Technology Development as a Normative Practice

Technology Development as a Normative Practice: A Meaning-Based Approach to Learning About Values in Engineering—Damming as a Case Study

Nia, Mahdi G. (Student TU Delft)
Harandi, Mehdi F. (University of Tehran)
de Vries, M.J. (TU Delft Science Education and Communication; TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology)

2017

Engineering, as a complex and multidimensional practice of technology development, has long been a source of ethical concerns. These concerns have been approached from various perspectives. There are ongoing debates in the literature of the philosophy of engineering/technology about how to organize an optimized view of the values entailed in technology development processes. However, these debates deliver little in the way of a concrete rationale or framework that could comprehensively describe different types of engineering values and their multi-aspect interrelations in real engineering practices. Approaching engineering values from a meaning-based perspective, as in this paper, can be a reliable method of tackling such a controversial problem. This paper therefore proposes that technology development be considered a systemic normative practice and attempts to provide a comprehensive view of various built-in values, their different origins and features, and a way of prioritizing them in real engineering processes. Studying two cases of the Zayandeh Rood Dam and the Abbasi Dam will lead to practical insights into how to understand norms in technology development and incorporate them into engineering practice.

Dooyeweerd’s ontological account
Normative constitutive rules
Normative practice
Normative regulative rules
Normativity
Technology development

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4c394319-25c8-4d0e-a910-0605f46f9ef3

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-017-9999-7

1353-3452

Science & Engineering Ethics, 1-28

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2017 Mahdi G. Nia, Mehdi F. Harandi, M.J. de Vries