How Do Technological Artefacts Embody Moral Values?

How Do Technological Artefacts Embody Moral Values?

Klenk, M.B.O.T. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology)

2020

According to some philosophers of technology, technology embodies moral values in virtue of its functional properties and the intentions of its designers. But this paper shows that such an account makes the values supposedly embedded in technology epistemically opaque and that it does not allow for values to change. Therefore, to overcome these shortcomings, the paper introduces the novel Affordance Account of Value Embedding as a superior alternative. Accordingly, artefacts bear affordances, that is, artefacts make certain actions likelier given the circumstances. Based on an interdisciplinary perspective that invokes recent moral anthropology, I conceptualize affordances as response-dependent properties. That is, they depend on intrinsic as well as extrinsic properties of the artefact. We have reason to value these properties. Therefore, artefacts embody values and are not value-neutral, which has practical implications for the design of new technologies.

Artefacts
Ethics of technology
Moral value
Response-dependence
Value embedding

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:5462a45d-2b99-48e8-a720-2052d3113658

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00401-y

2210-5433

Philosophy & Technology, 34 (3), 525-544

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2020 M.B.O.T. Klenk