Throughout this book (or set of essays), I have discussed how some philosophers in the applied philosophy community have gotten involved in activism and others — perhaps the larger percentage — have not.

    In the two chapters where this issue is most directly engaged — chapter VI on bioethics and chapter VII on engineering ethics

    — I noted a significant difference.

    Philosophical bioethicists, as a group, often seem to want to make an impression on fellow philosophers in academia.  Some get more respect for this than others.  But where nearly all philosophers who write about bioethical issues get more respect than anywhere else is in their socially responsible work on ethics committees or commissions in a great variety of institutional settings.  Some of the best work has been done on national and international commissions, but all except the most resolutely academic of us who do work in bioethics belong to some sort of health or healthcare committee in a hospital or similar setting.  And what I maintain is that that is where the best and most socially responsible work is being done.

    Philosophers involved with engineering ethics — and such kindred areas as computer ethics or the ethics of biotechnology — are a different story.  The vast majority of real-world engineering ethics is done by engineers — and especially by a relatively small group of engineers who have a special concern to uphold the good name of the profession.  Some work with sanctioning committees of technical professional organizations; others with licensing boards; and so on.  Only occasionally do such agencies and groups call upon philosophers for help.  When they do, it is true, they may be referred to those few philosophers in the USA who have gained renown as contributors to academic engineering ethics; but, in those cases, what they are often looking for is what one might call legal advice, advice on how to improve codes of ethics or similar matters.  Except for technology assessment boards (where these still exist) or environmental impact assessment boards, few of these group activities wrestle directly with the kinds of thorny cases that healthcare ethics committees do.  So the activism of academic philosophers involved in engineering ethics is less direct than that of bioethicists — or so I have argued in chapter VII.

    With respect to the ethics of technology more broadly, the story is different once again — and the record much more diverse.  As I argued in chapter III, there is a great diversity here among scholars explicitly identifying themselves as philosophers of technology.

    Some explicitly join the engineering ethicists or computer ethicists and attempt to provide better codes of ethics for practitioners — or, in a slight move toward activism, try to teach future engineers (for example) who enroll in engineering ethics classes, some of which are required courses in engineering (or computer science, or bio-technology, etc.) programs.   Others eschew ethical preaching — as they perceive the matter — and are only willing to contribute by serving as fellow experts in such ventures as technology assessment or environmental impact assessment teams.

    Still others think that real change in the ethos of engineering and other technical professions can only be brought about by political means — ranging from moderate to progressive to radical.

    Finally, there are the secular preachers on the "technology question" — philosophers like Martin Heidegger or Jacques Ellul or Langdon Winner or Albert Borgmann — who attempt to deal, in one fashion or another, with technological culture as a whole.

    In my opinion, all too few of these avowed ethicists of technology have any chance of impacting our technological society (or particular high-technology societies, such as the United States or the European Community, or the nations of the Pacific Rim) unless — following the guidance of the American Pragmatists G. H. Mead and John Dewey — they get involved with progressive activists attempting to deal with particular technosocial evils in particular locales.  (Even if, as one example, they wish to have an impact on, say, global warming, real reform work must begin with particular industrial or governmental agencies, usually starting in particular countries.)

    In short, what I have argued here is that philosophers of technology, of whatever stripe, will need to become activists if they expect to have any impact on the real-world technosocial problems that they say they are concerned about.

    But what about the academic philosophy community more generally?

    A careful reader of the previous chapter might conclude that, in spite of my examples there, I really do not have much hope that academic philosophers of science are likely to become activists in large numbers.  It is too easy to read the ones cited there as exceptions.  And in any case they are not talking about activism on the part of the scientists they describe — only about the human, social, and collaborative aspects of the scientific discovery process itself.  In fact, such a careful reader would be right; I do not expect to persuade many philosophers of science.  Nor do I have much hope for the academic epistemologists with whom philosophers of science have so much in common.

    Because of perceived links between applied ethics and academic ethics more generally, some people tell me I ought to expect more from the academic ethics community.  After all, ethics is, by definition, other-directed.  If we have moral obligations (no matter how abstractly rationalized), surely they are obligations to other persons — or, in deference to social responsibilities, some would add today, to animals or to the biosphere.

    All of this is surely true, but what critics of academic ethics in the twentieth century — and John Dewey was among the earliest — have been most concerned about is academic ethicists' resolutely theoretical stance.  Richard Rorty (1998, pp. 130-131) has caught the spirit of this critique in his lament about graduate education in analytical philosophy in the last several decades:

As philosophy became analytic, the reading habits changed. . . .  Fewer old books were read, and more recent articles. . . .  Romance, genius, charisma . . . have been out of style in anglophone philosophy for several generations.  I doubt that they will ever come back into fashion, just as I doubt that American sociology departments will ever again be . . . centers of social activism.

    What, say, of philosophers of artificial intelligence, of Continental philosophers, of philosophers of art, social and political philosophers, and so on and on.  Are all of those good people — or all of them who are not activists in the best tradition of American Pragmatism — are they too to be branded with a charge of anti-activism?  Surely not, or I would never have written this book.  Among all these philosophers — well-intentioned for the most part even when their focus seems mostly to be on their next academic promotion — are to be found the philosophers who are already doing progressive work with activists outside the academy or whom I would like to enlist in the adventure.

    My only complaint, in that respect, has to do with any academicism — any needless worry about doing "real philosophy" — that would keep more of them from venturing outside the walls of academe to get involved in the pressing social ills that vex our technological world.  It may be that we face no more urgent problems today than citizens have in any earlier age, but surely our world does have problems, very serious problems; and surely those involved in trying to solve them have a right to expect us philosophers to play our part.

    What I hope is that, in the twenty-first century, more philosophers will heed this call than have in the twentieth century.