# Some Misunderstandings About the Moral Significance of Technology  ## Metadata - Author: [[Peter-Paul Verbeek]] - Full Title: Some Misunderstandings About the Moral Significance of Technology - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses how technologies are often misunderstood to have moral agency, emphasizing that moral practices are a result of interactions between humans and technology. It highlights the need to recognize the mediating role of technology in shaping moral actions and decisions, urging for a responsible understanding of the moral significance of technology. Ultimately, the text argues that human morality is intricately connected to technologies and that acknowledging this relationship is crucial for ethical design and decision-making. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/165666154 - Source File: Some Misunderstandings About the Moral Significance of Technology Peter-Paul Verbeek.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > The core of my argument will be that we need to develop an alternative account of the relations between humans and technologies in ethical theory – an account that allows us to understand how moral practices are coproductions of humans and technologies, rather than exclusively human affairs in which technologies can only play instrumental or obstructive roles. Human beings and technological artifacts have become so closely connected in our everyday lives, that even our moral perceptions and decisions have become technologically mediated. Only by recognizing this interweaving of humans and technologies can we take responsibility for the ways in which technologies have an impact on society and on human exis- tence – in practices of technology design, implementation, and use. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw4z28zeq0cs6jgm99687gh6)) > Why would it make sense to speak about technologies in moral terms in the fi rst place? When ethics is so obviously a human affair, why bother giving the nonhu- mans a place in ethics as well? The reasons for this expansion of ethics are actu- ally quite understandable if one takes into account the profound infl uence that various technologies have come to have on the decisions and actions of human beings. Navigation systems in cars help us not to exceed the speed limit, antenatal diagnostic technologies inform moral decisions about abortion, telecare devices reorganize relations of care and the moral dimensions connected to it. If ethics is about the question of ‘how to act?’ or ‘how to live?’, and technologies help to shape how we act and live, there is good reason to claim that technologies have explicit moral signifi cance. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw4zd6ktdnmgzj16qzcnqgqd)) > The position I will defend here is a bit more radical; I will show that technologies are intrinsically involved in moral decision- making. This does not imply, to be sure, that they are moral agents themselves. But it does imply that moral agency needs to be understood as a fundamentally hybrid affair. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw4zesvbw733880qrywqgwxq)) > A relevant framework to analyze the moral signifi cance of technology is offered by the postphenomenological approach of ‘mediation theory’ (Verbeek 2005 ). This approach studies technologies as mediators between humans and reality. The central idea is that technologies-in-use help to establish relations between human beings and their environment. In these relations, technologies are not merely silent ‘inter- mediaries’ but active ‘mediators’ that help to constitute the entities that have a rela- tionship ‘through’ the technology. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw4zjv6avfecgk3g28jmq3gv)) > The paradigmatic example I elaborate in my recent book ‘Moralizing Technology’ (Verbeek 2011 ) is antenatal diagnostic technology, such as obstetric ultrasound. This technology is not merely a neutral interface between expecting parents and ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw4zknmbsve5bradj1wkx5qq)) > 78 P.-P. Verbeek their unborn child: it helps to constitute what this child is for its parents and what the parents are in relation to their child. By revealing the unborn in terms of vari- ables that mark its health condition, like the fold in the nape of the neck of the fetus, ultrasound ‘translates’ the unborn child into a possible patient, congenital diseases in preventable forms of suffering (provided that abortion is an available option) and expecting a child into choosing for a child, also after the conception. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw4zkk23fj508amzg0rrp45b)) > . By making the fetus present in a highly specifi c way, obstetric ultrasound substantially informs moral decisions regarding abortion, without determining them. 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. We do not make moral decisions about abortion as autonomous sub- jects, 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw4zpp14jdc45j2zx0216q65)) > Technologies are morally charged, so to speak. They embody a mate- rial form of morality, and when used, the coupling of this ‘material morality’ and human moral agency results in a ‘composite’ moral agency. This implies that technological artifacts should, indeed, be located in the realm of moral agency: moral agency cannot be understood without taking into account how it takes shape through technological mediations. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw4zv58ajgym92r163mpc1zq)) > Let me fi rst state that it is in fact hard to fi nd scholars who seriously defend the thesis that technologies can be full-blown human agents just like human beings are. To be sure, there are scholars – including myself – who explicitly speak about tech- nologies in terms of moral agency. But it is a true misunderstanding to think that this implies that technologies in themselves ‘have’ a form of agency that we normally only attribute to human beings. Rather, these scholars propose to reconceptualize the very concept of agency itself, in view of the close intertwinement of human beings and technological artifacts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw5529m6b5f0qj7rk0arxwkb)) > To be sure, human beings do not always need to obey the forces that are exerted upon them. But even when humans ignore or resist the impact of technologies, these technologies can still have a profound moral impact. The introduction of antenatal diagnostic tests, for example, has defi nitively changed human responsibilities regarding pregnancy. Even the decision not to use these tests has become a moral decision now, as some ‘wrongful life’ cases show in which children sue their par- ents or doctors for the fact that the were born rather than having been aborted. Even technologies that are not used can have an impact on human morality (Verbeek 2011 ). Human agency, therefore, and in many cases also our moral agency, has become intertwined with material objects. All those ethicists who are complaining about the moral decay of our society, according to Latour, should learn to include things in their refl ections; when these are taken into account as well, the world appears to be choc-a-bloc with morality. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw5545am9r706jx70jb5jjvz)) > This analysis does not imply, though, that scholars like Latour claim that material objects, ‘have’ moral agency just like human subjects do. In fact, the very question whether artifacts can be moral agents originates from a very specifi c metaphysical orientation: the modernist separation of human subjects and nonhuman objects that scholars like Latour intend to overcome. To be sure: Latour does speak about tech- nologies in terms of moral agency. But anyone who is a bit familiar with the meta- physics of Actor-Network Theory will immediately realize 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 enti- ties can they become meaningful and relevant: only networks turn entities into actors. Speed bumps can never be ‘moral agents’ in themselves, but only in relation to human beings whose morality is affected by these things. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw556y4sqsaatskwf2qh672c)) > When we give up this separa- tion, a refreshingly new picture emerges. And this is exactly what happens in various contemporary approaches in philosophy of technology. Such approaches urge us to see moral agency not as inherent in things, but as the outcome of complex interac- tions between humans and things. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw5585ga8w4tc87c7e58gb9z)) > Agency is distributed over humans and things, as it were: if one of the two were missing, this type of agency could not exist. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw55cc99ekavc2p2hyftrcx7)) > The question remains, though, whether this explanation can be a real assurance for critics of the ‘morality of technology’ thesis. The argumentation above, after all, does not only imply that things do not ‘have’ moral agency – the most crucial point is: neither do humans. Morality is a hybrid affair; it cannot be located exclusively in things, but not in humans either. 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. Because such a ‘humanist approach’ starts from a radical separation between subjects and objects, it forces us to choose between either reserving moral agency to the human domain or to claim that nonhuman entities can be moral agents as well. In the real world in which we all live, though, such purifi ed subjects and objects do not exist. Actual moral actions and decisions take place in complex and intricate connections between humans and things, which have moral agency as a result rather than as a pre-given ontological characteristic. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw55ezsfz7a2t7chv0srdcq1)) > This directedness is an intrinsic element of the relations between human beings and their world – while these relations can be conceptualized in various ways, e.g. in terms of consciousness (Husserl), or perception (Merleau-Ponty), or being-in-the-world (Heidegger). When technologies mediate these relations, this can have moral implications. After all, technologies then help to shape human interpretations of the world on the basis of which human beings make decisions. Sonograms help to shape our moral decisions regarding abortion, just like warning signals from our navigation system help us decide how fast we drive. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw55nmdvm0b276p96eyz2rk0)) - Note: I think this can be understood as technology allowing for new things for us to direct our attention at. > When this occurs, a second defi nition of intentionality starts to play a role: the human capacity to have intentions, to act purposively. By mediating how we inter- pret our unborn children or our own driving behavior, technologies help to shape the moral decisions we make. Human intentions, including moral intentions, can be technologically mediated because technologies help to shape our intentional ‘direct- edness’ at the world. Sonograms make humans responsible for things they were not responsible for before; it has now become a conscious decision to let a child be born with Down’s syndrome, for instance. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw55sv8v7fgqdxbbpz8wpgdx)) > . Only because human beings can intentionally design things in specifi c ways, things can be the ‘carriers’ of human intentions. Not the fact that things help to shape practices and experiences makes them morally signifi cant – 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. Therefore, Peterson concludes that the idea of ‘technological intentionality’ is “either false or misleading”. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw55v2n2gqfk30jknnprdcr9)) > Peterson fi ghts against the idea that technologies can ‘have’ intentionality, while my claim is simply that, in mediating how humans are directed at reality, technologies help to shape moral intentions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw55vrm90f239tefsjnwg00f)) > To be sure: this does not imply that this morally mediating role of technology is undesirable. Rather, the example illustrates that new technologies always create a new moral landscape in which human beings have to learn to orient themselves. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw56g9kfc7zfb8qmnc2d1yra)) > Current technological developments, to add to this, bring about an even more complicated relation between technology and intentionality than present in the ultrasound example. Some contemporary technologies cannot simply be ‘used’ anymore, but start to merge with our physical environment and with our own bodies. Ambient Intelligence technologies, for instance, result in ‘smart environments’, that actively register and monitor events, and react and intervene accordingly. Smart beds in geriatric hospitals are good examples here; they detect if patients fall out of bed or step out of their beds. When such smart environments are explicitly designed to infl uence people’s decisions and behavior, as is the case with so-called ‘persua- sive technologies’, they embody a truly new form of moral signifi cance. An inter- esting example here is the ‘persuasive mirror’. This mirror, which is in fact a fl at screen monitor with a built-in camera, is designed to persuade its users to adopt a healthier lifestyle by presenting them with an image of how they will look in the future if they would stick to their current pattern of living (Knight 2005 ). 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw56jd8jpfff1dbv2frfdkth)) > Intentionality, then, has a complex relation with technology. The conclusion that we need to reserve the concept for humans simply fails to do justice to the manifold ways in which human intentions are intricately connected to technologies – ranging from mediated and induced intentions to the fully-fl edged hybrid intentions of human-technology assemblies like people with brain implants. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw56ma5kw574s27hgdkwzp05)) > Again, the central idea in the approach of moral mediation is not to attribute freedom to things, but to include the mediating role of things in our notion of freedom. From a radical modernist point of view, it is quite a challenge to con- sider technologically mediated actions as forms of moral agency. After all, if our behavior is infl uenced by technologies, we cannot consider this behavior to be the result of autonomous decisions anymore. Can we call it a moral action if some- body slows down near a school because there is a speed bump on the road? This question is only relevant, though, if freedom is understood as negative freedom, to use Isaiah Berlin’s concept: the absence of external infl uences (Berlin 1979 ). Such a conception of freedom is only meaningful if human beings are understood as autonomous subjects, living in a world of external objects. When human beings are understood in terms of their relations to the world, though, this concept of auton- omy becomes too narrow. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw56ref7620669nnbr403y26)) > Isaiah Berlin’s concept of ‘positive freedom’ is much more relevant here: free- dom is not freedom-from but freedom-to. It is not the absence of constraints, but the presence of the capability to act. 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 rela- tion to obstetric ultrasound. Human beings are no helpless victims of mediating technologies. We can get actively involved in how these technologies have an impact on us. By critically examining how technologies help to shape situations of choice and frameworks of interpretation, it becomes possible to take responsibility for one’s technologically mediated agency. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw56vezm0mggf7xgx9r8vy5g)) > . Rather than to keep asking the question whether artifacts can be agents just like humans can, mediation theory simply recognizes that humans and artifacts can have distinct roles in the constitution of moral agency. From the perspective of moral mediation it is perfectly possible to acknowledge that one’s moral actions and decisions are technologically mediated without giv- ing 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 specifi c 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 seri- ous disease. Still, the mere possibility to have a scan inalterably conditions our existence: we now have to make a decision. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw5714sr9hfakvgzkw3ezbas)) > This subtle difference between ‘separating’ humans and nonhumans on the one hand versus making a ‘distinction’ between them on the other, makes all the differ- ence in discussions about the moral signifi cance of technologies. The central ques- tion in these discussions should not be: can technologies be moral agents just like ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw5794dhs69g5jta92kt18a3)) > humans are? Rather, what really matters is: what role do technologies play in morality? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hw5798mmvwzfpn94ns7z938m))