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: Contra
Opponents 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 humanmade 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 selfacting 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