Without apology, in this book I espouse a piecemeal, public-interest-activism approach to philosophy of technology.  It is modeled after the social ethics of G. H. Mead (1934, 1936, 1964a, 1964b) and John Dewey (1929, 1935, 1948).  As I have said elsewhere (Durbin, 1992), that may not satisfy many philosophers, but the situation reminds me of the old saying of Winston Churchill:  A piecemeal approach to social problem solving may seem the worst sort of ethics for our technological age -- except for all the rest.

     "Professional ethics," in one form or another, has become something of a mainstream activity, both in certain segments of academe and in certain circles within professional associations.  Conferences involving an amazing array of professional disciplines and associations have been held at the University of Florida, and there is an Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, based at Indiana University, that runs regular meetings -- equally well attended -- every year.

    Carl Mitcham (forthcoming 1998) and Leonard Waks (Mitcham and Waks, 1997) have lamented the fact (as they see it) that this growing body of literature includes all too few explicit references to the centrality of technology in generating the problems that applied and professional ethics practitioners address.  Mitcham and Waks admit that biomedical ethics, engineering ethics, and computer ethics often, perforce, address issues related to technology and particular technological devices -- computers themselves, but also artificial intelligence, etc., in the case of computer ethics.  But, Mitcham and Waks complain, "the technological" in these cases is all too often subordinated to the ethical (often to very traditional ethics) rather than transforming ethics.

    I believe there is something to be said for the Mitcham/Waks complaint.  However one defines technology -- whether in terms of new instrumentalities or devices or processes, or in terms of so-called "technoscience" (that peculiar admixture of science and engineering and other technical expertise with capitalism or modern goverance so common in our era) -- the phenomena associated with contemporary technologies or technological systems ought to have a central place in contemporary discourse.  And that means they should have such a place in ethical and legal discourse -- and therefore also in the discourse of those philosopher/ethicists concerned with real-world issues in our technological society.

    In this book, I take it for granted that academic ethicists have at least made a beginning in taking note of technosocial problems.  What I advocate is that they should take greater notice of these issues.  And I am urging them to do so in an activist fashion.

    Some philosophers have claimed that academic ethicists have a special claim to contribute to the solution of the sorts of technosocial problems I have in mind.  I dispute that claim if it assumes that philosophers can claim a special expertise in these areas.  In my opinion, we are all involved in technical decisions:  the experts who are involved directly with them, those who hire or otherwise deploy the experts, citizens directly or indirectly impacted by the decisions, and the entire democratic citizenry who pay the taxes that support the ventures or benefit the corporations involved in them in myriad ways or who must often pay (not only through taxation) for the foulups so often associated with large technological undertakings (and not only with technological disasters).  Technical expertise is often central to the creation of technosocial problems -- but also to their solution or at least remediation.  Corporate or governmental expertise is also involved.  Citizens can become experts, but they continue to have a legitimate democratic voice when they do not.  Philosophers in general, and ethicists in particular, often gain their own expertise -- most commonly in arriving at legal or political or social consensus on technosocial issues.  But no one -- none of the actors in these complicated issues -- has any more expertise than he or she does in his or her own limited area of focus.  We are all involved, together, in the sorts of decisions (and often the lack of considered decisions) that I have in mind.

    What I focus on in this book is the help that philosopher/ethicists can contribute in the search for solutions to technosocial problems -- but especially to how they can do a better job of it than they have done so far.

    Ralph Sleeper (1986) has interpreted Dewey's philosophy as fundamentally meliorist.  I like that. Sleeper's contrast of Dewey with Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein seems to me espcially instructive.  According to Sleeper (p. 206), Heidegger and Wittgenstein "have none of Dewey's concern regarding the practice of philosophy in social and political criticism."  Earlier in his book (p. 7), Sleeper had noted how this "accounts for [Dewey's] . . . pervasive sense of social hope.  It accounts for . . . his dedication to the instruments of democratic reform; his historicism and his commitment to education; his theological agnosticism and his lifelong struggle to affirm the 'religious' qualities of everyday life."  I suspect it is clear to anyone who has read Dewey carefully that the sorts of problems Dewey wanted to attack with his transformed, meliorist philosophy are very similar to those dealt with by leading advocates of an ethics of technology.

    Mead did not live nearly as long as Dewey, and the social problems to which he addressed his equally meliorist philosophy were those of just the first three decades of the twentieth century.  That was before the high-technology period of "post-industrialism" or the so-called "scientific-technological revolution," as it was called in the pre-1989 Communist Bloc.  But the spirit of Mead's philosophy is the same as Dewey's.  And, as seems to me often to have been the case, Mead is clearer than Dewey was when it comes to stating the theoretical underpinnings of their shared approach.

     According to Mead (1964, p. 266):

          The order of the universe that we live in is the moral order.  It has become the moral order by becoming the self-conscious method of the members of a human society. . . . The world that comes to us from the past possesses and controls us.  We possess and control the world that we discover and invent. . . . It is a splendid adventure if we can rise to it.

    In other words, societies acting to solve their problems in a creative fashion are by definition ethical.

    Traditional definitions of ethics are inadequate, Mead thought, and he grounded his social-action approach on this inadequacy.  This is emphasized by Hans Joas (1985, p. 124) in a recent reinterpretation of Mead:  "[Mead] and Dewey developed the premises of their own ethics through criticism of utilitarian and Kantian ethics."  Specifically, according to Joas, "In Mead's opinion, the deficiencies of utilitarian and Kantian ethics turn out to be complementary:  'The Utilitarian cannot make morality connect with the motive, and Kant cannot connect morality with the end.'" Utilitarians, who base their view on people's self-interest (according to Mead), fail to provide an adequate grounding for altruistic social action.  Kant, on the other hand (again according to Mead), fails to see that the right way to do one's duty is not predetermined; it must be worked out in a social dialogue or struggle of competing values.

    In both Dewey and Mead, ethics is not a set of guidelines or a system but the community attempting to solve its social problems in the most intelligent and creative way its members know how.  In a technological world, ethics is community action attempting to solve urgent technosocial problems.

     I believe one can make a positive defense of a social ethics of technology.  What this means for me is to demonstrate that there is some hope that some of the major social problems of our technological age are in fact being solved.

     A recent study of reform politics and public interest activism (McCann, 1986, p. 262) says just that:

Throughout the [United States], myriad progressive groups have been mobilizing and acting on behalf of crucial issues largely outside the glossy mainstream of media politics:  the variety of church, campus, and community organizations mobilized around issues of U.S. policy in South Africa and Central America as well as nuclear arms policy; the increasingly effective women's and gay-rights movements; the growing numbers of radical ecologists and advocates of "Green Party" politics; the renewed efforts to mobilize blacks, ethnics, and the multitude of the poor by Rev. Jesse Jackson and others; the diverse experiments of working people both in and out of labor unions to reassert themselves; and the legions of intellectuals committed to progressive economic and social policy formulation -- all have constituted elements of an increasingly dynamic movement to build an eclectic base of progressive politics in the nation.

    I made the same claim with respect to academic philosophers generally but also with respect to philosophers of technology.  What I do in this book is expand on this challenge to my fellow philosophers.  How philosophers of technology might contribute, within our intellectual climate today, I do not take up again until chapter IX.

    Before launching into a demonstration of how the approach might work out in practice, in my earlier book, I felt a need to provide a sample case.  What I chose for this purpose was the case of professionals attempting to deal with problems of families in our technological world.  There we see clearly displayed the combined power (if they get involved in activist ways) and weakness (if they do not) of that set of professionals most people would see as likely to get involved in activism in our culture.  What I hoped to show by this means was a pattern:  trained professionals -- in this case, social workers and other "helping" professionals -- who attempt to deal with the problems they are trained to address are helpless to get their professional goals accomplished if they do not go beyond mere professional work, if they do not get involved in activist coalitions with people outside their professions.  In the rest of that book, I tried to show this same pattern with respect to technical professionals.

    In this book I focus mainly on philosophers, assuming that the other activists are still active.

    In a nutshell this is my claim here.  There are a great many social problems in our technological world.  Many ethical solutions have been proposed.  But in the end none of them seems as likely to be a solution as an approach like that of Mead and Dewey that would urge philosophers to work alongside other activists in dealing with the real problems that face us.  Other ethics-of-technology approaches might also work, but in my view that can only happen if their practitioners become as actively involved as Mead and Dewey were.  (Again, see chapter IX.)

    Why should anyone accept this social work model of philosophy of technology?  Clearly they should not do so on the authority of Dewey and Mead -- let alone on mine.

    At this point, an early reviewer of the manuscript complained that I do not develop a detailed theory or program of activist philosophy of technology.  At first I was taken aback; why would anyone call for a theory of what is basically an anti-theoretical approach?  But a moment's reflection made me sensitive to the complaint — though I still resist its thrust.

    I claim here only to be following the lead of Dewey and Mead.  In my opinion, Dewey has already produced an excellent defense of activism in his Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920; 2d ed., 1948) and even a program of sorts in Liberalism and Social Action (1935).  The incredible extent of Dewey's activism is documented in Bullert (1983).

    Mead, for his part, felt no need to provide either a theory or a program; he simply viewed it as an expected extension of his philosophical commitment to get deeply involved in a variety of causes and political activities in and around Chicago.  (See Feffer, 1993, chapters 9-13; note that Feffer is highly critical about the impact of Mead's interventions.)

    I am not here claiming to update Dewey's defense of activism for our own time; the reader who is interested enough can go back to Reconstruction in Philosophy and Liberalism and Social Action — or, for that matter, to Dewey's The Quest for Certainty (1929) or A Common Faith (1934).  I actually prefer Mead's attitude, that activism simply follows from a commitment to pragmatism.

    But if people are not going to be persuaded on the basis of authority, they need an argument.  And a fully satisfying argument is difficult to come by.

    No one could be persuaded on the basis of a rigorously compelling logical argument -- certainly not on the basis of a claim that it is contradictory, in the literal sense, to defend ivory tower solutions for real-world problems.  Dewey and Mead opposed the academicizing of twentieth-century philosophy, but they did so precisely because they thought that philosophy has almost always, down through the centuries, been linked to the attempt to solve real-life problems.  No more than that.

    Neither is any factual argumentation likely to be totally compelling.  There might be a social philosophy or a political philosophy argument, but nothing of that sort is likely to be genuinely decisive.  Mead and Dewey offered historical arguments, but I doubt that they really expected academic philosophers to be persuaded.

    In the end, it seems to me that what it comes down to is a social responsibility argument -- a demonstration of the urgency of social problems in our technological world combined with the opportunity that exists to do something about these urgent problems.  In the list of (classes of) problems I referred to as a touchstone in my earlier book, some of the issues have the urgency of sheer survival -- e.g., nuclear proliferation or worldwide ecological collapse -- and others are related to fears about the survival of human values in the face of genetic engineering or possible new advances in applications of artificial intelligence or "smart" programming of computerized systems that escape human control.  But others are keyed to threats to the good life in a democratic society:  technoeconomic inequities or disparities between rich and poor (nations or individuals); hazards of technological workplaces or extreme boredom in high-technology jobs or widespread technological unemployment even among highly trained professionals; extreme failures of schools -- including universities and professional schools -- to prepare their graduates (or dropouts) for the jobs that need doing today, or for a satisfying and effective political/civic life; the widely-recognized but also confusing health care crisis; even technological and commercial threats to the arts and traditional high culture.

    Such a list, as a generalized list of classes of contemporary problems, cannot even begin to hint at the urgency I have in mind.  It is genuinely felt problems, of numbers of people in local communities everywhere throughout modern society, that will be compelling.  People motivated to do something about particular local problems do not look kindly on an academic retreat to the ivory tower.  But what I would stress is not people's disfavor; I would emphasize the opportunity such issues represent for philosophers to get involved.

    And some have gotten involved; that is the other half of my argument (or sermon).  In my earlier book, I offered several examples.  The first was related to a very technical aspect of contemporary philosophy of science -- as academic a field as there could possibly be -- and has to do with philosophical interpretations of artificial intelligence.  Quite a few philosophers of science have simply jumped on the bandwagon in this field, defending even the most extreme anti-humanistic claims of the artificial intelligence community.  But some philosophers (e.g., Hubert Dreyfus, 1992, and John Searle, 1992) have gained a certain notoriety as opponents of exaggerated claims for artificial intelligence.  I do not address this kind of contribution at all in this book.  However, in chapter X, I try to show that even those forbiddingly academic folks, philosophers of science, can make at least limited social contributions.

    While I find the work that academic philosophers have done on artificial intelligence interesting, I am not overwhelmed by the contributions that others think that academic philosophers can make.  Thomas Perry (1986) claims that certain philosophers (Perry mentions Judith Thomson, Thomas Scanlon, James Rachels, and Jeffrey Reiman) have thrown "increasing light on the privacy problem" (p. xiii) -- presumably in discussions of issues such as abortion and euthanasia.  Certainly many applied ethicists have made contributions to public debate on such issues, but my claim is that they do not necessarily thereby contribute to the solving of social problems.  To do that (as one example), they would have to join with others to bring about real reform.  I look at two examples here, bioethics (in chapter V) and engineering ethics (chapter VI).

    Returning to the possibility of direct contributions by academic philosophers to the solution of social problems, I here add some other examples not included in the earlier book.  (They include nuclear waste disposal, the regulation of toxic products more generally, and environmental ethics broadly, among others.  They are taken up in chapter IV.)

    A second (still academic) example has to do with work on encyclopedias and other integrative publishing ventures, as well as integrative teaching programs in colleges and universities.  Here, a small number of philosophers have exempted themselves from the normal promotion-ladder process in academia -- often against extreme pressure not to get involved -- to devote themselves to integration work.  One example is the work of the editors of volumes such as the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (1978 and 1995).  Similar projects in other fields help solve our social problem of intellectual fragmentation by bringing together, in a coherent whole, the work of specialist scholars in a vast array of fields -- a task for which thousands of students, not to mention physicians and other healthcare workers and their patients (in the bioethics example), ought to be as grateful as for the original specialist scholarly expertise.

    Similarly, a small but important band of interdisciplinarily-inclined philosophers have worked with others to establish integrative programs that help otherwise bewildered, career-oriented undergraduates to see some connections in the facts (and specialist hypotheses) they are so pressured to absorb.  (See Marsh, 1988; Klein, 1990; and Edwards, 1996.)

    A third example has to do with philosophers who have ventured completely outside their academic roles, joining with others in ethics committees, technology assessment commissions, and so on.  The best known example is the small group of bioethicists who worked with the two U.S. national commissions which, in the 1970s and 1980s, studied the regulation of human biomedical and behavioral research.  By their own admission (see Beauchamp and Childress, 1989, pp. 13-14; Brock, 1987, and Weisbard, 1987), these philosophers discovered that their abstract theories helped them very little toward reaching consensus on controversial issues; for that they had to devise a set of principles of lesser generality that almost all the commissioners could agree on.  The resulting guidelines do not, strictly speaking, solve problems in the practice of medicine and related areas of professional practices; only the participants in local controversies can do that (and even then only partially and temporarily—see chapter V).  But the influence of the philosophers on the commissions, and of the resulting commission guidelines on practice, seems to have had an overall social benefit.  And this continues today, with (U.S.) Presidential commissions on cloning and similar ventures.

    A final example among possibilities for philosophical activism I take directly from the conclusion of my earlier book.

    The final way I have said (Durbin, 1992) that contemporary philosophers can contribute to the modern world is as what I would call secular preachers -- advocates of vision in the solution of social, political, and cultural problems.  I had in mind philosophers like Albert Borgmann in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) and Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992).  Bruce Kuklick, in The Rise of American Philosophy (1977), maintains that this role has come largely to be scorned by academic philosophers after the rise of philosophical professionalism.  I believe Kuklick is, for the most part, correct; but I also believe that the small number of philosophers who still feel called upon to play this role are not necessarily out of the philosophical mainstream.

    Another recent American philosopher who has been perceived as playing this cultural role is Richard Rorty (1979, 1982, 1989) -- though he tends to look to literary figures rather than philosophers for such cultured vision.  Presumably, in this dichotomy, he would think of himself as more a literary figure, an essayist, rather than a philosopher -- at least in the narrow academic sense.  On the other hand, many critics -- and I include myself among them -- do not see Rorty as sufficiently activist in the Mead/Dewey sense.  Rorty would exercise his culture-criticism -- especially his criticism of the contemporary culture of academic philosophy -- exclusively at the intellectual level.  And even at that level, some critics have accused him of lacking the conviction that a preacher, even a secular preacher, needs.

    One of Rorty's defenders, Konstantin Kolenda (1990), attempts to address these criticisms -- of Rorty's lack of a "philosophically serious social activism" like that of Dewey (see Richard Bernstein, 1980a, 1980b, 1987), or of lacking a democratic liberalism with specific content (see Cornel West, 1985 and 1989).  Kolenda appeals to the political credo that Rorty proposed in response to West's goading.  But, strangely, neither Kolenda nor Rorty relates this credo to activist attempts to see it put into practice—though, very recently, Rorty (1998) has made something of a move in that direction.  (On Rorty, see also Saatkamp, 1995.)

    I would not commend secular preaching, whether Borgmann's or Rorty's, if it were not connected to activism.  Intellectual discourse unrelated to specific solutions for real and urgent problems is no better outside than inside the academy.

    Some concluding notes:  I would not want anyone to think that I have provided, here, anything like a comprehensive list of all -- or even a representative sample -- of the philosophical work in the United States in which philosophers have joined in activist crusades to solve urgent technosocial problems.  Even Michael McCann (1986), in his broader-ranging summary of progressive activists, had to resort to generality when he referred to "legions of intellectuals committed to progressive economic and social policy formulation."  Perhaps "legions" exaggerates, if one is applying the claim to philosopher/activists, but surely there are many more of them than the "ivory tower" stereotype would suggest -- and surely there are more than I am personally aware of, especially given that much activism is buried in group efforts on local issues.  These activists are, as often as not, the proverbial unsung heroes.

    Moreover, I would not want anyone to think that I approve of any and all activism(s), philosophical or other.  Not all activism is good.  All voices have the right to be heard in a democracy, but voices of groups that work to undercut this very democratic freedom -- indeed, voices of groups that are not positively committed to expanding democracy, to the removal of power structures or social structures that keep some groups down -- seem to me to be abusing the freedom they claim to be exercising.  What I (along with Mead and Dewey) want is for philosophers to join with progressive activists, with those who are consciously fighting for the expansion of social justice and the elimination of unjust inequities.

    As I said earlier, it is going to be very difficult to offer an argument that will persuade very many academic philosophers.  So my  appeal, in the end, is to the overwhelming urgency of technosocial problems, large and small, local, national, and international. I am just happy that some philosophers, recognizing this urgency, have joined with progressive groups in trying to solve the problems.  Here I argue that there should be more.

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