Uncovering the Political and Moral Dimensions of Technology: A Dialectic Between Classicism and Phenomenology

Excerpt

In their recent book, Narrative and Technology Ethics, Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh set out to develop “a hermeneutic ethics of technology by connecting and bridging philosophical discourses on narrative theory, virtue ethics, and responsible innovation” (p. 17). They seek to synthesize Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, ultimately with the aim of uncovering the narrative (and hence political and moral) dimensions of technology. Reijers and Coeckelbergh wish to transcend the contradiction between matter and mind, things and words, technologies, and texts. They argue that technologies typically have “narrative qualities,” in the sense that they embody particular interpretations of reality in similar ways as written texts do. Through their narrative power, technologies are thus able to configure our understanding of the world. From this hermeneutic ethics of technology perspective, the authors argue that “humans do not only read technologies, but technologies on the other hand ‘read’ humans, insofar as what is experienced by a user must first be constructed in the technology” (p. 87). Of course, this means that misreading is possible. Given the narrative power of technology, such a possible misreading in turn influences users of technology and hence perpetuates the misconception of human reality. To minimize the risk of misreading, and hence to ensure, as much as possible, that technologies do not reconfigure human reality in an alienating way, all those involved in the process of technology development and the actual use of technologies must therefore be of high moral caliber. At this stage, Reijers and Coeckelbergh, intriguingly enough, omit Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology and instead have recourse to MacIntyre’s classicist and Thomist version of virtue ethics. The authors make a classicist argument for “the cultivation of virtue” in and through the design and use of technology by engineers and users so that technologies may serve the common good in what they call “the politics of responsible innovation” (p. 200). …