Technology, ethics, politics

Lecture 4: Technology and The Good Life

• Ethics is about what we owe to each other, but….

• It is also about the good life• For the longest time philosophy was about the

good life• Then the good life became privatized• But now it is slowly re-appearing on the

philosophical agenda

Privatization of the good life

• Good life issues are connected to world-views• John Rawls: world-views are comprehensive

views, that should be privatized, as they are not neutral

• Typical reaction: I respect your view, therefore I don’t have to listen to it

• But this doesn’t stop people to have ‘public’ concerns about how NEST affects their life!

Narrative turn

• Interesting: good life arguments come in narrative form

• Why: because that is the way humans convey meaning

Good Life: Pro

• Prometheus: no limits, just frontiers! Boldly go where no men went before! – “Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals

have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries. We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown” Richard Dworkin

• Technological progress is for ‘real men’, not for sissies

Good Life: ContraOpponents stress limits: A Good Life is a life that recognizes, admits,

and obeys certain limits (ethos of humility and imperfection)

1. Cognitive: Sorcerer’s apprentice

– Run-away technology

2. Religious: Playing God

3. Normative Nature: disobeying the limits set upon us by Nature, ends up creating monsters

4. Political: creating too powerful machines will have them rebel against us

5. Anthropological: human self-realization is impossible in a human-made environment. Humans need ‘otherness’.

1. The sorcerer’s apprentice

• In their hubris, humans unleash powers they cannot control.– Risk– ‘unknown unknowns’

• Partial solution: the Precautionary Principle urges us to acknowledge our cognitive limitations– The burden of proof lies with the optimists

2. Playing God

• Key virtue in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: obeying God

• Obeying God = Accepting His (mysterious) ways, praising his Wisdom and Omnipotence

• Augustine: Thirst of Knowledge = Sin (Adam and Eve!)

• Trying to improve His Perfect Creation = Ultimate Sin

However (counters the protagonist)

• God created humans in His Image• If God is a Creator, he wants us to be creators

• Or: he left the Creation unfinished, and wants us to finish it– By choosing to be good– By making the world a good place to live

Synthetic biology

• There is no Masterplan; God is an engineer, but a rather amateurish one……

• Life sciences show how the Creation is not Perfect and Finished, but always in evolution: Nature ““produces jerry-rigged contraptions that respond to short-term design problems with no forethought for what will happen down the line.” (Buchanan)

3. Natural limits

• Emerging technologies can lead to disrupting the natural order

• Or better: the symbolic order• Symbolic order = the whole of conceptual

distinctions we apply to make sense of the world

Taming monsters (Smits 2002)

• Four strategies: different degrees of tolerance towards the disruptive:

• Monster exorcism– Hang all homo’s! Bann all GMO’s! – Violent strategy

• Monster adaptation– Transforming the monster into something that fits

the existing categories– Biodegradable plastics

• Monster embracing:• Projecting all kinds of

utopian hopes on the new technology

• Monster assimilation– Mutual adaptation of the monster and the cultural

(including the moral) categories

Political limits

• The relation between humans and technology is modeled on the ancient master-slave hierarchy.

• And like the master always has to fear that the slave will rise up, moderns have to fear the rise of the machine

• Especially if we make the machine too powerful

Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)the stoker is almost as much a cook for his engine as our

own cooks for ourselves. Consider also the colliers and pitmen and coal merchants and coal trains, and the men who drive them, and the ships that carry coals—what an army of servants do the machines thus employ! Are there not probably more men engaged in tending machinery than in tending men? Do not machines eat as it were by mannery? Are we not ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth? daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organisation, daily giving them greater skill and supplying more and more of that self-regulating self-acting power which will be better than any intellect?

Other examples

• The conveyor belt from Modern Times• Hall (From: 2001) • The Terminator…..• ……….

But…..

• The fear mirrors the original fantasy of mastery

• Cannot we do without slaves?• Maybe accept that we have a relation with

technologies, without one necessarily dominating the other?

• For example: – Accepting techno-moral change– Assimilating monsters

5. Anthropological limits

• Too much technological control is not good for humans

• Aldous Huxley (1932) Brave New World• Fantasy of Perfect Control over the World• Including over human beings• Core message: technology dehumanizes us by

alienating us from our human core

Why is everyone happy in BNW?

• Unhappiness is the result of frustrated desire• In Brave New World:

– Everyone gets what (s)he wants– What you cannot get, you don’t want– Thus: no one is ever frustrated

• Who of you would like to live in that world?– Or be plugged in to the Happiness machine?– Or to the Matrix?

Why is BNW not attractive?

• Who of you is sometimes unsatisfied by your partner?

• Would you rather have a love-bot?• Most people would find this boring: you can

only have a relation with an Other• Perfect technological control leads to

metaphysical solitude• We crave ‘otherness’. Otherness manifests

itself as resistance to our wish to control

Do we live in BNW?

• We cannot go back to pre-technological times• The survival of humankind will depend on

technological control• Moderns no longer inhabit a biotope, but

rather a technotope• According to some, we are already on the way

of turning into cyborgs• Should we therefore abandon all hope?

No, perfect control is an illusion

• Because even a human-made world constantly resists our desire to control it– Environmental problems– New technologies permanently disrupting our

routines– New technologies creating new problems

Conclusion

• It is general stories like these that shape our response to new technologies

• That is unavoidable• But we should remain critical and aware of

their possible limitations

• Thank you for your attention