Recently I participated in a conference on technology and the future of humankind.  Some of the concerns that make that issue topical have to do with possibilities of altering human nature, either genetically or by substituting artificial for human intelligence.  Stated another way, the concerns have to do with whether or not we humans can control, or continue to control, the dangerous technologies of genetic manipulation and artificial intelligence.

    A third concern of many at that conference was another issue of control, controlling technology's negative impacts on the environment.

    One traditional way in which humans have attempted to control dangerous techniques and technologies is by formulating ethical guidelines for the behavior of technical workers.  From the classical age of Greek philosophy through the Middle Ages, the primary way of doing this was to define all technical workers as inferior, subordinating them to the supposedly wise leadership of certain members of a leisure class with the breadth of vision to decide issues (especially issues of justice) in a reasonable fashion (Medina, 1993).  Martha Nussbaum, in her book, The Fragility of Goodness (1986), has admirably summarized Greek debates about how best to do this — debates pitting Plato against popular thinkers whose arguments he summarizes (and challenges) in the Protagoras, and pitting Aristotle against Plato.

    Nussbaum ends up siding with Aristotle, and her reasons for doing so can be helpful in dealing with our concerns here.  Much of her book focuses on Greek tragedies — of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides — rather than on the arguments of the philosophers.  And her favoring of Aristotle's view of ethics, in the end, is at least partly motivated by a belief that his views better capture what was best in the Greek culture of the classical period.  The fundamental issue is revealed in Nussbaum's subtitle, Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, and here is her opening summary:

    It was evident to all the thinkers with whom we shall be concerned that the good life for a human being must to some extent, and in some ways, be self-sufficient, immune to the incursions of luck. . . .

    This book will be an examination of the aspiration to rational self-sufficiency in Greek ethical thought:  the aspiration to make the goodness of a good human life safe from luck through the controlling power of reason.

And Nussbaum ends this way:

Our own Aristotelian inquiry cannot claim to have answered our original questions [about luck and ethics] once for all in favor of an Aristotelian ethical conception. . . .[But Euripedes'] Hecuba leaves us with an appropriate image for [the] further work [that needs to be done].  In place of the story of salvation through new arts [the Protagoras], in place of the stratagems of the hunter and the solitary joy of the godlike philosopher [Plato], we are left with a new (but also very old), picture of deliberation and of writing.  We see a group of sailors, voyaging unsafely.  They consult with one another and take their bearings from that rock, which casts . . . its shadow on the sea.

    One aspect of Nussbaum's discussion that links her reflections to contemporary technological concerns is her discussion of techne (she often seems to prefer "craft" to "technique" or "art" as her favored translation) as a means of dealing with tuche or luck.  She heads her discussion of Plato's Protagoras, "A Science of Practical Reasoning," with this quote:

Every circumstance by which the condition of an individual can be influenced, being remarked and inventoried, nothing . . . [is] left to chance, caprice, or unguided discretion, everything being surveyed and set down in dimension, number, weight, and measure (Jeremy Bentham, Pauper Management Improved).

These proto-humans (for their existence is so far more bestial than human) would soon have died off, victims of starvation, overexposure, the attacks of stronger beasts.  Then the kindness of Prometheus (god named for the foresight and planning that his gifts make possible) granted to these creatures, so exposed to tuche, the gift of the technai.  House-building, farming, yoking and taming, metal-working, shipbuilding, hunting; prophecy, dream-divination, weather-prediction, counting and calculating; articulate speech and writing; the practice of medicine . . . with all these arts they preserved and improved their lives.  Human existence became safer, more predictable; there was a measure of control over contingency.

    Nussbaum's focus is on tuche or (bad) luck in ancient Greece though she clearly thinks the lessons to be learned there are relevant for the ages.  What means, on the other hand, have recent thinkers explicitly proposed for dealing with misfortunes associated with modern science and technology?  I think they can be summed up under four broad categories (as long as we are willing to entertain the possibility of overlaps):

1.  Technology Assessment:

    This has been the technical experts' method of choice.  It has a great many variations, both in design and in execution, but a brief and generic summary is possible.  One textbook, which attempted to summarize the state of the art at the beginning of the popularity of the technology assessment movement in the USA (in the 1970s), organizes the method around ten strategies:  1. problem definition; 2. technology description; 3. technology forecast; 4. social description; 5. social forecast; 6. impact identification; 7. impact analysis; 8. impact evaluation; 9. policy analysis; and 10. communication of results (Porter, et al. 1980).

    This bare-bones skeleton can easily mask the extraordinary difficulties involved.  Any sort of forecasting is difficult, and technological forecasting is no easier.  One leader in the field, Joseph Coates, is quoted as identifying not just first-order and second-order consequences of a new technology (TV), but third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order consequences!  And so the problems or difficulties mount.

    In actual assessments — for instance, by the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, during the roughly twenty years of its official existence — impact analysis often ended up being restricted to economic impact assessments using the economists' technique of cost-benefit analysis (sometimes risk-cost-benefit analysis).  Even aside from the obvious difficulty of quantifying costs and benefits in monetary terms — along with the further difficulty of quantifying people's values or choices in the same terms — this approach is fraught with other difficulties.  For example, deciding what count as internal or external costs (externalities); settling on a discount rate for future costs; leaving ultimate decisions to officials who can ignore everything said in the assessment; etc.  And of course the obvious problem already mentioned, that of reducing everything to economic choices and values, is absolutely fundamental.

    Some authors have attempted to put an ethical coloring on the method, linking it or even equating it with an ethical Utilitarianism (usually with value assignments transcending the purely monetary).  Others, worried about the limitations of utilitarianism as a defensible ethical system, have attempted to maintain its broad outlines but correct its fundamental limitations by making non-consequentialist assumptions, such as (especially) egalitarian rules of justice, which would trump some consequentialist assessments (Shrader-Frechette, 1985 and 1991).

    Other expertocrat assessors have attempted to make other compromises between consequentialist assessments and ethical rules—and one of these will be described later.

    Still others have eschewed any appeal to ethics, claiming to leave any alleged inequities arising from expert assessors' judgments to the democratic political process for rectification (Florman, 1981).  This amounts to a compromise, not with ethical rules for the control of technologies, but with politics as the preferred method.

2.  Proposals for Ethical Rules as Limits on Technology (or Particular Technologies):

    I have, before (Durbin, 1992), considered a short list of four or five ethical approaches to the control of technological problems.  In addition to Shrader-Frechette (just mentioned), I listed Hans Jonas, some Heideggerians, and some Ellulians.  To that list, I would now add Carl Mitcham (who has recently added ethical concerns to his metaphysical concerns) and also Hans Lenk.

    Jonas is the best known (see especially his 1984) ethics-of-technology advocate, on the basis of his avowedly post-Kantian "categorical imperative of fear or caution" in the face of such new human powers as biotechnology.

    Neo-Heideggerian (or post-Heideggerian) Albert Borgmann (1984, 1992; see chapter II) is less concerned with new moral rules than he is with "focal things and practices" that offer a counter to the consumerist Zeitgeist of our technological age.  Others have seen similarities between this approach and the new communitarianism in ethics (see Bellah, et al., 1986).

    Ellulians, often conservative Christians but not necessarily so (see Hottois, 1984, 1988), offer something akin to religious existentialism as a reply to the excesses of technology — a kind of "just say no" resistant attitude (see Wenneman, 1990).

    Mitcham, in his more metaphysical writings (see his 1994), has always seemed to favor a humanistic/romantic resistance against the "engineering approach" to problem solving; this resistance clearly borrows from Ellul and is similar to Borgmann's approach.  But now that he has explicitly taken it upon himself to produce a "high-tech ethics" (forthcoming), he is more willing to preach a gospel of cooperation between engineers and technical experts, on one hand, and humanistic and other critics — along with ordinary citizens concerned about controlling technology's bad effects.

    The common theme in all of these approaches is that what we need to depend on for the control of technology is moral rules, or good moral character, or exemplary moral behavior (perhaps especially on the part of technical experts).

    Hans Lenk (e.g., 1987 and 1991) carries this approach to an extreme with his proposal that we acknowledge the multiple levels of individual and collective contributions to technological activities and assign specific (kinds and levels of) responsibilities to each (to the extent possible).  In this venture, he has found willing listeners in the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, the main German engineering professional society (see Lenk, 1992 and 1997).

    I want to pause a moment now to look at what our chances would be if we adopted this approach to controlling biotechnology or expert systems — including such feared negative consequences as cloned or otherwise genetically engineered superhumans.

    The key here (as in chapter II) is to be found in the fact that ours is a technological culture (see Berger and colleagues, 1966 and 1973).  "Modernized" cultures — in spite of claims put forward by postmodern critics — continue to be dominated by the twin features of technological production (often, today, supertechnologized in terms of computerization and automation) and bureaucracy (also almost always computer-supported today).  This leads to consequences for individual and collective lifestyles in high-tech societies — separation of work from private life, numerous scripted roles in both, etc. — but also to the fact that "modernized" cultural values are transmitted by what Berger and colleagues call "secondary carriers."  These include, especially, education — typically for a long time and to a high level if one is to contribute productively — and the mass media, including today the electronic media.  So today, if one wants new ethical rules to have an influence on large numbers of the expert citizens and workers who might have some hope of controlling the computerized milieux in which they work (and, often, play), as well as such dangerous new technologies as bioengineering, it must be in one of two ways.

    One way is to intervene in the technical education of experts in the appropriate fields — in our sample cases, computers, biotechnology, and ecology.  For the most part, reform proposals of this kind have recommended ethics courses for future computer scientists and biotechnologists.  (I am not aware of very many cases where environmental ethics is a requirement for future ecologists or environmental studies — though an environmental policy program I work in does strongly recommend a course in environmental ethics.)

    I have been involved, directly or indirectly, in at least two such programs, and I have enjoyed working with future computer programmers and future biomedical scientists (who will, in fact, be doing biomedical engineering).  These are bright and eager students with extremely promising careers.  And an ethics course may have some impact on their professional work in the future — but only if it is taught as an invitation to ongoing continuing education, to lifelong learning.  If a student does no more than learn a few rules now, those rules are almost certainly going to be too general to help in the future in problematic situations; if, on the other hand, students practice now for future problematic situations, and — when real problems arise — if they relearn again and again, in ever more detail, how really applicable rules help in really controversial situations, then an ethics course may help (some).

    Similar problems arise with respect to the other way we might have an influence, through the media:  publishing books and articles, disseminating ethics case decisions to larger audiences in professional societies, occasionally getting ethics issues (and, implicitly, ethical guidelines) into mass-media publications or broadcasts or even movies or TV shows, and so on.  As philosophers, we have been trained to believe strongly in the power of the word, written or spoken — or broadcast (imaginatively as opposed to the banalty of most broadcasting).

    But we should be very realistic here.  If we consider our greatest preachers of ethical rules for technology to have been philosophers like Hans Jonas, then we need to do our homework to find out just how many people have actually read Jonas's writings, writings of others influenced by him, and so on.  And of course we need to go further and ask how many (of the crucial people we want to reach) have actually heeded his rules of caution.

    In my experience, the numbers here are even more discouraging than the numbers reached by ethics education for technical experts; almost none of the young computer professionals or biotechnologists I have known (even if they took one of my classes), and even fewer of their coworkers and managers (when I have talked with them later) have ever so much as heard of Hans Jonas — or Albert Borgmann, Carl Mitcham, etc.  The philosophical voice today is a muted voice, and most of the philosophers that I know are extremely wary of those popularizations of ethical rules or ideas that occasionally find their way into broadcasts or media productions that do reach larger audiences.  Do we really want our deepest concerns about cloning to be dealt with through "Jurassic Park"?  On the other hand, do BBC-type considerations of these same issues actually have an impact on the behavior of the biotechnology professionals we want to reach?

3.  Radical Politics:

    Worries about the inadequacy of preaching do-good rules — as well as an almost complete assurance that, if left to their own risk/cost/benefit calculations, devotees of "virtual reality" or cloning or further depradations of the environment in the name of "sustainable development," technical professionals will always favor more of the same rather than controls on their work — have led others to the conclusion that the only effective way to control technological developments that we consider undesirable must be political.

    I have already mentioned Samuel Florman — who is, properly speaking, an advocate of unfettered technological advance . . . until it generates public controversy, when the appropriate way to deal with it (Florman says) is through public hearings and other administrative mechanisms of the modern liberal-democratic polity.  This, however, is a far cry from the views I have in mind here.

    Many advocates of political, as opposed to ethical, control of technology have been Marxists or neo-Marxists.  One of the best
known is the historian, David Noble (especially 1977 and 1984).  In America by Design (1977), Noble concentrates on documenting the rise of science-based technocapitalism.  The politics of control is muted there, mostly a short reference at the end to the "labor trouble," "personnel problems," and "politics" that technocorporate managers and their sympathizers fear as obstacles to the continuing advance of corporate capitalism.

    Forces of Production (1984) is a little more political, as it focuses on further developments of technocapitalism fueled by automation; Noble says this at the end:  "Certainly it is of the utmost importance that working people — including engineers and scientists — have belatedly begun to confront technology as a political phenomenon" (p. 350).

    But it is in a series of articles (1983) that Noble is most explicit about a call to a neo-Luddism on the part of workers displaced by automation and similar "advances"; they should, he says, "seize control of their workplaces."  Noble then expands on this idea:

The real challenge posed by the current technological assault is for us to become able to put technology not simply in perspective but aside, to make way for politics.  The goal must not be a human-centered technology but a human-centered society (1983, p. 92).

    (Since my purpose here is to talk about controls on technologies — or technological excess — I see no need here to mention one other political philosophy.  It would give a complete green light to any and all technological developments, either on laissez-faire principles or on the capitalist principle that the market should decide everything.)

4.  Progressive Activism:

    Conservatism, neo-conservatism, nineteenth-century liberalism, twentieth-century "moderate" liberalism, socialism or radicalism — these do not exhaust the stops along the political spectrum, even a spectrum of political attempts to control bad effects of technological development.  More than once I have argued that what we need — to bring particular technologies under control — is a combination of radical unmasking of status quo myths together with progressive politics (Durbin, 1995).  But my most consistent stance has been to leave out the radical part and simply advocate progressive activism (Durbin, 1992 and 1997).

    And  progressive activism is what I would advocate here as the most effective means of controlling particular technologies, whether biotechnology or runaway computer technologies or technological developments that threaten to undermine any progress that has been made toward sustainability on environmental issues.

    Elsewhere I have argued that, because there are a number of activist groups already working to avoid excesses in biotechnology developments, philosophers (along with other humanists or critical academics of various sorts) ought to join forces with these activists in trying to bring under control particular new biotechnologies, one at a time.  Similarly for excesses in the implementation and dissemination of computers — in overautomation, surveillance, databanks, etc. — where activists are already at work and philosophers can do a great deal of good by joining forces with them (Durbin, 1992, chapters 7 and 8).

    On the environment, I have argued against both ecologists who refuse to become activists (on alleged "pure science" grounds) and philosophers who would turn environmental ethics into an academic game (Durbin, 1992, chapter 10).  And I have gone further, to suggest that if there is to be sustainable development, it can only come about if we focus on individual development efforts in particular locales and, more important, if in those local efforts all the relevant parties can be persuaded to get involved in an effort aimed at balanced compromise.  Some of the partisans will always favor development at the expense of other interests; others will demand a cessation of all development efforts; and a whole range of voices in between will favor other interests.  Getting all of them to work together is seldom possible, but getting enough of them to pull together and counter both extremes is at least occasionally possible.  And where this happens, there can be some approximation of sustainability — sometimes by slowing or even stopping a particular development initiative, but sometimes also allowing a particular development to proceed with adequate concern for the local environment and adequate consideration given to justice for those most often made to suffer in the name of development, namely, poor workers and their families (Durbin, 1997, included here as chapter VII, below).

    In my opinion, these are the lessons to be learned from the philosophical school of American Pragmatism — especially from William James, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey, but also from their recent disciples in philosophy of technology, such as Larry Hickman (1990).
Conclusion:

    An astute reader of Dewey (or Hickman) might wonder, at this point, why I started this essay with Martha Nussbaum defending Aristotelian ethics as the best means of dealing with bad luck, including the ill effects of technological development.  I might, on another occasion, make the case that Dewey and Hickman have misread at least some parts of Aristotle — that an Aristotelian practical politics and social ethic could be made compatible with Deweyan activism.  But that is not necessary here.

    It is enough to note Nussbaum's main point in the passages I quoted at the beginning of this chapter.  The way to deal with the evils of the world, the mischances of ill fortune or the excesses of blind advocates of technological advances, is not to escape to some Platonic heaven, hoping to leave bad luck behind.  Nor should we attempt to calculate and quantify all risks and costs, hoping that some magical technology assessment will provide political and managerial decision makers with all the "objective" facts and risk assessments they need to make wise decisions for our technological society — as though that were ever the path to democratic control of technologies.  No, like the sailors in Euripides' Hecuba whom Nussbaum describes, we need to remain in our boat in the midst of the stream, trying the best way we can — philosophers, other academics and experts of all kinds, and activist citizens — to steer a course that will most likely, but never certainly, get us where we want to go.

    We may, of course, capsize; but we are more likely to achieve our goals by steering an activist middle course than by following some ideal ethical plan or some spuriously concrete risk assessment.  If other philosophers of technology insist on trying to devise the ethics of technology, or if they attempt to perfect the ideal risk/cost/benefit assessment for each particular technology under consideration — all I would insist on is that their efforts are not likely to lead to any practical controls on particular technological developments unless they join with us activists in the middle of the stream.

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