that Verbeek is right up
to date on the often still presumptive technologies in question. My own reading
suggests that perhaps he comes too close to ‘believing’ the presumptions which on
my part I am not yet convinced that such technoutopian fantasies are likely to
materialize. But, the real issue is simpler: precisely by recognizing the multistabilities
of all technologies, the ambiguities of designer intent gone astray, and the sheer
complexity of the mix, could there be any gestalt simple enough to serve as a guide
for such designed positive features—I have my doubts. This leaves muddling
through…
My third look, at chapters 7 and 8 takes account of the enigma which Moralizing
Technologies must deal with: if the dominant philosophical ethics, as Verbeek has so
convincingly shown, remain caught in modernist, humanist and thus subjectivist
frames, and at least implicitly, if there are no options of returning to any premodern ethics, what can a new ethical turn emerge? Verbeek wisely does not offer
us a formula. Rather, he offers us hints. As I have suggested, one alternative is a
modernized (or postmodernized) set of variants upon virtue ethics. Here the question
becomes what kind of person do I want to be? What style of values do I wish to
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embody? All of this in the context of the complex set of human-technology mediations. On the North American scene I suppose the two philosophers who have
discussed this include Alisdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum, mentioned here
but overshadowed by Gerard DeVries and Steven Dorrestijn.
Moralizing Technology remains a tour-de-force. The third (and fourth?) ethical
turn is both appropriate and timely. Verbeek makes a major mark with this book.
References
Achterhuis, H. (2001). American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Forman, P. (2007). The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology. History and Technology 23
(1/2), 1–152.
Ihde, D. (2010). Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Verbeek, P. P. (2005). What Things Do. Philosophical Reflections on Technology,
Agency,and Design (R. P. Crease, Trans.). Penn State: Penn State University Press.
Verbeek, P. P. (2011). Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the
Morality of Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Winner, L. (1986). The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Technology as Moral Agent
Ibo van de Poel
Delft University of Technology
i.r.vandepoel@tudelft.nl
In his new book Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality
of Things, Peter-Paul Verbeek discusses the implications for the ethics of technology
of the mediation theory that he developed in his previous book What Things Do:
Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (2005). His approach
is not only original but also rich and multi-faceted, seemingly easily moving from
abstract philosophical discussions about Heidegger and Foucault to the practice of
engineering design and the development of ambient intelligence and persuasive
technology. Part of the value of the book lays no doubt in this combination of
philosophical argument and analysis of concrete technological developments. The
book also has important practical implications for the design and development of new
technologies, augmenting current approaches in engineering ethics and science and
technology studies (STS). At the core of the book, however, is a philosophical
argument about how current ethical theory should be adapted to do justice to the
moral significance of technologies. It is this argument I will be focusing on. There is a
slight danger in this focus because it is likely to stress the points in which I disagree
with Verbeek rather than the points at which I agree with him. Let me therefore at the
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outset stress that I agree that technological mediation is an interesting an important
phenomenon that requires more attention in the ethics of technology. I also largely agree
with the practical implications that Verbeek sketches for the design and use of technologies. In addition, I liked his Foucauldian treatment of freedom. What I doubt, however,
is whether all these things require the kind of drastic changes in ethical theory that
Verbeek proposes. Surely, ethicists have tended to ignore the role of technologies in
morality and ethics and surely doing justice to their moral significance may require
certain changes in ethical theory, but I am not sure whether a redefinition of moral
agency is the right target for such changes. But rather than getting ahead of my
argument, I should start with explaining why Verbeek thinks that doing justice to the
moral significance of technology requires a new approach to ethics.
Why We Need a Posthumanist Ethics
The phenomenon of technological mediation draws attention to the fact that technologies
actively shape the actions and perceptions of human beings. According to Verbeek,
however, “this moral role of technology is hard to conceptualize” because of “the
humanist orientation of the established frameworks of ethical theory” (33). Therefore,
“the humanist foundations of ethics need to be broadened” (ibid.). As Verbeek explain,
his criticism of humanism is not directed at the values articulated by humanists, but rather
at the metaphysics of humanism, “which has its roots in modernism, and its radical
separation of the human subject and nonhuman objects” (ibid.). His criticism of modernism is similar to that of Latour in We have never been modern, although Verbeek
also draws on other sources like Heidegger, Slotendijk and Foucault.
The consequence of the modernist divide between object and subject, according to
Verbeek, is that “ethics now suddenly has to be located in one of the two domains.
And almost automatically, that domain is the one of the subject, which asks itself
from a distance how to act in the world of objects” (42). However,
Technologies appear to be able to “act” in the human world, albeit in a different
way than humans do. By doing so, technologies painlessly cross the modernist
border between subject and object. A humanist ethics, as Harbers put it, is
founded on a “human monopoly on agency” (Harbers 2005, 259). Because of
this, it is not able to see the moral dimension of artifacts, which causes it to
overlook an essential part of moral reality. (45)
What is needed then is a posthumanist ethics in which some form of moral agency is
attributed to technology.
Moral Agency
The notion of moral agency brings us to the core of the posthumanist ethics that
Verbeek tries to articulate to do justice to the moral roles of certain technologies. He
sets out to redefine moral agency “in a direction that makes it possible to investigate
the moral relevance of technological artifacts in ethical theory” (57). He basically
employs two argumentative strategies to do so. The first strategy is to argue that
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neither technological artifacts nor humans in isolation possess moral agency but that
agency is rather a property or characteristic of ensembles of humans and technology.
The second strategy is to redefine the notion of moral agency so that objects possess
more and humans less agency than in customary philosophical thought, while
recognizing that humans and objects are not entirely the same in this respect.
The first strategy argues that neither humans nor objects exist in splendid isolation,
but that they always exist in relation to each other. Humans and technological objects
constitute each other and it are the resulting ensembles, associations or hybrids that
possess moral agency. This line of reasoning sees moral agency as a result of the
interaction between humans and technology rather than as an intrinsic property of
humans as in traditional philosophy.
The second strategy is a bit more complicated. Verbeek distinguishes “two criteria
that are usually seen as condition sine qua non for moral agency” (70); these are
“intentionality—the ability to form intentions—and the freedom to realize its intentions” (ibid., emphasis in original). He sets out to “show that these two criteria can be
reinterpreted along postphenomenological lines in such a way that they also pertain to
nonhuman entities” (ibid.).
With respect to intentionality, he admits that most technological artifacts cannot
deliberately form intentions, but they nevertheless direct our actions and experiences
and thus “can “have” intentionality in the literal sense of the Latin word “intendere,”
which means “to direct,” “to direct one’s course,” “to direct one’s mind”” (73). He
concludes that it “seems plausible, then, to attribute a form of intentionality to
artifacts—albeit a radically different form than human intentionality” (74).
With respect to freedom, Verbeek starts with noting that if we take the theory of
technological mediation seriously absolute freedom cannot be a precondition for moral
agency, unless we are willing to give up the idea of (human) moral agency all together.
After all, in a technologically mediated world, human beings are never completely free
from external influences. He therefore proposes to understand freedom not as the
absence of external constraints or powers but rather as the ability to relate oneself to
those external constraints or powers. He admits that, this “redefinition of freedom …
does not imply that we need to actually attribute freedom to technological artifacts” (77).
Nevertheless, he maintains that “like intentionality appeared to be distributed over the
human and nonhuman elements in human-technology associations, so is freedom” (77).
What are the Bearers of Agency?
The combination of the two argumentative strategies employed by Verbeek raises the
question whether Verbeek wants to argue that only ensembles can possess agency (the
first strategy) or that also technological devices can possess some form of moral
agency, albeit maybe different from human agency (the second strategy). At several
places, he states that only ensembles can possess agency, but sometimes he seems to
suggest that also humans or objects can possess agency. For example, in Chapter 5, in
relation to design, he talks about three forms of agency at work: that of the designer,
the user and the technology. Human agency is, however, different from technological
agency: “it does not make sense to consider technologies fully fledged moral agents
in the way human beings are moral agents” (132).
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What then is the relation between human agency, technological agency and the agency
of human-technology ensembles? The following quote about intentionality may give a hint:
intentionality is “distributed” over human and nonhuman entities, and technologies “have” the nonhuman part. In such “hybrid intentionalities”, the technologies involved and the human beings who use the technologies share equally in
intentionality (72).
Here, the argument seems to be that the constituting parts—the human and the
technological object—have intentionality because their association has intentionality,
and a similar argument may apply to agency according to Verbeek. There are, however,
two problems with this suggestion. First, the argument is invalid because it is based on a
fallacy of division: parts do not necessary have the same properties as their association.
From the fact that I can think it does not follow that my leg can think.
The other problem is that the argument seems to suggest that intentionality and
agency are equally distributed over humans and objects, while Verbeek at other places
explicitly says that technological agency, unlike human agency, is not full- fledged
agency. When it comes to moral responsibility, his position is even more asymmetrical: “The fact that technologies cannot bear moral responsibility themselves does
not take away the fact that both users and designers can have a specific moral
responsibility for technologically mediated action” (133). Although he states that
“it is the amalgam of humans and technologies … that bears moral responsibility”
(ibid.), apparently this moral responsibility does, according to him, not distribute
equally over humans and technologies.
Is Moral Agency the Right Target?
I think the ambiguities alluded to above are not coincidental, but point at a broader issue.
This is the question whether moral agency is the right place to start when one wants to
conceptualize the morality of technology. Verbeek at several places suggests that
redefining moral agency is the only way in which one can do justice to the moral
significance of technologies in ethical theory. This suggestion, however, seems me to be
based on a false dilemma. This false dilemma is not only apparent in Verbeek’s work,
but seems to characterize the debate about the moral agency of technology more
generally. As Deborah Johnson notes in relation to the moral agency of computers:
The debate seems to be framed in a way that locks the interlocutors into
claiming either that computers are moral agents or that computers are not moral.
Yet, to deny that computer systems are moral agents is not the same as denying
that computers have moral importance or moral character; and to claim that
computer systems are moral is not necessarily the same as claiming that they are
moral agents (Johnson 2006, 195).
There are, moreover, several other kinds of entities, besides technology, that are
morally significant without being a moral agent. Typical examples are social structures
and laws. Both co-shape human behavior like technologies do, and do so in other ways
than just through mute physical causation. Both social structures and laws can be
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morally evaluated and are shaped by humans. It is not incidental, I think, that some
philosophers of technology have conceived of technologies as being somehow similar to
social structures (Sclove 1995) or to laws (Winner 1983).
I am also inclined to believe that moral agency is not the most appropriate place to
start to conceptualize the moral significance of technology. The main reason for my
doubts is that, as Verbeek recognizes, the notion of moral agency is closely connected
to moral responsibility. It seems that if technological artifacts can have moral agency
they can, at least in principle, also bear moral responsibility, a conclusion that
Verbeek does not seem willing to draw although it remains a bit unclear how he sets
out to avoid it. Of course, one could give up the conceptual connection between
moral agency and moral responsibility, but I doubt whether that is a price worth
paying because, after all, one would still need an argument why technological
artifacts, unlike humans, cannot bear responsibility. Apart from that, the argument
that technologies can bear some form of agency is my view not very convincing.
Although Verbeek offers a very interesting notion of freedom, i.e. as the ability to
relate oneself to external constraints, which in my view convincingly shows that
human moral agency is very well possible in a technologically mediated world, he
admits that on this notion, technologies cannot be called free. If technologies have
agency it then seems to be a kind of derived agency that is based on the agency of
human-technology ensembles. But even if we grant that such ensembles can have
agency, it does not follow that technological objects have agency as we have seen.
For all these reasons, I think that moral agency may not be the best candidate for
understanding the moral significance of technology.
References
Harbers, H. (2005). Epilogue: political materials—material politics. In H. Harbers
(Ed.), Inside the politics of technology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Johnson, D. G. (2006). Computer systems: Moral entities but not moral agents. Ethics
and Information Technology, 8, 195–205.
Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Sclove, R. E. (1995). Democracy and Technology. New York: The Guilford Press.
Verbeek, P. P. (2005). What Things Do. Philosophical Reflections on Technology,
Agency, and Design (R. P. Crease, Trans.). Penn State: Penn State University Press.
Verbeek, P. P. (2011). Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the
Morality of Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Winner, L. (1983). Techne and politeia: the technical constitution of society. In P. T.
Durbin, & F. Rapp (Eds.), Philosophy and technology (pp. 97–111). Dordrecht: D.
Reidel.
Three Objections to Verbeek
Martin Peterson
Eindhoven University of Technology
M.Peterson@tue.nl
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Peter-Paul Verbeek defends a radical view about the moral status of technical
artefacts. To put things briefly, he argues that (i) artefacts, such as ‘binoculars,
thermometers, and air conditioners’ (p. 56) have a special and morally relevant form
of intentionality, and that (ii) we should, partly as a consequence of this, ascribe moral
agency to hybrid entities consisting of technical artefacts and ordinary humans (pp.
58–61).2 In addition, Verbeek claims that (iii) this view about technical artefacts has
important implications for traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism,
Kantian duty ethics and virtue ethics (pp. 61–63).
In what follows I shall discuss claims (i)—(iii) in some detail. This is because these
ideas seem to be central to Verbeek’s view as a whole. My hypothesis is that (i)—(iii)
are either false or misleading.
Having said that, I would like to emphasize that I think Verbeek’s work is
interesting and deserves respect. In my view, he has managed to raise a number of
important questions that are worth taking seriously. This holds true no matter how
good or bad my objections turn out to be. Many philosophers have attempted to
formulate coherent views about the ethics of technology, but to do so is no easy task.
It seems that no one (including the author of this article) has managed to provide a
convincing account of exactly how and when artefacts enter the moral domain.
Verbeek’s view should be judged in light of this lack of well-developed alternatives.
The ethics of technology is still a somewhat immature sub-discipline, and more
promising theories will hopefully be developed in the future.
First Objection: Artefacts Have No Intentionality
As explained above, Verbeek believes that binoculars, thermometers, and air conditioners have some morally relevant form of intentionality (pp. 55–58). How should
we understand this claim? Verbeek is careful to point out that he does not take artefacts
to be conscious beings. Obviously, binoculars, thermometers and air conditioners have
no mental states, so if only entities having such states could have some form of
intentionality, then artefacts would have no intentionality. However, Verbeek believes
that he has found a way around this problem. According to Verbeek, ‘The concept of
intentionality actually has a double meaning in philosophy’. (p. 55) In ethics, intentionality refers to, ‘the ability to form intentions’ (ibid.) whereas in phenomenology
‘intentionality indicates the directedness of human beings toward reality’. (ibid.)
This seems to be a neat distinction. On the one hand we have the ordinary notion of
intentionality, according to which intentionality is closely linked to mental states. Then
there is also another notion, which is less demanding than the ordinary one. According to
this alternative notion, intentionality just requires ‘directedness … toward reality’
(ibid.), and an entity can have such directedness without having any mental states.
As far as I can see, it might very well be plausible to claim that technical artefacts
have the second, weak form of intentionality (given that the phrase ‘directedness toward
reality’ can be spelled out in sufficiently great detail). It is less attractive to claim that
binoculars, thermometers and air conditioners have the first, strong form of intentionality. Unfortunately, Verbeek does not reject the strong notion of intentionality
2
All quotes are from Verbeek (2011).
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altogether. He explicitly claims that, ‘these two meanings of the concept of intentionality
augment each other’ (ibid.), but he never explains how or in what sense. Moreover, he
never offers us a clear explanation of what is left of the first, strong notion of
intentionality in his own hybrid notion of technological intentionality. All he says
is that, ‘The ethical implications of the second meaning of the concept of intentionality are closely related to those of the first’. (ibid.) The following passage is probably
the best summary of Verbeek’s view:
Binoculars, thermometers, and air conditioners help to shape new experiences,
either by procuring new ways of accessing reality or by creating new contexts
for experience…This implies that a form of intentionality is at work here—one
in which both humans and technologies have a share. And this, in turn, implies
that the context of such “hybrid” forms of intentionality, technologies do indeed
“have” intentionality—intentionality is “distributed” among human and nonhuman entities, and technologies “have” the nonhuman part. In such “hybrid
intentionalities”, the technologies involved and the human beings who use the
technologies share equally in intentionality. (p. 56)
As far as I can see, the problem with this story is that it does not give Verbeek what
he needs. It might very well be true that binoculars, thermometers, and air conditioners help to shape new experiences, but the moral relevance of this is ambiguous.
If the ability to, ‘help to shape new experiences, either by procuring new ways of
accessing reality or by creating new contexts for experience’ (p. 56) is all that is
needed for being endowed with the weak form of intentionality, then many natural
artefacts would have such intentionality. This indicates that there is nothing special
with technical artefacts from a moral point of view.
Let us take a closer look at this objection. What I am claiming is that if all that is
required for having a morally relevant form of intentionality is the ability to, ‘shape
new experiences, either by procuring new ways of accessing reality or by creating
new contexts for experience’ (ibid.), then many natural artefacts seem to have such
intentionality. Imagine, for instance, that you are about to climb the Matterhorn,
which is one of the most famous peaks in the Alps. It seems hard to deny that a
mountain such as the Matterhorn can sometimes, ‘help to shape new experiences,
either by procuring new ways of accessing reality or by creating new contexts for
experience’ (ibid.). Moreover, the Matterhorn has a form of ‘directedness … toward
reality’ (p. 55)—the north face is the most difficult one to climb. But does this really
show that the Matterhorn has any morally relevant form of intentionality? I believe
even Verbeek would agree that the answer is no.
Anthonie Meijers has pointed out to me—and I believe this is a point that has been
made by several Dutch philosophers working on the philosophy of artefacts—that
there are many philosophically important differences between natural objects and
technical artefacts. For instance, unlike natural objects, technical artefacts have an
intentional history. Moreover, artefacts typically have certain effects only when used
by some agent in certain ways. We can only see or measure certain things with a
microscope or thermometer when we interact with them under the right kind of
circumstances. Earthquakes and tsunamis are not used by agents for any specific
purpose, and it seems implausible to argue that humans somehow interact with them.
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However, although I accept all these differences between technical artefacts and
natural objects, the problem is that Verbeek’s account of hybrid intentionality fails to
pick up on them. Humans sometimes interact with natural objects, such as the
Matterhorn, in ways that make them fulfil Verbeek’s criteria of hybrid intentionality.
The Matterhorn shapes new experiences and creates new contexts for experience
(which cannot not be achieved without climbing the mountain) in roughly the same
ways as microscopes and thermometers enable us to see and measure things we could
not have measured otherwise. Therefore, if the shaping of new experiences is what
matters for Verbeek’s notion of hybrid intentionality, then the fact that mountains are
different from technical artefacts in many other respects seems to be irrelevant. We all
agree that the Matterhorn has no intentional history, but Verbeek’s criterion of hybrid
intentionality makes no reference to the intentional history of technical artefacts (and
if it did, this would of course be somewhat question-begging).
The Matterhorn fulfils Verbeek’s hybrid condition of intentionality, but this hardly
shows that mountains are of any interest to ethics. This, in turn, shows that Verbeek’s
theory of technological intentionality is either false or misleading. I think the best
way to illustrate this is to simply substitute the talk about technology with the word
‘mountain’ in the passage quoted above.
[Mountains] help to shape new experiences, either by procuring new ways of
accessing reality or by creating new contexts for experience…This implies that a
form of intentionality is at work here—one in which both humans and [mountains]
have a share. And this, in turn, implies that the context of such ‘hybrid’ forms of
intentionality, [mountains] do indeed ‘have’ intentionality—intentionality is ‘distributed’ among human and nonhuman entities, and [mountains] ‘have’ the
nonhuman part. In such ‘hybrid intentionalities’, the [mountain] involved and
the human beings who use the [mountain] share equally in intentionality. (p. 56)
Not convinced by this argument? Then you should also reject Verbeek’s claim that
technical artefacts and human beings have a hybrid form of intentionality. The mere
fact that technical artefacts, unlike mountains, are created (intentionally) by humans
does not change this. An intention is no infectious disease. And even if it were,
it seems that humans interact at least as much with natural artefacts that shape
new experiences. Although claims about the intentional history of an entity could
help us to distinguish technical artefacts from natural objects, Verbeek has by no
means managed to explain why such claims about the past would make any
moral difference.
Second Objection: Artefacts are No Moral Agents
Very few people think of binoculars, thermometers, and air conditioners as (parts of)
moral agents. Verbeek is the exception that proves the rule. His moral analysis of
cases in which someone fires a gun at a fellow citizen runs as follows:
Without denying the importance of human responsibility in any way, we can
conclude that when a person is shot, agency should not be located exclusively
in either the gun or the person shooting, but in the assembly of both. (p. 64)
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This view about moral agency is deeply puzzling. In order to see this, note that
Verbeek clearly believes that when someone fires a gun at another person, we should
locate the moral agency of this event in, ‘the assembly of both [the gun and the person
shooting]’. (ibid.) However, Verbeek also claims—very explicitly—that this ascription of moral agency to the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting can be
done ‘[w]ithout denying the importance of human responsibility’. (ibid.) How could
these two claims ever be compatible with each other?
It seems that the only way of making sense of Verbeek’s position is to maintain
that the there are two moral agents responsible for firing the gun: first, we have the
ordinary human being (so we do not have to deny ‘the importance of human
responsibility in any way’); then we also have a novel kind of moral agent, viz.
the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting.
This innovative reading would perhaps make Verbeek’s position come out as
logically consistent, but this is hardly an attractive approach to moral agency. To
start with, if the fact that the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting entails
that the-person-shooting is a moral agent, why not then also ascribe agency to the gun
itself, i.e. argue that there are not two but three agents involved in this example? What
is the philosophical advantage of ascribing moral agency to exactly two entities, viz.
the-person-shooting and the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting?
A possible reply, suggested to me by Anthonie Meijers, could be that it is common
to ascribe agency to an organisation or a corporation, such as a bank. For instance,
most people probably agree that a bank is responsible for ensuring that money
deposited by its customers are not stolen, and this of course entails that the chairman
of the bank is responsible for taking certain actions to prevent this from happening.
To ascribe agency to a bank does not preclude us from also ascribing agency to its
chairman.
In reply to this objection, I wish to make it clear that what I believe is a problem for
Verbeek is that he tries to locate the agency of one and the same action in both theperson-shooting and the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting. It might of
course be true that the-person-shooting was responsible for buying the gun in the
first instance, thereby enabling the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting to
carry out an atrocity, in the same way as the chairman of the bank was responsible for
ensuring the bank as a whole implements a policy for preventing various types of
fraud. But this is not the issue that is at stake here. Verbeek wishes to avoid the
accusation that he cannot account for the importance of human responsibility as theassembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting carries out an atrocity, and his strategy
is to also ascribe agency to the-person-shooting. In the bank case, this would mean
that all decisions about, say, bonuses are taken not just by the bank, but by the bank
and the individual members of the board of the bank. No matter what your view about
collective agency happens to be, I can assure you that this inflationary approach
would hardly be welcomed by any participants in this debate.3
Verbeek goes on to relate his view on moral agency to various views about
freedom. He takes the plausible view that the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-personshooting can only be a moral agent if it can exhibit some morally relevant sort of
freedom, that is, Verbeek accepts the common idea that moral agency requires an
3
See e.g. Pettit & David Schweikard and Hindriks (2009).
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ability to choose freely among alternative actions. He then goes on to claim that,
‘Technologies cannot be free agents as human beings are’ because ‘freedom requires
the possession of a mind, which artefacts do not have’. (p. 59) Despite this very
reasonable remark, he nevertheless ends up in the wrong corner: he insists that
binoculars, thermometers, and air conditioners are parts of complex entities that
qualify as free moral agents. (pp. 58–61)
Verbeek’s argumentative strategy is straightforward. In summary, he argues that
although technologies cannot be free if we take the word ‘freedom’ to mean what it
usually means, there is an alternative notion of freedom. According to Verbeek, this
alternative notion is relevant to discussions of technical artefacts, and it is also
sufficiently strong for warranting the conclusion that artefacts can be (parts of) moral
agents. Here is a representative quote:
Rather than taking freedom from (technological) influences as a prerequisite for
moral agency, we need to reinterpret freedom as an agent’s ability to relate to
what determines him or her… Technologies ‘in themselves’ cannot be free, but
neither can human beings. Freedom is a characteristic of human-technology
associations. (p. 60, his italics)
Again, the words used by Verbeek do not mean what they normally mean. The
word ‘freedom’ apparently means something radically different, just like in George
Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The problem with Verbeek’s Newspeak
account of freedom is that it does not seem to be relevant to our original problem:
can technical artefacts (in combination with humans) have the kind of freedom that is
often taken to be a prerequisite for the ordinary, Oldspeak account of moral agency?
Since Verbeek operates with quite unusual notions of freedom and agency, it is even
hard to tell what his answer to this seemingly simple question would be. This is a
serious objection. To put things briefly, it is hardly interesting to discuss whether
there is a Newspeak account of freedom that enables artefacts to be (parts of)
Newspeak-style moral agents.
However, based on his innovative account of freedom, Verbeek goes on to argue
that technical artefacts should play a prominent role in discussions of moral agency.
His conclusion is as follows.
By rethinking the concepts of intentionality and freedom in view of the morally
mediating roles of technology, I have dispatched the major obstacles to including technological artifacts in the domain of moral agency. […] The position I
have laid out in this chapter is based on the idea that the moral significance of
technology is to be found not in some form of independent agency but in the
technological mediation of moral actions and decisions—which needs to be
seen as a form of agency itself. (p. 61, his italics)
Apart from the fact that Verbeek’s redefinition of freedom is questionable, there is
also another problem with this position. In analogy with what I claimed above, it
seems that if we accept the ‘Newspeak account’ it follows that mountains would have
the same kind of freedom and moral agency as technical artefacts. This is quite
peculiar and Verbeek fails to explain what the moral difference could be between
mountains on the one hand and technical artefacts on the other. It is certainly true that
there are some differences, but what is lacking is an analysis of how we should think
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of those differences. For instance, as pointed out above, technical artefacts tend to be
created intentionally (in the ordinary Oldspeak sense), whereas mountains are not.
This could perhaps be claimed to be an important moral difference. But recall that
Verbeek operates with his own, weak notion intentionality, which is applicable to
both technical artefacts and mountains. Therefore, that simple move is not open to
him. As far as I can see, all the key claims Verbeek makes about the moral properties
of technical artefacts seem to be equally applicable to mountains. It would perhaps be
tempting to use some Oldspeak distinctions for explaining the difference, but once
you have started to speak Newspeak you have to stick to that vocabulary. If we use
Verbeek’s Newspeak vocabulary it is simply impossible to make interesting and
substantial distinctions between thermometers and mountains.
Third Objection: Verbeek’s Theory Does Not Square Well with Virtue Ethics
Let me finally discuss Verbeek’s claims about the implications of his position for
traditional ethical theories. Although he seems to think that his radical view about
intentionality and moral agency could in principle be rendered compatible with (nonstandard) accounts of Kantianism and utilitarianism, Verbeek argues that it fits
particularly well with virtue ethics. The following quote is a representative summary
of Verbeek’s take on virtue ethics:
From a virtue-ethical position it is much easier to incorporate the moral roles of
technologies. As Gerard de Vries has noted (de Vries 1999), this premodern
form of ethics does not focus on the question of “how should I act” but on the
question of “how to live.” It does not take as its point of departure a subject that
asks itself how to behave in the outside world of objects and other subjects. It
rather focuses on “life”—human existence, which inevitably plays itself out in a
material world. From this point of view, it is only a small step to recognize with
de Vries that in our technological culture, not only ethicists and theologians
answer this question of the good life but also all kinds of technological devices
tell us “how to live”. (p. 63, his italics)
There are several problems with this passage. First, and this is a minor issue, it is
misleading to give credit to Gerard de Vries for having noted that virtue ethics does
not focus on the question of how should I act but on the question of how to live. This
point has been made many times in the literature (by e.g. Anscombe 1958 and Foot
1985) long before de Vries mentioned it in 1999. My second and more important
worry is that virtue ethics seems to be the ethical theory that fits least well with
Verbeek’s claims about intentionality and moral agency. As Verbeek correctly points
out earlier in the book, it seems possible to reformulate Kantianism and utilitarianism
such that they could become claims not about what a human being ought to do, but
claims about what human-technology associations ought to do. For instance, if you
read Verbeek and then decide to become a Kantian it seems reasonable to think that it
is not the person holding the gun, but rather the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-personshooting, that should perform actions which are compatible with the categorical
imperative. Moreover, if you read Verbeek and then decide to become a utilitarian
it seems reasonable to think that it is not the person holding the gun, but rather the-
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assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting, that should perform actions that maximize overall utility. Given that we accept the quite implausible claim that theassembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting is a moral agent, everything seems to be
fine from a Kantian as well as a utilitarian perspective.
However, now imagine that you read Verbeek and then decide to become a virtue
ethicist, as Verbeek thinks we should. Then it is no longer sufficient to believe that
the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting is a moral agent; then we also have
to accept one additional and highly controversial claim, viz. the claim that theassembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting is an entity that has a life. As mentioned above, virtue ethics is a claim not about what the moral agent should do, but a
claim about how the moral agent should live. Therefore, since the moral agent in
Verbeek’s theory is the-assembly-of-the-gun-and-the-person-shooting, rather than
just the-person-shooting, Verbeek must concede that the-assembly-of-the-gun-andthe-person-shooting can be more or less virtuous and lead a life that is either good or
bad from a virtue ethical point of view. This is a very uncomfortable concession to
make for a philosopher.
References
Anscombe, G.E.M. (1958) “Modern Moral Philosophy”, Philosophy, 33 (124): 1–19.
De Vries, G. 1999. Zeppelins: Over filosofie, technologie en cultuur. Amsterdam: Van
Gennep.
Foot, P. (1985). Utilitarianism and the virtues. Mind 94 (374):196–209.
Hindriks, F. (2009). Corporate responsibility and judgment aggregation. Economics
and Philosophy 25 (2):161–177.
Orwell, G. (1949), Nineteen Eighty-Four, London: Secker & Warburg.
Pettit, P. and D. Schweikard (2006). Joint actions and group agents. Philosophy of the
Social Sciences 36 (1):18–39.
Verbeek, P (2011) Moralizing Technology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The Irony of Humanism: On the Complexities of Discussing the Moral Significance
of Things
Peter-Paul Verbeek
Dept. Philosophy
Twente University
p.p.c.c.verbeek@utwente.nl
The Blackmail of Humanism
Without any doubt, Sigmund Freud would have tremendously enjoyed the current
discussion about the moral significance of technology. Even though only few people
would still call themselves 'Freudians' nowadays, there are some ideas in his work
that will never die. Among these is definitely the thesis that modern science has
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caused humanity various ‘narcissistic offences’, humiliating human beings with
scientific insights. Copernicus showed that not the earth but the sun is the center
around which the heavenly bodies circle. Darwin showed that the human being is not
the central entity in God's creation, but a mammal that developed from the ape. And
Freud himself showed that in many cases not conscious decisions but unconscious
factors shape our behavior.
The fierce resistance against the idea that human morality is interwoven with
nonhuman entities might very well reveal yet another narcissistic wound. Discussing
the moral significance of technological artifacts evokes fears about giving up on
human autonomy and responsibility, and even raises doubts about the rationality of
one’s mind. If material objects are allowed to play a substantial role in morality, how
can human beings possibly be responsible for their actions? Don’t we end up in a
kind of premodern animism, if we seriously consider an active role of nonhuman
objects in the realm of human subjects? Human dignity itself seems to be at stake
when we have to recognize that things are involved in our moral actions and
decisions.
This dispute reminds of Michel Foucault's discussion of Immanuel Kant's ideas on
the Enlightenment. In his lecture What is Enlightenment, Foucault discusses how, for
Kant, Enlightenment meant a way out of immaturity—immaturity being defined as “a
state of our will that makes us accept someone else's authority to lead us in areas
where the use of reason is called for.” Some of the objections against Moralizing
Technology seem to imply a similar logic. It seems that we have to make a choice
between using reason or letting things decide for us what to do. And this mirrors what
Foucault, in the same text, calls ‘the blackmail of the Enlightenment’: if you are not
entirely with it, you are supposed to be against it.
The most interesting aspect of these objections is that they in fact reproduce the
error they claim to identify. They typically fight against the idea that things can be
moral agents—which is depicted as an absurd idea that threatens human responsibility. Humans, not things do ethics; who would blame a car for an accident or a gun for
a shooting? This is a fight against windmills, though. Hardly anybody who studies the
moral significance of things would claim that things in themselves have moral agency.
And if this claim is made at all, it is done at a level of abstraction that makes it much less
absurd, like Floridi and Sanders did in their inspiring article ‘On the morality of artificial
agents’ (Floridi and Sanders 2004). Moralizing Technology, in any case, does not
intend to defend this idea at all. In fact, the idea that artifacts can be moral agents
originates from the very modernist metaphysics that Moralizing Technology intends
to help overcome.
Only from a metaphysics in which humans and things are radically separated—
humans being active and intentional, nonhumans being mute and inert, as Bruno
Latour has elaborated so convincingly—it becomes relevant to ask if things, just like
humans, can be moral agents. When we give up this separation, a completely new
picture emerges. The central question then is not if artificial agents can have morality
too, like Floridi and Sanders did, but how morality is distributed over human and
nonhuman entities. Recent insights from philosophy of technology urge us to see
moral agency as the outcome of complex interactions between humans and things.
Indeed, things do not have moral agency—but the most crucial point is: neither do
humans. Morality is a hybrid affair that cannot be located exclusively in things, but
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not in humans either. Each in their own way—distinct, but never separated—humans
and things contribute to moral actions and decisions.
Moralizing Technology is an inquiry into the nature of these interactions of humans
and things, and into their implications for ethical theory and the ethics of design. My
approach, therefore, should not be read as a defense of animism—bringing spirit to
things—but as a critique of humanism. I do not claim that material objects are
‘spirited’, but I want to move away from ethical approaches that isolate and immunize
human existence from its material conditions and contexts.
This is the irony of humanism: in its radicality it loses what it aims to defend. A
hybrid approach to the relations between humans and things does not reduce human
morality, but adds to it; it shows dimensions that normally remain underexposed. It
does not excavate human responsibility by blaming cars for accidents, but expands
the ways in which we can design, implement, and use technologies in responsible
ways. Let me make this clear by replying to a few of the topics raised in the
thoughtful and provocative discussions of Moralizing Technology by Don Ihde,
Martin Peterson, and Ibo van de Poel.
Mediated Intentionality
Martin Peterson’s thorough review is a fine example of radical humanism. He first
explains why things cannot have intentionality by showing how absurd it would be to
speak of the intentions of a mountain. Things do not have intentions, Peterson claims,
but an intentional history that he finds lacking in my argumentation. Not the fact that
things help to shape practices and experiences makes them morally significant—in
that case, non-technological entities like mountains would be moral agents too—but
the fact that they have their origins in human intentions. Therefore, my theory is
“either false or misleading”. Moreover, he feels that I do not use the “ordinary” notion
of intentionality—which, for him, is “closely linked to mental states”—but a “weak”
form of intentionality that “just requires ‘directedness toward reality’.”
Apart from his remarkable characterization of the most central concept in phenomenology as “not ordinary” and “weak”, Peterson fails to see here how I aim to
make visible a close connection between human intentions for action and the technologically mediated character of human perception and experience. His critique
shows how hard it is, from a modernist-humanist point of view, to conceptualize
the interwoven character of humans and technologies. Peterson suggests that I
attribute moral intentionality to technologies, while my central claim is simply that,
in mediating how humans are directed at reality, technologies help to shape moral
intentions.
What is misleading here, in fact, is Peterson’s reductionist assumption that only
human ‘input’ can make technologies morally significant. The central example in the
book clearly shows the limitations of this humanist approach. Ultrasound was not
explicitly developed for medical diagnostic purposes, and certainly not to change
abortion practices. Still, it helped to create a new form of responsibility, because
expecting parents now explicitly have to make a decision about the lives of their
unborn children. This situation is not the result of somebody’s explicit decision; no
intentional history will help us to understand it exhaustively.
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And what is worse: refusing to conceptualize the active moral role of obstetric
ultrasound in abortion practices makes it harder to give this technology an intentional
future, in practices of design and redesign. And that is exactly what Moralizing
Technology does. Its analysis of the moral significance of technology and the
mediated character of human morality culminates in an attempt to expand the ethics
of design, enabling designers to anticipate, assess, and design moral mediations in
technology.
Hybrid Agency
Even more puzzling, from a radical humanist point of view, is the role of technologies
in moral agency. Peterson develops a complicated system to understand my claim that
the hybrid character of moral agency does not urge us to give up human responsibility.
He states that my position implies that there are in fact two moral agents responsible for
an action—firing a gun, in his example. One would be the human being shooting the
gun, and the other the assembly of human and gun, as a composite agent. And, of
course, this would be absurd: one and the same action cannot be the product of two
different entities.
My position is much less complicated, though. When we give up the idée fixe that
only autonomous beings can be moral agents, it becomes perfectly possible both to
acknowledge that one’s moral actions and decisions are technologically mediated and
to take responsibility for these actions and decisions. Technological mediations do not
make human beings powerless. To the contrary: they make it possible to live our lives
in specific ways, while we also have the ability to develop an active and critical
relation to these mediations. Nobody has to choose to have an abortion when an
ultrasound scan reveals a serious disease. Still, the mere possibility to have a scan
inalterably conditions our existence: we now have to make a decision.
This also relates directly to Peterson’s comments on my concept of freedom, which
I sharply distinguish from ‘autonomy’. While autonomy indicates the absence of
external influences, the concept of freedom that I defend takes these influences—or
technological mediations—as its starting point. Freedom, then, does not come about
by liberating oneself from the influences of technology, but by engaging in an explicit
relation with them. Developing a free relation to technology implies: understanding
its mediating power, and getting actively involved in the impact these mediations
have on one’s existence. It is remarkable that Peterson dubs this definition ‘newspeak’, complaining that “the words used by Verbeek don’t mean what they normally
mean”. In fact, my definition builds upon ‘oldspeak’ conceptions of freedom by
Isaiah Berlin and Michel Foucault. Moreover, developing new concepts has always
been the core business of philosophers.
Also Ibo van de Poel is worried about my redefinition of the concept of agency. He
wonders whether such a drastic change in ethical theory is actually needed to
understand the moral significance of technology. Why make such a conceptual mess,
when there are much tidier solutions, he seems to ask himself. Also for Van de Poel,
an example of the problems I run into is my seemingly double definition of agency.
On the one hand, I claim that agency needs to be located in assemblages of humans
and technologies, while on the other hand I seem to ascribe agency to things as well,
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as parts of these assemblages. Adding the latter form of agency, Van de Poel claims, is
a fine example of the ‘fallacy of division’: from the fact that I can think, and that my
leg is a part of myself, it does not follow that my leg can think. Things do not have
agency; rather, human agency is co-shaped by things.
This critique is certainly interesting. In fact, van de Poel addresses the question of
how to characterize the mediating role of things in moral agency. But again, my
central claim that moral agency is a hybrid affair does not imply that things are moral
agents just like humans are. This is an example of what, in turn, could be called the
fallacy of reduction. While agency cannot be limited to humans, acknowledging that
things have a share in moral agency does not make them moral agents.
Responsibility
Van de Poel argues that the main criterion here should be that agency requires
responsibility—which things obviously cannot take. But in fact, the very possibility
to take responsibility is one of the main reasons to take the role of things in moral
agency very seriously. One the one hand, we do not take responsibility in a vacuum
but in a thoroughly mediated situation, as the ultrasound example shows. Sonograms
do not 'act' on themselves, but nevertheless they fundamentally shape what we can
feel responsible for and how we can take on that responsibility. And what is more,
acknowledging this moral role of technologies makes it possible to take responsibility
for it, and to help shape it in practices of design, implementation, and use. We can
only reorganize practices around technologies when we understand the precise role
technologies have in them. Seeing the moral significance of technologies make us
more responsible, rather than less.
Precisely at this point, however, Don Ihde has his doubts. We should not overestimate our possibilities to organize and design the moral significance of things, he
states. We need to recognize the multistabilities of all technologies, and therefore the
ambiguities of designer intent. Technologies typically end up in different relations
with human beings than their designers expected, and therefore their mediating power
is hardly predictable.
Ihde is completely right here. Technological mediations are always part of humantechnology relations, which are principally unpredictable. Still, this does not make us
entirely powerless. Industrial Designers, as I show in the book, have developed
various methods to make an educated guess about possible use practices. And once
we see the phenomenon of mediation, including its moral dimensions, it becomes our
moral responsibility to make such an educated guess and to design ‘for the good’.
Mirrors and Symmetry
Don Ihde’s use of the mirror metaphor is highly interesting in this context. This
metaphor does not only make it possible to create an interesting combination of
nearness and distance between our positions. It can also be expanded to shed new
light on the issue of ‘symmetry’ between humans and nonhumans that has proven to
be the core theme in discussions about the moral significance of technology.
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The concept of symmetry comes from Bruno Latour, who claims that we should
analyze humans and nonhumans in symmetrical ways. Rather than making an a priori
distinction between them, we need to see the continuity between them. From such a
symmetrical approach, not only humans but also things ‘act’—and from there it is
only a small step towards defending that things can be moral agents as well.
Yet, this symmetry is not what I am after. And this is what distinguishes my ‘postphenomenological’ account from Actor-Network Theory, despite the many forms of
kinship that are there as well. Symmetry is what you get when you use a mirror: a
mirror image is completely symmetrical to its original, and it derives all of its main
characteristics from that original. In my approach, however, there is no symmetry but
interaction. Things are not symmetrical to humans, but together, humans and things
constitute myriad entities. In this approach, it remains very relevant to make a
distinction between humans and things—it is not the distinction between humans
and technologies that we need to depart from, but their radical separation.
Moralizing Technology, then, ultimately intends to show that Kant's "way out of
immaturity" implies that we acknowledge the moral dimension of artifacts. A mature
approach to technology does not exclude technologies from the realm of ethics. Only
by taking seriously their fundamental role in moral actions and decisions can we
better understand the character of human morality. And, more importantly, can we
take responsibility for the material world in which we live our lives.
References
Floridi, L. & J.W. Sanders. (2004). On the Morality of Artificial Agents. Minds and
Machines 14 (3), 349–79.