A# created ```dataview LIST WITHOUT ID file.link FROM -"windsurf" WHERE file.cday = date(this.file.name) AND !startswith(file.folder, "windsurf") SORT file.cday ASC ``` # modified ```dataview LIST WITHOUT ID file.link FROM -"windsurf" WHERE file.mday = date(this.file.name) AND !startswith(file.folder, "windsurf") SORT file.mday ASC ``` --- # [[diary and thoughts]] #thought #diary --- # Notes # [[Speaker's Notes]]: Verbeek on the [[Moral Significance]] of Technology ([[Philosophy of Technology]]) --- #teaching/technology-course ## Slide 1: [[Title Slide]] **[[Some Misunderstandings About]] the [[Moral Significance]] of Technology** These notes will focus on Verbeek's response to critics who fear that acknowledging technology's role in morality somehow threatens human dignity and responsibility. [[The article]] is structured around clearing up specific misunderstandings, so emphasise that we're not attacking anyone—we're clarifying a position that's often misread. --- ## Slide 2: What People Fear **Context from article:** Verbeek mentions he was asked "So you really think we should blame cars for traffic accidents?" at least once a month during his book tour. The resistance is visceral and immediate. Note that Verbeek explicitly says: "In their view, ethics is an exclusively human affair; if we allow technologies to be part of it, we gamble with the crown jewel of human civilization." **Additional quote to mention:** "To be followed immediately by arguments like: 'If we are going to blame things for evil practices, human beings would have a comfortable place to hide themselves!' And: 'If technologies are allowed to influence our moral actions and decisions, we will inevitably develop an undesirable form of moral laziness!'" **Tricky concept alert:** Students may initially share these worries. Don't dismiss them—acknowledge they're intuitive. The whole article is about showing why they're based on misunderstandings. --- ## Slide 3: What Scholars Actually Claim The key distinction: claiming that technologies are "involved in" [[moral agency]] is NOT the same as claiming they ARE [[moral agents]] themselves. This is the central misunderstanding the entire article addresses. **Additional material:** Verbeek writes: "My claim is that the resistance against [[the idea]] that technologies are morally significant is in fact a resistance against [[the need]] to give up the modernist idea that actions and decisions can only be moral when they are the sole product of individual human choice without external influences." **Connection to make:** This modernist idea of the autonomous moral subject is actually quite recent historically. Medieval thinkers, for instance, had very different frameworks. But we'll return to this. --- ## Slide 4: What Is Mediation? **Tricky concept: Mediation vs Determination.** Students often think: if technology influences my decision, then I'm not really deciding—I'm being controlled. But mediation is between complete neutrality and complete determination. Technologies shape the space of possibilities and how we perceive them, but don't eliminate choice. **Additional quote:** "The moral question of 'how to act' gets answered not only on the basis of the input of human beings but also of nonhuman entities. Morality appears to be a coproduction of humans and nonhumans." **Discussion question:** Think about your smartphone. In what ways does it mediate your social relationships without determining them? Can you identify specific norms that have changed (response times to messages, acceptability of photographing moments, etc.)? Are these changes you explicitly chose, or did they emerge through use? --- ## Slide 5: The Ultrasound Example This is Verbeek's paradigmatic example throughout the book and article. Spend time here—it's concrete and powerful. **[[Additional detail]] from article:** Verbeek emphasises that ultrasound technology was NOT originally developed for antenatal diagnostics, and certainly not to change abortion practices. This is important because it shows how moral mediations can emerge without anyone intending them. "Even technologies that are not used can have an impact on human morality" - he mentions 'wrongful life' cases where children sue parents/doctors for being born rather than aborted. The mere existence of the technology creates new moral responsibilities. **Quote to use:** "We do not make moral decisions about abortion as autonomous subjects, but neither are we steered by technology as if we were determined objects. Morality is technologically mediated: it takes shape in technologically mediated relations between humans and reality." **Tricky concept:** "Translation" - the ultrasound doesn't just show the foetus, it translates it into something else (a patient, a set of data points, a medical condition). This is different from neutral observation. --- ## Slide 6: Three Positions on Technology & Morality **Pedagogical note:** These three positions form a spectrum. Make clear that Verbeek thinks the instrumental and situational views are insufficient, but they're not absurd—they just don't go far enough. **Additional context:** Verbeek mentions that "Pitt in his contribution to this book argues, one can see this significance as purely instrumental" and "Illies and Meijers attempt to see morality as a human affair that is technologically situated." These are other philosophers in the same volume who disagree with Verbeek's stronger position. The term "hybrid" [[moral agency]] is key—it means agency that cannot be cleanly divided into human and technological components. --- ## Slide 7: The Traditional Picture **Conceptual point:** This modernist dualism isn't just an abstract philosophical position—it structures how we think about responsibility in law, policy, design. Verbeek is arguing we need to question this fundamental framework. **Additional quote:** "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 whether things, just like humans, can be moral agents." **Discussion question:** If we accept this modernist picture, what follows? Can we make sense of how technologies like social media have changed political discourse? Or would we have to say: "Twitter is just a neutral tool; humans chose to use it for misinformation"? --- ## Slide 8: What Distributed Agency Means **Tricky concept:** "Distributed agency" doesn't mean agency is cut up into pieces that humans and technologies each possess separately. Rather, agency emerges from the assemblage. If you remove either humans or technologies from the speed bump scenario, that particular form of agency (slowing near schools) doesn't exist. **Additional material:** Verbeek writes: "Each in their own way—distinct, but not separated—humans and things contribute to moral actions and decisions. Reducing ethics to an exclusively human affair leaves us with a drastically impoverished world." Note the distinction: distinct but not separated. We can still differentiate humans from technologies (they have different properties, capabilities, etc.) without treating them as belonging to completely separate ontological realms. **Important clarification:** "Defending the idea that things have moral significance, therefore, should not be understood as a defence of animism but rather as a critique of humanism." --- ## Slide 9: Bruno Latour and Symmetry **Context:** Latour is a sociologist/anthropologist who developed Actor-Network Theory (ANT). His work is influential but controversial. Verbeek both draws on and distances himself from Latour. **Additional quote:** Latour says "all those ethicists who are complaining about the moral decay of our society should learn to include things in their reflections; when these are taken into account as well, the world appears to be choc-a-bloc with morality." **Key point from article:** "But anyone who is a bit familiar with the metaphysics of Actor-Network Theory will immediately realise that this does not imply that things can be moral agents in themselves. The central idea in Latour's approach, after all, is that no entity can be something 'in itself'. Only in relations to other entities can they become meaningful and relevant: only networks turn entities into actors." **Pedagogical note:** This is worth emphasising because critics often attribute to Latour (and Verbeek) the view that things ARE agents in themselves. But ANT specifically denies this—agency is always relational. --- ## Slide 10: Two Meanings of Intentionality **Tricky concept:** These two meanings of intentionality are often conflated. The phenomenological sense (directedness, aboutness) is more fundamental. All conscious states are "about" something or "directed at" something—you can't just "fear" in general, you fear something; you can't "hope" in general, you hope for something. The purposive sense (having intentions, planning) builds on this but is more specific. **Additional context:** This comes from phenomenology—Brentano, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger. If students have read any phenomenology, connect to that. If not, don't get bogged down in the tradition—focus on the basic idea that consciousness is always directed. **Discussion question:** Consider Google Search. How does it mediate your directedness toward the world? It shapes what you see, what seems relevant, how information is organised. Does this in turn shape your purposive intentions (what you decide to do with that information)? --- ## Slide 11: "Intendere" = To Give Direction **The mountain objection:** This is from Martin Peterson's critique. It's worth presenting because it seems like a strong objection. Mountains do affect how climbers act and decide, but we wouldn't call them morally significant. Why are technologies different? **Verbeek's response (from article):** "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 their impact has its origins in human intentions." **But then Verbeek complicates this:** Even this response is too simple, because some moral mediations emerge without explicit design intention (as the ultrasound example shows). So we can't reduce technological moral significance entirely to "intentional history." **Tricky concept:** This section shows how Verbeek navigates between two poles: (1) technologies are just neutral objects like mountains, and (2) technologies fully "have" intentions. Neither extreme is right. --- ## Slide 12: When Mediation Emerges Unintended **Additional quote:** "The technology of ultrasound was not explicitly developed for medical diagnostic purposes, and certainly not to change abortion practices. But as soon as it got to be used to make visible the foetus in the womb, it dramatically changed moral practices and decisions regarding pregnancy." **Key insight:** This creates "new forms of responsibility." What was once fate (having a child with a congenital condition) is now choice. And crucially: "Even the decision not to use the technology is an explicit choice." **Point to emphasise:** This is why limiting our analysis to designer intentions is inadequate. Moral mediations can emerge through use contexts, combinations with other technologies, cultural uptake, etc. This is also why we need an "intentional future"—we can't just look backwards at design intentions; we need to actively engage with mediation going forward. **Discussion question:** Can you think of other technologies where moral mediations emerged that designers didn't intend? Social media and political polarisation? GPS and spatial cognition? Dating apps and relationship formation? --- ## Slide 13: Contemporary Technologies: More Complex **Context:** Verbeek distinguishes three levels of technological involvement in intentionality: 1. Mediated intentions (ultrasound—technology shapes how we perceive, and thus what we intend) 2. Induced intentions (persuasive technologies—technology actively tries to make us form certain intentions) 3. Hybrid intentions (brain implants—technology becomes part of the cognitive/neural substrate of intention formation) **Additional material on persuasive mirror:** This technology "presents users with an image of how they will look in the future if they would stick to their current pattern of living." It's explicitly designed to change behaviour by affecting how people see themselves. Verbeek's point: "The intentions of people using technologies like this are not so much 'mediated' as they are 'induced'. They are not the result of 'using' a technology—rather, technologies use human beings here to do their work." **Tricky concept:** "Technologies use humans" might sound like mere rhetoric, but there's a real phenomenological difference between using a tool (hammer, pen) and being in a relationship with a technology that monitors and responds to you (smart home, persuasive technology). --- ## Slide 14: Deep Brain Stimulation Case This case is striking and worth dwelling on. It raises profound questions about identity, authenticity, and choice. **Full details from article:** Patient with Parkinson's received DBS implant. Motor symptoms improved dramatically, but behaviour became uninhibited—extramarital relationships, overspending, no awareness of behaviour change. When DBS was switched off (for medical reasons), the symptoms returned and he became bedridden and dependent, but regained awareness. He had to choose between: life with Parkinson's (bedridden but "himself") or life without symptoms but with uninhibited behaviour he couldn't control. Eventually he chose to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital where he could switch the DBS on (reducing symptoms) but be protected from himself. **Quote from article:** "In this case, moral intentions—for instance regarding adultery, dealing with money, et cetera—are not so much mediated by technologies. Rather, the intentions are the product of a hybrid entity, half human, half technology. Blurring the physical boundaries between humans and technologies also results in the blurring of intentional boundaries." **Discussion question:** Was the patient with DBS on "really him"? Was he more free with the implant (able to move, engage with world) or without it (able to control behaviour, aware of himself)? What does this case tell us about the relationship between brain states, technology, and moral agency? **Tricky concept:** This pushes beyond mediation to actual hybridisation. It's not just that technology shapes how he perceives the world—the technology is part of the neural system generating intentions. --- ## Slide 15: Two Concepts of Freedom **Conceptual background:** Isaiah Berlin's distinction between negative and positive liberty is classic political philosophy. Negative liberty: freedom from interference. Positive liberty: freedom to act, capacity to do things. **Additional quote:** "From this viewpoint, mediating technologies do not take away moral agency, but rather are its basis. Obstetric ultrasound does not force parents to have an abortion when they are expecting a child with Down's syndrome; rather, their moral agency comes about in the way they develop a relation to obstetric ultrasound." **Point to stress:** Technologies create capabilities, not just constraints. The speed bump example: yes, it constrains your ability to drive fast, but you're now capable of slowing down in a way that required more conscious effort before. The ultrasound: yes, it creates pressure to make certain decisions, but you're now capable of making informed choices about genetic conditions. **Tricky concept:** Students might feel this is linguistic sleight of hand—calling constraints "capabilities." Push them: Is the ultrasound making you less free by giving you information and choices you didn't have before? In what sense were you more free when those choices weren't available? --- ## Slide 16: What Mediated Freedom Means **Key quote (already on slide as blockquote):** "A free relation to technology does not require the absence of its influence, but the presence of the ability to be actively involved in the way in which one is constituted as a moral subject." **Additional point from article:** "In fact, it is the denial of the mediating role of technologies in human freedom that makes people not free. Only when making the mediations explicit, we can develop a free relation to it—understood as positive, not as negative freedom." This is a profound inversion: denying that technology shapes us doesn't make us free—it makes us blind to how we're shaped, and thus unable to engage critically with it. **Discussion question:** Consider recommendation algorithms (Netflix, Spotify, YouTube). Does knowing how they work and consciously reflecting on their influence make you more free in your relation to them? Or does it not matter because you're shaped by them whether you're aware of it or not? --- ## Slide 17: Expanding Responsibility **Point to emphasise:** This is one of Verbeek's main practical claims. Recognising technological mediation isn't just an abstract philosophical point—it has concrete implications for design, policy, and use. **Additional material from article:** "From the perspective of moral mediation it is perfectly possible to acknowledge that one's moral actions and decisions are technologically mediated without giving up the possibility to take responsibility for these actions and decisions. Technological mediations, after all, do not make human beings powerless. On 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." **Three domains of responsibility mentioned:** - Design: "Industrial Designers, for instance, have developed various methods to make an educated guess about possible use practices." - Implementation: Consider how technologies are introduced, what training is provided, what alternative practices are maintained - Use: "Use practices can be enriched by equipping users with the ability to 'read' how the technologies they use help to shape their actions and decisions" **Discussion question:** Who should be responsible when AI hiring systems discriminate? Just the company that uses it? The programmers who built it? The users who deploy it? If we understand moral agency as distributed, how does this change our answer? --- ## Slide 18: Addressing "The Pistol Objection" This objection comes from Illies and Meijers in the same volume. It's worth presenting carefully because it seems to reduce Verbeek's position to absurdity. **The full quote from Illies and Meijers:** "In the case of a man using a pistol Verbeek would argue that the two form an association and that the man-pistol association has moral agency and is accountable. The association as such becomes blameworthy. That however, blatantly contradicts our practice of blaming and punishing. We do not (and we should not!) put the murderer plus his pistol, or the hacker plus his computer, in prison." **Verbeek's response:** This completely misunderstands the position. "From the perspective of mediation theory, however, this is quite a remarkable statement. Recognising that pistols and computers help to shape our moral actions and decisions, after all, does not imply that it should be possible to blame them for their mediating roles." **Key clarification:** "Rather than to keep asking the question whether artefacts can be agents just like humans can, mediation theory simply recognises that humans and artefacts can have distinct roles in the constitution of moral agency." **Point to make:** We already recognise that context matters for moral and legal responsibility—we distinguish between premeditated murder and manslaughter, between acting under duress and acting freely. Acknowledging that technological context matters isn't fundamentally different. It doesn't eliminate human responsibility—it enriches our understanding of what humans are responsible for. --- ## Slide 19: Limits: Multistability **Context:** Don Ihde's concept of "multistability" means that technologies don't have a single, fixed use or meaning. They can be taken up in multiple ways, stabilising differently in different contexts. **Additional quote:** "After all, the contextual and relational approach to technologies implies that we should not overestimate our possibilities to organise and design the moral significance of things. We always need to recognise the fact that all technologies are multistable." **This introduces humility:** We can't fully predict or control how technologies will be used and what mediations will emerge. BUT this doesn't make us powerless. We can make "educated guesses" and design "for the good." **Point to emphasise:** Verbeek is not claiming that designers can or should determine how technologies are used. That would be a form of technological determinism. Rather, designers have a responsibility to anticipate possible mediations and design in ways that support rather than undermine human flourishing—while recognising that technologies will always exceed their designs. **Discussion question:** Think of a technology that stabilised in an unexpected way (Twitter as political platform, SMS as teen communication tool). Could designers have anticipated this? Should they have designed differently? Or is multistability something we just have to accept and respond to? --- ## Slide 20: Not Symmetry, But Interaction **Important clarification:** Verbeek is distancing himself somewhat from Latour here. While he draws on ANT, he rejects the full "symmetry" between humans and nonhumans. **Additional quote:** "This subtle difference between 'separating' humans and nonhumans on the one hand versus making a 'distinction' between them on the other, makes all the difference in discussions about the moral significance of technologies." **The key move:** Separation = treating humans and technologies as belonging to completely different ontological categories that can't really interact. Distinction = recognising differences while seeing them as always already intertwined in practice. **Verbeek writes:** "Symmetry is what one gets when using 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 and mutual constitution." **Tricky concept:** "Mutual constitution" means humans and technologies shape each other. Technologies are designed by humans with certain intentions and cultural frameworks; but then technologies reshape human practices, perceptions, and even cognitive capacities. Neither is prior or more fundamental. --- ## Slide 21: Reframing the Question **This is the article's main intervention.** The wrong question ("Can technologies be moral agents like humans?") already presupposes the dualist framework that Verbeek wants to reject. It's like asking "Can computers really think?" when the real question is "How does computation relate to cognition?" **Quote:** "The central question in these discussions should not be: can technologies be moral agents just like humans are? Rather, what really matters is: what role do technologies play in morality?" **Point to stress:** This reframing isn't evasive—it's getting at what actually matters for ethics, design, policy, and everyday life. Understanding how technologies mediate morality helps us: - Design better technologies - Implement them more responsibly - Regulate them more appropriately - Use them more critically **Additional material:** "Understanding this morally mediating role of technologies makes it possible to deal with it in a responsible way, in practices of design and policy-making." --- ## Slide 22: A Narcissistic Wound? **Context:** This is a nice rhetorical move by Verbeek. Rather than just defending his position philosophically, he's diagnosing why it meets such resistance. The resistance isn't purely rational—it's about human self-understanding and dignity. **Freud's narcissistic wounds:** 1. Copernican: We're not at the centre of the cosmos 2. Darwinian: We're not separate from animals 3. Freudian: We're not in conscious control of ourselves 4. (Implied) Technological: We're not separate from our material environment **Quote:** "The fierce resistance against the idea that human morality is interwoven with nonhuman entities shows that these narcissistic wounds have not quite healed yet: the autonomous subject appears to be reluctant to receive yet another blow." **But Verbeek's twist:** This "blow" actually expands our moral responsibility rather than diminishing it. Just as evolutionary theory deepened our understanding of human nature, understanding technological mediation deepens our understanding of moral agency. **Discussion question:** Is there something valuable we lose if we give up the idea of the autonomous moral subject? Or is that idea already a fiction that obscures how morality actually works? --- ## Slide 23: Key Take-Aways Use this slide to synthesise the main moves: 1. **Not dualism:** Rejecting the modernist separation of humans and technologies 2. **Not determination:** Technologies mediate, not determine 3. **Distributed but differentiated:** Agency is distributed, but humans and technologies have different roles 4. **More responsibility, not less:** Understanding mediation expands what we can be responsible for 5. **Practical implications:** For design, policy, use **Final quote from article:** Verbeek ends by invoking Foucault on Enlightenment. Foucault discussed "the blackmail of the Enlightenment": if you're not entirely with it, you're against it. Verbeek writes: "From the perspective of moral mediation, the opposite is true. Maturity in our thinking about technology requires that we no longer exclude technologies from the realm of ethics." **The inversion:** Excluding technology from ethics isn't being rational and mature—it's being immature, refusing to acknowledge how our world actually works. True maturity means facing up to our technological entanglement. **Discussion question for end:** After reading Verbeek, do you think our current systems (legal, political, educational) are adequate for understanding responsibility in a technologically mediated world? What would need to change? --- ## Additional Discussion Questions (for use throughout or as extensions) 1. **On design ethics:** If designers have responsibility for how technologies mediate morality, what training should they receive? Should philosophy of technology be required for computer science students? 2. **On legal responsibility:** Should the concept of "technological mediation" change how we think about legal responsibility? If someone commits a crime using AI that made certain decisions, how do we apportion responsibility? 3. **On technological determinism:** Does Verbeek's position escape technological determinism? Or does saying "technologies mediate morality" just smuggle determinism back in under a different name? 4. **On enhancement:** How does Verbeek's framework apply to cognitive enhancement technologies (smart drugs, brain-computer interfaces, AI assistants)? If these technologies mediate our thinking, does that change whether we should use them? 5. **On withdrawal:** Is it possible or desirable to limit technological mediation in some domains of life? Should we have "technology-free zones" in schools, homes, or public spaces? Or does Verbeek's argument imply we should embrace technological mediation and just try to shape it well? 6. **On animals:** Verbeek focuses on human-technology relations. But what about animal-technology relations (GPS tracking of wildlife, technologies used in factory farming)? Does his framework extend? --- ## Common Student Confusions to Watch For 1. **Conflating mediation with determination:** Students often slide from "technology influences" to "technology controls." Keep emphasising the middle ground. 2. **Thinking Verbeek wants to blame objects:** The pistol objection shows how easy it is to misread the position. Repeatedly clarify: humans and technologies have different roles. 3. **Treating "hybrid agency" as paradoxical:** Students may think: "Either I'm responsible or the technology is—it can't be both." But that's the dualist assumption Verbeek rejects. 4. **Assuming this eliminates human uniqueness:** Students may worry that if technologies shape our morality, there's nothing special about humans anymore. Clarify: Verbeek isn't denying human distinctness, just denying radical separation. 5. **Missing the practical point:** Students sometimes get lost in abstract metaphysics. Keep bringing it back to: How does this change how we design, regulate, and use technologies? --- ## Connections to Other Thinkers (mention if relevant to your course) - **Heidegger:** The "ready-to-hand" and "present-at-hand" distinction is relevant to understanding how technologies recede into the background of practice while still shaping it. - **Merleau-Ponty:** The phenomenology of the body, especially the blind person's cane example—the cane becomes part of the perceptual system, extending the body schema. Similar to how technologies become part of our cognitive/moral "equipment." - **Foucault:** Technologies as part of "disciplinary power" and "technologies of the self." Governmentality and how subjects are formed through material practices. - **Haraway:** Cyborg theory and rejecting nature/culture, human/machine dualisms. - **Winner:** "Do artifacts have politics?"—technologies as legislation, embodying values and norms. - **Ihde:** Technological mediation in perception (hermeneutic relations, alterity relations, embodiment relations). --- ## Potential Essay Questions 1. Does Verbeek successfully avoid the charge that his position eliminates or reduces human moral responsibility? Defend your answer. 2. Is the distinction between "mediation" and "determination" coherent and meaningful? Or does it collapse under scrutiny? 3. Can Verbeek's framework account for malicious or negligent design? If technologies mediate morality, what follows for designers who create harmful mediations? 4. Compare Verbeek's position to technological determinism. Are they really different? 5. Apply Verbeek's framework to a contemporary technology (social media, facial recognition, autonomous vehicles). What does his approach reveal about the moral dimensions of this technology?