## 1. Historical Developments


### 1.1 The Greeks



Philosophical reflection on technology is about as old as philosophy
itself. Our oldest testimony is from ancient Greece. There are four
prominent themes. One early theme is the thesis that technology learns
from or imitates nature (Plato, *Laws* X 899a ff.). According
to Democritus, for example, house-building and weaving were first
invented by imitating swallows and spiders building their nests and
nets, respectively (Diels 1903 and Freeman 1948: 154). Perhaps the
oldest extant source for the exemplary role of nature is Heraclitus
(Diels 1903 and Freeman 1948: 112). Aristotle referred to this
tradition by repeating Democritus' examples, but he did not
maintain that technology can only imitate nature: "generally
*techne* in some cases completes what nature cannot
bring to a finish, and in others imitates nature"
(*Physics* II.8, 199a15; see also *Physics* II.2, and
see Schummer 2001 and this encyclopedia's entry on
 *episteme* and *techne*
 for discussion).



A second theme is the thesis that there is a fundamental ontological
distinction between natural things and artifacts. According to
Aristotle (*Physics* II.1), the former have their principles of
generation and motion inside, whereas the latter, insofar as they are
artifacts, are generated only by outward causes, namely human aims and
forms in the human soul. Natural products (animals and their parts,
plants, and the four elements) move, grow, change, and reproduce
themselves by inner final causes; they are driven by purposes of
nature. Artifacts, on the other hand, cannot reproduce themselves.
Without human care and intervention, they vanish after some time by
losing their artificial forms and decomposing into (natural)
materials. For instance, if a wooden bed is buried, it decomposes to
earth or changes back into its botanical nature by putting forth a
shoot.



The thesis that there is a fundamental difference between man-made
products and natural substances has had a long-lasting influence. In
the Middle Ages, Avicenna criticized alchemy on the ground that it can
never produce 'genuine' substances (Briffault 1930: 147).
Even today, some still maintain that there is a difference between,
for example, natural and synthetic vitamin C. The modern discussion of
this theme is taken up in
 Section 2.5.



Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes--material, formal,
efficient and final--can be regarded as a third early
contribution to the philosophy of technology. Aristotle explained this
doctrine by referring to technical artifacts such as houses and
statues (*Physics* II.3). The four causes are still very much
present in modern discussions related to the metaphysics of artifacts.
Discussions of the notion of function, for example, focus on its
inherent teleological or 'final' character and the
difficulties this presents to its use in biology. And the notorious
case of the ship of Theseus--see this encyclopedia's
entries on
 material constitution,
 identity over time,
 relative identity,
 and
 sortals--was
 introduced in modern philosophy by Hobbes as showing a conflict
between unity of matter and unity of form as principles of
individuation. This conflict is seen by many as characteristic of
artifacts. David Wiggins (1980: 89) takes it even to be the defining
characteristic of artifacts.



A fourth point that deserves mentioning is the extensive employment of
technological images by Plato and Aristotle. In his *Timaeus*,
Plato described the world as the work of an Artisan, the Demiurge. His
account of the details of creation is full of images drawn from
carpentry, weaving, ceramics, metallurgy, and agricultural technology.
Aristotle used comparisons drawn from the arts and crafts to
illustrate how final causes are at work in natural processes. Despite
their negative appreciation of the life led by artisans, who they
considered too much occupied by the concerns of their profession and
the need to earn a living to qualify as free individuals, both Plato
and Aristotle found technological imagery indispensable for expressing
their belief in the rational design of the universe (Lloyd 1973:
61).


### 1.2 Later Developments; Humanities Philosophy of Technology



Although there was much technological progress in the Roman empire and
during the Middle Ages, philosophical reflection on technology did not
grow at a corresponding rate. Comprehensive works such as
Vitruvius' *De architectura* (first century BC) and
Agricola's *De re metallica* (1556) paid much attention
to practical aspects of technology but little to philosophy.



In the realm of scholastic philosophy, there was an emergent
appreciation for the mechanical arts. They were generally considered
to be born of--and limited to--the mimicry of nature. This
view was challenged when alchemy was introduced in the Latin West
around the mid-twelfth century. Some alchemical writers such as Roger
Bacon were willing to argue that human art, even if learned by
imitating natural processes, could successfully reproduce natural
products or even surpass them (Newman 2004). The result was a
philosophy of technology in which human art was raised to a level of
appreciation not found in other writings until the Renaissance.
However, the last three decades of the thirteenth century witnessed an
increasingly hostile attitude by religious authorities toward alchemy
that culminated eventually in the denunciation *Contra
alchymistas*, written by the inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric in 1396
(Newman 2004).



The Renaissance led to a greater appreciation of human beings and
their creative efforts, including technology. As a result,
philosophical reflection on technology and its impact on society
increased. Francis Bacon is generally regarded as the first modern
author to put forward such reflection. His view, expressed in his
fantasy *New Atlantis* (1627), was overwhelmingly positive.
This positive attitude lasted well into the nineteenth century,
incorporating the first half-century of the industrial revolution.
Karl Marx, for example, did not condemn the steam engine or the
spinning mill for the vices of the bourgeois mode of production; he
believed that ongoing technological innovation allowed for the
necessary steps toward the more blissful stages of socialism and
communism of the future. A discussion of different views on the role
of technology in Marx's theory of historical development can be
found in Bimber 1990. See Van der Pot 1985 [1994/2004] for an
extensive historical overview of appreciations of the development of
technology generally.



A turning point in the appreciation of technology as a socio-cultural
phenomenon is marked by Samuel Butler's *Erewhon* (1872),
written under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, and
Darwin's *On the Origin of Species* (1859).
Butler's book gave an account of a fictional country where all
machines are banned and the possession of a machine or the attempt to
build one is a capital crime. The people of this country had become
convinced by an argument that ongoing technical improvements are
likely to lead to a 'race' of machines that will replace
mankind as the dominant species on earth. This introduced a theme that
has remained influential in the perception of technology ever
since.



During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and most of the
twentieth century a critical attitude predominated in philosophical
reflection on technology. The representatives of this attitude were,
overwhelmingly, schooled in the humanities or the social sciences and
had virtually no first-hand knowledge of engineering practice. Whereas
Bacon wrote extensively on the method of science and conducted
physical experiments himself, Butler, being a clergyman, lacked such
first-hand knowledge. Ernst Kapp, who was the first to use the term
'philosophy of technology' in his book *Eine
Philosophie der Technik* (1877 [2018]), was a philologist and
historian. Most of the authors who wrote critically about technology
and its socio-cultural role during the twentieth century were
philosophers of a general outlook, such as Martin Heidegger (1954
[1977]), Hans Jonas (1979 [1984]), Arnold Gehlen (1957 [1980]),
Gunther Anders (1956), and Andrew Feenberg (1999). Others had a
background in one of the other humanities or in social science, such
as literary criticism and social research in the case of Lewis Mumford
(1934), law in the case of Jacques Ellul (1954 [1964]), political
science in the case of Langdon Winner (1977, 1980, 1983) and literary
studies in the case of Albert Borgmann (1984). The form of philosophy
of technology constituted by the writings of these and others has been
called by Carl Mitcham (1994) "humanities philosophy of
technology", because it takes its point of departure from the
humanities and the social sciences rather than from the practices of
science and engineering, and it approaches technology accepting
"the primacy of the humanities over technologies" (1994:
39), since technology originates from the goals and values of humans.




Humanities philosophers of technology tend to take the phenomenon of
technology itself largely for granted; they treat it as a 'black
box', a given, a unitary, monolithic, inescapable phenomenon.
Their interest is not so much to analyze and understand this
phenomenon itself but to grasp its relations to morality (Jonas,
Gehlen), politics (Winner), the structure of society (Mumford), human
culture (Ellul), the human condition (Hannah Arendt), or metaphysics
(Heidegger). In this, these philosophers are almost all openly
critical of technology: all things considered, they tend to have a
negative judgment of the way technology has affected human society and
culture, or at least they single out for consideration the negative
effects of technology on human society and culture. This does not
necessarily mean that technology itself is pointed out as the
principal cause of these negative developments. In the case of
Heidegger, in particular, the paramount position of technology in
modern society is rather a symptom of something more fundamental,
namely a wrongheaded attitude towards Being which has been on the rise
for almost 25 centuries. It is therefore questionable whether
Heidegger should be considered as a philosopher of technology,
although within the humanities view he is considered to be among the
most important ones. Much the same could be said about Arendt, in
particular her discussion of technology in *The Human
Condition* (1958), although her position in the canon of
humanities philosophy of technology is not as prominent as is
Heidegger's.



To be sure, the work of these founding figures of humanities
philosophy of technology has been taken further by a second and third
generation of scholars--in particular the work of Heidegger
remains an important source of inspiration--but who in doing so
have adopted a more neutral rather than overall negative view of
technology and its meaning for human life and culture. Notable
examples are Ihde (1979, 1993) and Verbeek (2000 [2005]).



In its development, humanities philosophy of technology continues to
be influenced not so much by developments in philosophy (e.g.,
philosophy of science, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind) but
by developments in the social sciences and humanities. Although, for
example, Ihde and those who take their point of departure with him,
position their work as phenomenologist or postphenomenologist, there
does not seem to be much interest in either the past or the present of
this diffuse notion in philosophy, and in particular not much interest
in the far from easy question to what extent Heidegger can be
considered a phenomenologist. Of particular significance has been the
emergence of 'Science and Technology Studies' (STS) in the
1980s, which studies from a broad social-scientific perspective how
social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and
technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society,
politics, and culture. We discuss authors from humanities philosophy
of technology in
 Section 3
 on 'Ethical and Social Aspects of Technology', but do not
present separately and in detail the wide variety of views existing in
this field. For a detailed treatment Mitcham's 1994 book still
provides an excellent overview. A recent coverage of humanities
philosophy of technology is available in Coeckelbergh's (2020a)
textbook. Olsen, Selinger and Riis (2008) and Vallor (2022) offer
wide-ranging collections of contributions; Scharff and Dusek (2003
[2014]) and Kaplan (2004 [2009]) present comprehensive anthologies of
texts from this tradition.


### 1.3 A Basic Ambiguity in the Meaning of Technology



Mitcham contrasts 'humanities philosophy of technology' to
'engineering philosophy of technology', where the latter
refers to philosophical views developed by engineers or technologists
as "attempts ... to elaborate a technological
philosophy" (1994: 17). Mitcham discusses only a handful of
people as engineering philosophers of technology: Ernst Kapp, Peter
Engelmeier, Friedrich Dessauer, and much more briefly Jacques Lafitte,
Gilbert Simondon, Hendrik van Riessen, Juan David Garcia Bacca,
R. Buckminster Fuller and Mario Bunge. The label 'engineering
philosophy of technology' raises serious questions: many of the
persons discussed hardly classify as engineers or technologists. It is
also not very clear how the notion of 'a technological
philosophy' should be understood. As philosophers, these authors
seem all to be rather isolated figures, whose work shows little
overlap and who seem to be sharing mainly the absence of a
'working relation' with established philosophical
disciplines. It is not so clear what sorts of questions and concerns
underlie the notion of 'engineering philosophy of
technology'. A larger role for systematic philosophy could bring
it quite close to some examples of humanities philosophy of
technology, for instance the work of Jacques Ellul, where the analyses
would be rather similar and the remaining differences would be ones of
attitude or appreciation.



In the next section we discuss in more detail a form of philosophy of
technology that we consider to occupy, currently, the position of
alternative to the humanities philosophy of technology. It emerged in
the 1960s and gained momentum in the past twenty to twenty-five years.
This form of the philosophy of technology, which may be called
'analytic', is not primarily concerned with the relations
between technology and society but with technology itself. It
expressly does not look upon technology as a 'black box'
but as a phenomenon that should be studied in detail. It does not
regard technology as such as a practice but as something grounded in a
practice, basically the practice of engineering. It analyses this
practice, its goals, its concepts and its methods, and it relates its
findings to various themes from philosophy.



In seeing technology as grounded in a practice sustained by engineers,
similar to the way philosophy of science focuses on the practice of
science as sustained by scientists, analytic philosophy of technology
could be thought to amount to the philosophy of engineering. Indeed
many of the issues related to design, discussed below in Sections
 2.3
 and
 2.4,
 could be singled out as forming the subject matter of a philosophy of
engineering. The metaphysical issues discussed in Section
 2.5
 could not, however, and analytic philosophy of technology is
therefore significantly broader than philosophy of engineering. The
very title of *Philosophy of Technology and Engineering
Sciences* (Meijers 2009), an extensive up-to-date overview, which
contains contributions to all of the topics treated in the next
section, suggests that technology and engineering do not coincide, but
the book does not specifically address what distinguishes technology
from engineering and how they are related. In fact, the existence of
humanities philosophy of technology and analytic philosophy of
technology next to one another reflects a basic ambiguity in the
notion of technology that the philosophical work that has been going
on has hardly succeeded in clarifying.



Technology can be said to have two aspects or dimensions, which can be
referred to as *instrumentality* and *productivity*.
Instrumentality covers the totality of human endeavours to control
their lives and their environments by interfering with the world in an
instrumental way, by using things in a purposeful and clever way.
Productivity covers the totality of human endeavours to bring into
existence new things through which certain things can be realized in a
controlled and clever way. For the study of the dimension of
instrumentality, it is in principle irrelevant whether the things that
are made use of in controlling our lives and environments have been
produced by us first; if we somehow could rely on natural objects to
always be available to serve our purposes, the analysis of
instrumentality and its consequences for how we live our lives would
not necessarily be affected. Likewise, for the analysis of what is
involved in the making of artifacts, and how the notion of artifact
and of something new being brought into existence are to be
understood, it is to a large extent irrelevant how human life, culture
and society are changed as a result of the artifacts that are in fact
produced. Notwithstanding its fundamental character, the ambiguity
noted here seems hardly to be confronted directly in the literature.
It is addressed by Lawson (2008, 2017) and by Franssen and Koller
(2016).



Humanities philosophy of technology has been interested predominantly
in the instrumentality dimension, whereas analytic philosophy of
technology has focused on the productivity dimension. But technology
as one of the basic phenomena of modern society, if not the most basic
one, clearly is constituted by the processes centering on and
involving both dimensions. It has proved difficult, however, to come
to an overarching approach in which the interaction between these two
dimensions of technology are adequately dealt with--no doubt
partly due to the great differences in philosophical orientation and
methodology associated with the two traditions and their separate
foci. To improve this situation is arguably the most urgent challenge
that the field of philosophy of technology as a whole is facing, since
the continuation of the two orientations leading their separate lives
threatens its unity and coherence as a discipline in the first place.
Indeed, during the past ten to fifteen years the philosophy of
engineering has established itself as a subdiscipline within the
philosophy of technology, for which a comprehensive handbook was
edited recently by Michelfelder and Doorn (2021). 



After presenting the major issues of philosophical relevance in
technology and engineering that are studied by analytic philosophers
of technology in the next section, we discuss the problems and
challenges that technology poses for the society in which it is
practiced in the third and final section.


## 2. Analytic Philosophy of Technology


### 2.1 Introduction: Science and Technology's Different Relations to Philosophy



It may come as a surprise to those new to the topic that the fields of
philosophy of science and philosophy of technology show such great
differences, given that few practices in our society are as closely
related as science and engineering. Experimental science is nowadays
crucially dependent on technology for the realization of its research
set-ups and for gathering and analyzing data. The phenomena that
modern science seeks to study could never be discovered without
producing them through technology.



Theoretical research within technology has come to be often
indistinguishable from theoretical research in science, making
engineering science largely continuous with 'ordinary' or
'pure' science. This is a relatively recent development,
which started around the middle of the nineteenth century, and is
responsible for great differences between modern technology and
traditional, craft-like techniques. The educational training that
aspiring scientists and engineers receive starts off being largely
identical and only gradually diverges into a science or an engineering
curriculum. Ever since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century, characterized by its two major innovations, the experimental
method and the mathematical articulation of scientific theories,
philosophical reflection on science has focused on the method by which
scientific knowledge is generated, on the reasons for thinking
scientific theories to be true, or approximately true, and on the
nature of evidence and the reasons for accepting one theory and
rejecting another. Hardly ever have philosophers of science posed
questions that did not have the community of scientists, their
concerns, their aims, their intuitions, their arguments and choices,
as a major target. In contrast it is only recently that the philosophy
of technology has discovered the community of engineers.



It might be claimed that it is up to the philosophy of technology, and
not the philosophy of science, to target first of all the impact of
technology--and with it science--on society and culture,
because science affects society only through being applied as
technology. This, however, will not do. Right from the start of the
scientific revolution, science affected human culture and thought
fundamentally and directly, not with a detour through technology, and
the same is true for later developments such as relativity, atomic
physics and quantum mechanics, the theory of evolution, genetics,
biochemistry, and the increasingly dominating scientific world view
overall. All the same philosophers of science for a long time gave the
impression that they left questions addressing the normative, social
and cultural aspects of science gladly to other philosophical
disciplines, or to historical studies. This has changed only during
the past few decades, by scholars either focusing on these issues from
the start (e.g. Longino 1990, 2002) or shifting their focus toward
them (e.g. Kitcher 2001, 2011).



There is a major difference between the historical development of
modern technology as compared to modern science which may at least
partly explain this situation, which is that science emerged in the
seventeenth century from philosophy itself. The answers that Galileo,
Huygens, Newton, and others gave, by which they initiated the alliance
of empiricism and mathematical description that is so characteristic
of modern science, were answers to questions that had belonged to the
core business of philosophy since antiquity. Science, therefore, kept
the attention of philosophers. Philosophy of science can be seen as a
transformation of epistemology in the light of the emergence of
science. The foundational issues--the reality of atoms, the
status of causality and probability, questions of space and time, the
nature of the quantum world--that were so lively discussed during
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century
are an illustration of this close relationship between scientists and
philosophers. No such intimacy has ever existed between philosophers
and engineers or technologists. Their worlds still barely touch. To be
sure, a case can be made that, compared to the continuity existing
between natural philosophy and science, a similar continuity exists
between central questions in philosophy having to do with human action
and practical rationality and the way technology approaches and
systematizes the solution of practical problems. To investigate this
connection may indeed be considered a major theme for philosophy of
technology, and more is said on it in Sections
 2.3
 and
 2.4.
 This continuity appears only by hindsight, however, and dimly, as the
historical development is at most a slow convening of various strands
of philosophical thinking on action and rationality, not a development
into variety from a single origin. Significantly it is only the
academic outsider Ellul who has, in his idiosyncratic way, recognized
in technology the emergent single dominant way of answering all
questions concerning human action, comparable to science as the single
dominant way of answering all questions concerning human knowledge
(Ellul 1954 [1964]). But Ellul was not so much interested in
investigating this relationship as in emphasizing and denouncing the
social and cultural consequences as he saw them. It is all the more
important to point out that humanities philosophy of technology cannot
be differentiated from analytic philosophy of technology by claiming
that only the former is interested in the social context of
technology. There are studies which are rooted in analytic philosophy
of science but address in particular the relation of technology to
society and culture, and equally the relevance of social relations to
technological practices, without taking an evaluative stand with
respect to technology; an example is Preston 2012.


### 2.2 The Relationship Between Technology and Science



The close relationship between the practices of engineering and
science may easily keep the important differences between the
technology and science from view. The predominant position of science
in the philosophical field of vision made it difficult for
philosophers to recognize that technology merits special attention for
involving issues that do not emerge in science. This view resulting
from this lack of recognition is often presented, perhaps somewhat
dramatically, as coming down to a claim that technology is
'merely' applied science.



A questioning of the relation between science and technology was the
central issue in one of the earliest discussions among analytic
philosophers of technology. In 1966, in a special issue of the journal
*Technology and Culture*, Henryk Skolimowski argued that
technology is something quite different from science (Skolimowski
1966). As he phrased it, science concerns itself with what is, whereas
technology concerns itself with what is to be. A few years later, in
his well-known book *The Sciences of the Artificial* (1969),
Herbert Simon emphasized this important distinction in almost the same
words, stating that the scientist is concerned with how things are but
the engineer with how things ought to be. Although it is difficult to
imagine that earlier philosophers were blind to this difference in
orientation, their inclination, in particular in the tradition of
logical empiricism, to view knowledge as a system of statements may
have led to a conviction that in technology no knowledge claims play a
role that cannot also be found in science. The study of technology,
therefore, was not expected to pose new challenges nor hold surprises
regarding the interests of analytic philosophy.



In contrast, Mario Bunge (1966) defended the view that technology
*is* applied science, but in a subtle way that does justice to
the differences between science and technology. Bunge acknowledges
that technology is about action, but an action heavily underpinned by
theory--that is what distinguishes technology from the arts and
crafts and puts it on a par with science. According to Bunge, theories
in technology come in two types: substantive theories, which provide
knowledge about the object of action, and operative theories, which
are concerned with action itself. The substantive theories of
technology are indeed largely applications of scientific theories. The
operative theories, in contrast, are not preceded by scientific
theories but are born in applied research itself. Still, as Bunge
claims, operative theories show a dependence on science in that in
such theories the *method* of science is employed. This
includes such features as modeling and idealization, the use of
theoretical concepts and abstractions, and the modification of
theories by the absorption of empirical data through prediction and
retrodiction.



In response to this discussion, Ian Jarvie (1966) proposed as
important questions for a philosophy of technology what the
epistemological status of technological statements is and how
technological statements are to be demarcated from scientific
statements. This suggests a thorough investigation of the various
forms of knowledge occurring in either practice, in particular, since
scientific knowledge has already been so extensively studied, of the
forms of knowledge that are characteristic of technology and are
lacking, or of much less prominence, in science. A distinction between
'knowing that'--traditional propositional
knowledge--and 'knowing how'--non-articulated
and even impossible-to-articulate knowledge--had been introduced
by Gilbert Ryle (1949) in a different context. The notion of
'knowing how' was taken up by Michael Polanyi under the
name of tacit knowledge and made a central characteristic of
technology (Polanyi 1958); the current state of the philosophical
discussion is presented in this encyclopedia's entry on
 knowledge how.
 However, emphasizing too much the role of unarticulated knowledge, of
'rules of thumb' as they are often called, easily
underplays the importance of rational methods in technology. An
emphasis on tacit knowledge may also be ill-fit for distinguishing the
practices of science and engineering because the role of tacit
knowledge in science may well be more important than current
philosophy of science acknowledges, for example in concluding causal
relationships on the basis of empirical evidence. This was also an
important theme in the writings of Thomas Kuhn on theory change in
science (Kuhn 1962).


### 2.3 The Centrality of Design to Technology



To claim, with Skolimowski and Simon, that technology is about what is
to be or what ought to be rather than what is may serve to distinguish
it from science but will hardly make it understandable why so much
philosophical reflection on technology has taken the form of
socio-cultural critique. Technology is an ongoing attempt to bring the
world closer to the way one wishes it to be. Whereas science aims to
understand the world as it is, technology aims to change the world.
These are abstractions, of course. For one, whose wishes concerning
what the world should be like are realized in technology? Unlike
scientists, who are often personally motivated in their attempts at
describing and understanding the world, engineers are seen, not in the
least by engineers themselves, as undertaking their attempts to change
the world as a service to the public. The ideas on what is to be or
what ought to be are seen as originating outside of technology itself;
engineers then take it upon themselves to realize these ideas. This
view is a major source for the widely spread picture of technology as
being *instrumental*, as delivering instruments ordered from
'elsewhere', as means to ends specified outside of
engineering, a picture that has served further to support the claim
that technology is *neutral* with respect to values, discussed
in
 Section 3.3.1.
 This view involves a considerable distortion of reality, however.
Many engineers are intrinsically motivated to change the world, in
particular the world as shaped by past technologies. As a result, much
technological development is 'technology-driven'.



To understand where technology 'comes from', what drives
the innovation process, is of importance not only to those who are
curious to understand the phenomenon of technology itself but also to
those who are concerned about its role in society. Technology or
engineering as a practice is concerned with the creation of artifacts
and, of increasing importance, artifact-based services. The *design
process*, the structured process leading toward that goal, forms
the core of the practice of engineering. In the engineering
literature, the design process is commonly represented as consisting
of a series of translational steps; see for this, e.g., Suh 2001. At
the start are the customer's needs or wishes. In the first step
these are translated into a list of *functional requirements*,
which then define the design task an engineer, or a team of engineers,
has to accomplish. The functional requirements specify as precisely as
possible what the device to be designed must be able to do. This step
is required because customers usually focus on just one or two
features and are unable to articulate the requirements that are
necessary to support the functionality they desire. In the second
step, the functional requirements are translated into *design
specifications*, which the exact physical parameters of crucial
components by which the functional requirements are going to be met.
The design parameters chosen to satisfy these requirements are
combined and made more precise such that a *blueprint* of the
device results. The blueprint contains all the details that must be
known such that the final step to the process of manufacturing the
device can take place. It is tempting to consider the blueprint as the
end result of a design process, instead of a finished copy being this
result. However, actual copies of a device are crucial for the purpose
of prototyping and testing. Prototyping and testing presuppose that
the sequence of steps making up the design process can and will often
contain iterations, leading to revisions of the design parameters
and/or the functional requirements. Even though, certainly for
mass-produced items, the manufacture of a product for delivery to its
customers or to the market comes after the closure of the design
phase, the manufacturing process is often reflected in the functional
requirements of a device, for example in putting restrictions on the
number of different components of which the device consists. The
complexity of a device will affect how difficult it will be to
maintain or repair it, and ease of maintenance or low repair costs are
often functional requirements. An important modern development is that
the complete life cycle of an artifact is now considered to be the
designing engineer's concern, up till the final stages of the
recycling and disposal of its components and materials, and the
functional requirements of any device should reflect this. From this
point of view, neither a blueprint nor a prototype can be considered
the end product of engineering design.



The biggest idealization that this scheme of the design process
contains is arguably located at the start. Only in a minority of cases
does a design task originate in a customer need or wish for a
particular artifact. First of all, as already suggested, many design
tasks are defined by engineers themselves, for instance, by noticing
something to be improved in existing products. Nevertheless design
often starts with a problem pointed out by some societal agent, which
engineers are then invited to solve. Many such problems, however, are
ill-defined or *wicked* problems, meaning that it is not at all
clear what the problem is exactly and what a solution to the problem
would consist in. The 'problem' is a situation that
people--not necessarily the people 'in' the
situation--find unsatisfactory, but typically without being able
to specify a situation that they find more satisfactory in other terms
than as one in which the problem has been solved. In particular it is
not obvious that a solution to the problem would consist in some
artifact, or some artifactual system or process, being made available
or installed. Engineering departments all over the world advertise
that engineering is problem solving, and engineers easily seem
confident that they are best qualified to solve a problem when they
are asked to, whatever the nature of the problem. This has led to the
phenomenon of a *technological fix*, the solution of a problem
by a technical solution, that is, the delivery of an artifact or
artifactual process, where it is questionable, to say the least,
whether this solves the problem or whether it was the best way of
handling the problem.



A candidate example of a technological fix for the problem of global
warming would be the currently much debated option of injecting
sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to offset the warming effect of
greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. Such schemes of
geoengineering would allow us to avoid facing the--in all
likelihood painful--choices that will lead to a reduction of the
emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but will at the same
time allow the depletion of the Earth's reservoir of fossil
fuels to continue. See for a discussion of technological fixing, e.g.,
Volti 2009: 26-32. Given this situation, and its hazards, the
notion of a problem and a taxonomy of problems deserve to receive more
philosophical attention than they have hitherto received.



These wicked problems are often broadly social problems, which would
best be met by some form of 'social action', which would
result in people changing their behavior or acting differently in such
a way that the problem would be mitigated or even disappear
completely. In defense of the engineering view, it could perhaps be
said that the repertoire of 'proven' forms of social
action is meager. The temptation of technical fixes could be
overcome--at least that is how an engineer might see it--by
the inclusion of the social sciences in the systematic development and
application of knowledge to the solution of human problems. This
however, is a controversial view. *Social engineering* is to
many a specter to be kept at as large a distance as possible instead
of an ideal to be pursued. Karl Popper referred to acceptable forms of
implementing social change as 'piecemeal social
engineering' and contrasted it to the revolutionary but
completely unfounded schemes advocated by, e.g., Marxism. In the entry
on
 Karl Popper,
 however, his choice of words is called 'rather
unfortunate'. The notion of social engineering, and its cogency,
deserves more attention that it is currently receiving.



An important input for the design process is scientific knowledge:
knowledge about the behavior of components and the materials they are
composed of in specific circumstances. This is the point where science
is applied. However, much of this knowledge is not directly available
from the sciences, since it often concerns extremely detailed behavior
in very specific circumstances. This scientific knowledge is therefore
often generated within technology, by the engineering sciences. But
apart from this very specific scientific knowledge, engineering design
involves various other sorts of knowledge. In his book *What
Engineers Know and How They Know It* (Vincenti 1990), the
aeronautical engineer Walter Vincenti gave a six-fold categorization
of engineering design knowledge (leaving aside production and
operation as the other two basic constituents of engineering
practice). Vincenti distinguishes


1. Fundamental design concepts, including primarily the operational
principle and the normal configuration of a particular device;
2. Criteria and specifications;
3. Theoretical tools;
4. Quantitative data;
5. Practical considerations;
6. Design instrumentalities.



The fourth category concerns the quantitative knowledge just referred
to, and the third the theoretical tools used to acquire it. These two
categories can be assumed to match Bunge's notion of substantive
technological theories. The status of the remaining four categories is
much less clear, however, partly because they are less familiar, or
not at all, from the well-explored context of science. Of these
categories, Vincenti claims that they represent prescriptive forms of
knowledge rather than descriptive ones. Here, the activity of design
introduces an element of normativity, which is absent from scientific
knowledge. Take such a basic notion as 'operational
principle', which refers to the way in which the function of a
device is realized, or, in short, how it works. This is still a purely
descriptive notion. Subsequently, however, it plays a role in
arguments that seek to prescribe a course of action to someone who has
a goal that could be realized by the operation of such a device. At
this stage, the issue changes from a descriptive to a prescriptive or
normative one. An extensive discussion of the various kinds of
knowledge relevant to technology is offered by Houkes (2009).



Although the notion of an operational principle--a term that
seems to originate with Polanyi (1958)--is central to engineering
design, no single clear-cut definition of it seems to exist. The issue
of disentangling descriptive from prescriptive aspects in an analysis
of technical actions and their constituents is therefore a task that
has hardly begun. This task requires a clear view on the extent and
scope of technology. If one follows Joseph Pitt in his book
*Thinking About Technology* (1999) and defines technology
broadly as 'humanity at work', then to distinguish between
technical action and action in general becomes difficult, and the
study of action in technology must absorb all descriptive and
normative theories of action, including the theory of practical
rationality, and much of theoretical economics in its wake. There have
indeed been attempts at such an encompassing account of human action,
for example Tadeusz Kotarbinski's *Praxiology* (1965),
but a perspective of such generality makes it difficult to arrive at
results of sufficient depth. It would be a challenge for philosophy to
specify the differences among action forms and the reasoning grounding
them in, to single out three prominent fields of study, technology,
organization and management, and economics.



A more restricted attempt at such an approach is Ilkka
Niiniluoto's (1993). According to Niiniluoto, the theoretical
framework of technology as an activity that is concerned with what the
world should be like rather than is, the framework that forms the
counterpoint to the descriptive framework of science, is *design
science*. The content of design science, the counterpoint to the
theories and explanations that form the content of descriptive
science, would then be formed by *technical norms*, statements
of the form 'If one wants to achieve *X*, one should do
*Y*'. The notion of a technical norm derives from Georg
Henrik von Wright's *Norm and Action* (1963). Technical
norms need to be distinguished from anankastic statements expressing
natural necessity, of the form 'If *X* is to be achieved,
*Y* needs to be done'; the latter have a truth value but
the former have not. Von Wright himself, however, wrote that he did
not understand the mutual relations between these statements. Zwart,
Franssen and Kroes (2018) present a detailed discussion. Ideas on what
design science is and can and should be are evidently related to the
broad problem area of practical rationality--see this
encyclopedia's entries on
 practical reason
 and
 instrumental rationality--and
 also to means-ends reasoning, discussed in the next section.


### 2.4 Methodological Issues: Design as Decision Making



Design is an activity that is subject to rational scrutiny but in
which creativity is considered to play an important role as well.
Since design is a form of action, a structured series of decisions to
proceed in one way rather than another, the form of rationality that
is relevant to it is practical rationality, the rationality
incorporating the criteria on how to act, given particular
circumstances. This suggests a clear division of labor between the
part to be played by rational scrutiny and the part to be played by
creativity. Theories of rational action generally conceive their
problem situation as one involving a choice among various course of
action open to the agent. Rationality then concerns the question how
to decide among given options, whereas creativity concerns the
generation of these options. This distinction is similar to the
distinction between the context of justification and the context of
discovery in science. The suggestion that is associated with this
distinction, however, that rational scrutiny only applies in the
context of justification, is difficult to uphold for technological
design. If the initial creative phase of option generation is
conducted sloppily, the result of the design task can hardly be
satisfactory. Unlike the case of science, where the practical
consequences of entertaining a particular theory are not taken into
consideration, the context of discovery in technology is governed by
severe constraints of time and money, and an analysis of the problem
how best to proceed certainly seems in order. There has been little
philosophical work done in this direction; an overview of the issues
is given in Kroes, Franssen, and Bucciarelli (2009).



The ideas of Herbert Simon on bounded rationality (see, e.g., Simon
1982) are relevant here, since decisions on when to stop generating
options and when to stop gathering information about these options and
the consequences when they are adopted are crucial in decision making
if informational overload and calculative intractability are to be
avoided. However, it has proved difficult to further develop
Simon's ideas on bounded rationality since their conception in
the 1950s. Another notion that is relevant here is means-ends
reasoning. In order to be of any help here, theories of means-ends
reasoning should then concern not just the evaluation of given means
with respect to their ability to achieve given ends, but also the
generation or construction of means for given ends. A comprehensive
theory of means-ends reasoning, however, is not yet available; for a
proposal on how to develop means-ends reasoning in the context of
technical artifacts, see Hughes, Kroes, and Zwart 2007. In the
practice of engineering, alternative proposals for the realization of
particular functions are usually taken from 'catalogs' of
existing and proven realizations. These catalogs are extended by
ongoing research in technology rather than under the urge of
particular design tasks.



When engineering design is conceived as a process of decision making,
governed by considerations of practical rationality, the next step is
to specify these considerations. Almost all theories of practical
rationality conceive of it as a reasoning process where a match
between beliefs and desires or goals is sought. The desires or goals
are represented by their value or utility for the decision maker, and
the decision maker's problem is to choose an action that
realizes a situation that, ideally, has maximal value or utility among
all the situations that could be realized. If there is uncertainty
concerning the situations that will be realized by a particular
action, then the problem is conceived as aiming for maximal
*expected* value or utility. Now the instrumental perspective
on technology implies that the value that is at issue in the design
process viewed as a process of rational decision making is not the
value of the artifacts that are created. Those values are the domain
of the *users* of the technology so created. They are supposed
to be represented in the functional requirements defining the design
task. Instead the value to be maximized is the extent to which a
particular design meets the functional requirements defining the
design task. It is in this sense that engineers share an overall
perspective on engineering design as an exercise in
*optimization*. But although optimization is a value-orientated
notion, it is not itself perceived as a value driving engineering
design.



The functional requirements that define most design problems do not
prescribe explicitly what should be optimized; usually they set levels
to be attained minimally. It is then up to the engineer to choose how
far to go beyond meeting the requirements in this minimal sense.
*Efficiency*, in energy consumption and use of materials first
of all, is then often a prime value. Under the pressure of society,
other values have come to be incorporated, in particular
*safety* and, more recently, *sustainability*. Sometimes
it is claimed that what engineers aim to maximize is just one factor,
namely market success. Market success, however, can only be assessed
after the fact. The engineer's maximization effort will instead
be directed at what are considered the predictors of market success.
Meeting the functional requirements and being relatively efficient and
safe are plausible candidates as such predictors, but additional
methods, informed by market research, may introduce additional factors
or may lead to a hierarchy among the factors.



Choosing the design option that maximally meets all the functional
requirements (which may but need not originate with the prospective
user) and all other considerations and criteria that are taken to be
relevant, then becomes the practical decision-making problem to be
solved in a particular engineering-design task. This creates several
methodological problems. Most important of these is that the engineer
is facing a *multi-criteria* decision problem. The various
requirements come with their own operationalizations in terms of
design parameters and measurement procedures for assessing their
performance. This results in a number of rank orders or quantitative
scales which represent the various options out of which a choice is to
be made. The task is to come up with a final score in which all these
results are 'adequately' represented, such that the option
that scores best can be considered the optimal solution to the design
problem. Engineers describe this situation as one where
*trade-offs* have to be made: in judging the merit of one
option relative to other options, a relative bad performance on one
criterion can be balanced by a relatively good performance on another
criterion. An important problem is whether a rational method for doing
this can be formulated. It has been argued by Franssen (2005) that
this problem is structurally similar to the well-known problem of
social choice, for which Kenneth Arrow proved his notorious
impossibility theorem in 1950. As a consequence, as long as we require
from a solution method to this problem that it answers to some
requirements that spell out its generality and rationality, no such
solution method exists. In technical design, the role that individual
voters play in situations of social choice is played by the various
design criteria, which each have a say in what the resulting product
comes to look like. This poses serious problems for the claims of
engineers that their designs are optimal solutions in the sense of
satisfying the totality of the design criteria best, since
Arrow's theorem implies that in most multi-criteria problems
this notion of 'optimal' cannot be rigorously defined,
just as in most multi-voter situations the notion of a best or even
adequate representation of what the voters jointly want cannot be
rigorously defined.



This result seems to except a crucial aspect of engineering activity
from philosophical scrutiny, and it could be used to defend the
opinion that engineering is at least partly an art, not a science.
Instead of surrendering to the result, however, which has a
significance that extends much beyond engineering and even beyond
decision making in general, we should perhaps conclude instead that
there is still a lot of work to be done on what might be termed,
provisionally, 'approximative' forms of reasoning. One
form of reasoning to be included here is Herbert Simon's bounded
rationality, plus the related notion of 'satisficing'.
Since their introduction in the 1950s (Simon 1957) these two terms
have found wide usage, but we are still lacking a general theory of
bounded rationality. It may be in the nature of forms of approximative
reasoning such as bounded rationality that a general theory cannot be
had, but even a systematic treatment from which such an insight could
emerge seems to be lacking.



Another problem for the decision-making view of engineering design is
that in modern technology almost all design is done by teams. Such
teams are composed of experts from many different disciplines. Each
discipline has its own theories, its own models of interdependencies,
its own assessment criteria, and so forth, and the professionals
belonging to these disciplines must be considered as inhabitants of
different *object worlds*, as Louis Bucciarelli (1994) phrases
it. The different team members are, therefore, likely to disagree on
the relative rankings and evaluations of the various design options
under discussion. Agreement on one option as the overall best one can
here be even less arrived at by an algorithmic method exemplifying
engineering rationality. Instead, models of social interaction, such
as bargaining and strategic thinking, are relevant here. An example of
such an approach to an (abstract) design problem is presented by
Franssen and Bucciarelli (2004).



To look in this way at technological design as a decision-making
process is to view it normatively from the point of view of practical
or instrumental rationality. At the same time it is descriptive in
that it is a description of how engineering methodology generally
presents the issue how to solve design problems. From that somewhat
higher perspective there is room for all kinds of normative questions
that are not addressed here, such as whether the functional
requirements defining a design problem can be seen as an adequate
representation of the values of the prospective users of an artifact
or a technology, or by which methods values such as safety and
sustainability can best be elicited and represented in the design
process. These issues will be taken up in
 Section 3.


### 2.5 Metaphysical Issues: The Status and Characteristics of Artifacts



Understanding the process of designing artifacts is the theme in
philosophy of technology that most directly touches on the interests
of engineering practice. This is hardly true for another issue of
central concern to analytic philosophy of technology, which is the
status and the character of artifacts. This is perhaps not unlike the
situation in the philosophy of science, where working scientists seem
also to be much less interested in investigating the status and
character of models and theories than philosophers are.



Artifacts are man-made objects: they have an author (see Hilpinen 1992
and Hilpinen's article
 artifact
 in this encyclopedia). The artifacts that are of relevance to
technology are, additionally, made to serve a purpose. This excludes,
within the set of all man-made objects, byproducts and waste products
and equally, though controversially, works of art. Byproducts and
waste products result from an intentional act to make something but
just not precisely, although the author at work may be well aware of
their creation. Works of art result from an intention directed at
their creation (although in exceptional cases of conceptual art, this
directedness may involve many intermediate steps) but it is contested
whether artists include in their intentions concerning their work an
intention that the work serves some purpose. Nevertheless, most
philosophers of technology who discuss the metaphysics of artifacts
exclude artworks from their analyses. A further discussion of this
aspect belongs to the philosophy of art. An interesting general
account which does not do so has been presented by Dipert (1993).



Technical artifacts, then, are made to serve some purpose, generally
to be used for something or to act as a component in a larger
artifact, which in its turn is either something to be used or again a
component. Whether end product or component, an artifact is 'for
something', and what it is for is called the artifact's
*function*. Several researchers have emphasized that an
adequate description of artifacts must refer both to their status as
tangible physical objects and to the intentions of the people engaged
with them. Kroes and Meijers (2006) have dubbed this view "the
dual nature of technical artifacts"; its most mature formulation
is Kroes 2012. They suggest that the two aspects are 'tied
up', so to speak, in the notion of artifact function. This gives
rise to several problems. One, which will be passed over quickly
because little philosophical work seems to have been done concerning
it, is that structure and function mutually constrain each other, but
the constraining is only partial. It is unclear whether a general
account of this relation is possible and what problems need to be
solved to arrive there. There may be interesting connections with the
issue of multiple realizability in the philosophy of mind and with
accounts of reduction in science; an example where this is explored is
Mahner and Bunge 2001.



It is equally problematic whether a unified account of the notion of
function as such is possible, but this issue has received considerably
more philosophical attention. The notion of function is of paramount
importance for characterizing artifacts, but the notion is used much
more widely. The notion of an artifact's function seems to refer
necessarily to human intentions. Function is also a key concept in
biology, however, where no intentionality plays a role, and it is a
key concept in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, where it
is crucial in grounding intentionality in non-intentional, structural
and physical properties. Up till now there is no accepted general
account of function that covers both the intentionality-based notion
of artifact function and the non-intentional notion of biological
function--not to speak of other areas where the concept plays a
role, such as the social sciences. The most comprehensive theory, that
has the ambition to account for the biological notion, cognitive
notion and the intentional notion, is Ruth Millikan's 1984; for
criticisms and replies, see Preston 1998, 2003; Millikan 1999; Vermaas
& Houkes 2003; and Houkes & Vermaas 2010. The collection of
essays edited by Ariew, Cummins and Perlman (2002) presents an
introduction to the topic of characterizing the notion of function,
although the emphasis is on biological functions. This emphasis
remains very strong in the literature, as can be judged from the most
recent critical overview (Garson 2016), which explicitly refrains from
discussing artifact functions.



Against the view that, at least in the case of artifacts, the notion
of function refers necessarily to intentionality, it could be argued
that in discussing the functions of the components of a larger device,
and the interrelations between these functions, the intentional
'side' of these functions is of secondary importance only.
This, however, would be to ignore the possibility of the
*malfunctioning* of such components. This notion seems to be
definable only in terms of a mismatch between actual behavior and
intended behavior. The notion of malfunction also sharpens an
ambiguity in the general reference to intentions when characterizing
technical artifacts. These artifacts usually engage many people, and
the intentions of these people may not all pull in the same direction.
A major distinction can be drawn between the intentions of the actual
user of an artifact for a particular purpose and the intentions of the
artifact's designer. Since an artifact may be used for a purpose
different from the one for which its designer intended it to be used,
and since people may also use natural objects for some purpose or
other, one is invited to allow that artifacts can have multiple
functions, or to enforce a hierarchy among all relevant intentions in
determining the function of an artifact, or to introduce a
classification of functions in terms of the sorts of determining
intentions. In the latter case, which is a sort of middle way between
the two other options, one commonly distinguishes between the
*proper function* of an artifact as the one intended by its
designer and the *accidental function* of the artifact as the
one given to it by some user on private considerations. Accidental use
can become so common, however, that the original function drops out of
memory.



Closely related to this issue to what extent use and design determine
the function of an artifact is the problem of characterizing artifact
kinds. It may seem that we use functions to classify artifacts: an
object is a knife because it has the function of cutting, or more
precisely, of enabling us to cut. On closer inspection, however, the
link between function and kind-membership seems much less
straightforward. The basic kinds in technology are, for example,
'knife', 'aircraft' and 'piston'.
The members of these kinds have been designed in order to be used to
cut something with, to transport something through the air and to
generate mechanical movement through thermodynamic expansion,
respectively. However, one cannot create a particular kind of artifact
just by designing something with the intention that it be used for
some particular purpose: a member of the kind so created must actually
be useful for that purpose. Despite innumerable design attempts and
claims, the perpetual motion machine is not a kind of artifact. A kind
like 'knife' is defined, therefore, not only by the
intentions of the designers of its members that they each be useful
for cutting but also by a shared operational principle known to these
designers, and on which they based their design. This is, in a
different setting, also defended by Thomasson, who in her
characterization of what she in general calls an *artifactual
kind* says that such a kind is defined by the designer's
intention to make something of that kind, by a substantive idea that
the designer has of how this can be achieved, and by his or her
largely successful achievement of it (Thomasson 2003, 2007). Qua sorts
of kinds in which artifacts can be grouped, a distinction must
therefore be made between a kind like 'knife' and a
corresponding but different kind 'cutter'. A
'knife' indicates a particular way a 'cutter'
can be made. One can also cut, however, with a thread or line, a
welding torch, a water jet, and undoubtedly by other sorts of means
that have not yet been thought of. A 'cutter' would then
refer to a truly functional kind. As such, it is subject to the
conflict between use and design: one could mean by
'cutter' anything than can be used for cutting or anything
that has been designed to be used for cutting, by the application of
whatever operational principle, presently known or unknown.



This distinction between artifact kinds and functional kinds is
relevant for the status of such kinds in comparison to other notions
of kinds. Philosophy of science has emphasized that the concept of
natural kind, such as exemplified by 'water' or
'atom', lies at the basis of science. On the other hand it
is generally taken for granted that there are no regularities that all
knives or airplanes or pistons answer to. This, however, is loosely
based on considerations of multiple realizability that fully apply
only to functional kinds, not to artifact kinds. Artifact kinds share
an operational principle that gives them some commonality in physical
features, and this commonality becomes stronger once a particular
artifact kind is subdivided into narrower kinds. Since these kinds are
specified in terms of physical and geometrical parameters, they are
much closer to the natural kinds of science, in that they support
law-like regularities; see for a defense of this position (Soavi
2009). A recent collection of essays that discuss the metaphysics of
artifacts and artifact kinds is Franssen, Kroes, Reydon and Vermaas
2014.


### 2.6 Other Topics



There is at least one additional technology-related topic that ought
to be mentioned because it has created a good deal of analytic
philosophical literature, namely Artificial Intelligence and related
areas. A full discussion of this vast field is beyond the scope of
this entry, however. Information is to be found in the entries on
 Turing machines,
 the Church-Turing thesis,
 computability and complexity,
 the Turing test,
 the Chinese room argument,
 the computational theory of mind,
 functionalism,
 multiple realizability, and
 the philosophy of computer science.


## 3. Ethical and Social Aspects of Technology


### 3.1 The Development of the Ethics of Technology



It was not until the twentieth century that the development of the
ethics of technology as a systematic and more or less independent
subdiscipline of philosophy started. This late development may seem
surprising given the large impact that technology has had on society,
especially since the industrial revolution.



A plausible reason for this late development of ethics of technology
is the instrumental perspective on technology that was mentioned in
 Section 2.2.
 This perspective implies, basically, a positive ethical assessment of
technology: technology increases the possibilities and capabilities of
humans, which seems in general desirable. Of course, since antiquity,
it has been recognized that the new capabilities may be put to bad use
or lead to human *hubris*. Often, however, these undesirable
consequences are attributed to the users of technology, rather than
the technology itself, or its developers. This vision is known as the
instrumental vision of technology resulting in the so-called
neutrality thesis. The neutrality thesis holds that technology is a
neutral instrument that can be put to good or bad use by its users.
During the twentieth century, this neutrality thesis met with severe
critique, most prominently by Heidegger and Ellul, who have been
mentioned in this context in
 Section 2,
 but also by philosophers from the Frankfurt School, such as
Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [2002]), Marcuse (1964), and Habermas
(1968 [1970]).



The scope and the agenda for ethics of technology to a large extent
depend on how technology is conceptualized. The second half of the
twentieth century has witnessed a richer variety of conceptualizations
of technology that move beyond the conceptualization of technology as
a neutral tool, as a world view or as a historical necessity. This
includes conceptualizations of technology as a political phenomenon
(Winner, Feenberg, Sclove), as a social activity (Latour, Callon,
Bijker and others in the area of science and technology studies), as a
cultural phenomenon (Ihde, Borgmann), as a professional activity
(engineering ethics, e.g., Davis), and as a cognitive activity (Bunge,
Vincenti). Despite this diversity, the development in the second half
of the twentieth century is characterized by two general trends. One
is a move away from technological determinism and the assumption that
technology is a given self-contained phenomenon which develops
autonomously to an emphasis on technological development being the
result of choices (although not necessarily the intended result). The
other is a move away from ethical reflection on technology as such to
ethical reflection of specific technologies and to specific phases in
the development of technology. Both trends together have resulted in
an enormous increase in the number and scope of ethical questions that
are asked about technology. The developments also imply that ethics of
technology is to be adequately empirically informed, not only about
the exact consequences of specific technologies but also about the
actions of engineers and the process of technological development.
This has also opened the way to the involvement of other disciplines
in ethical reflections on technology, such as Science and Technology
Studies (STS) and Technology Assessment (TA).


### 3.2 Approaches in the Ethics of Technology



Not only is the ethics of technology characterized by a diversity of
approaches, it might even be doubted whether something like a
subdiscipline of ethics of technology, in the sense of a community of
scholars working on a common set of problems, exists. The scholars
studying ethical issues in technology have diverse backgrounds (e.g.,
philosophy, STS, TA, law, political science, and STEM disciplines) and
they do not always consider themselves (primarily) ethicists of
technology. To give the reader an overview of the field, three basic
approaches or strands that might be distinguished in the ethics of
technology will be discussed.


#### 3.2.1 Cultural and political approaches



Both cultural and political approaches build on the traditional
philosophy and ethics of technology of the first half of the twentieth
century. Whereas cultural approaches conceive of technology as a
cultural phenomenon that influences our perception of the world,
political approaches conceive of technology as a political phenomenon,
i.e., as a phenomenon that is ruled by and embodies institutional
power relations between people.



Cultural approaches are often phenomenological in nature or at least
position themselves in relation to phenomenology as
post-phenomenology. Examples of philosophers in this tradition are Don
Ihde, Albert Borgmann, Peter-Paul Verbeek and Evan Selinger (e.g.,
Borgmann 1984; Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2000 [2005], 2011). The approaches
are usually influenced by developments in STS, especially the idea
that technologies contain a script that influences not only
people's perception of the world but also human behavior, and
the idea of the absence of a fundamental distinction between humans
and non-humans, including technological artifacts (Akrich 1992; Latour
1992, 1993; Ihde & Selinger 2003). The combination of both ideas
has led some to claim that technology has (moral) agency, a claim that
is discussed below in
 Section 3.3.1.



Political approaches to technology mostly go back to Marx, who assumed
that the material structure of production in society, in which
technology is obviously a major factor, determined the economic and
social structure of that society. Similarly, Langdon Winner has argued
that technologies can embody specific forms of power and authority
(Winner 1980). According to him, some technologies are inherently
normative in the sense that they require or are strongly compatible
with certain social and political relations. Railroads, for example,
seem to require a certain authoritative management structure. In other
cases, technologies may be political due to the particular way they
have been designed. Some political approaches to technology are
inspired by (American) pragmatism and, to a lesser extent, discourse
ethics. A number of philosophers, for example, have pleaded for a
democratization of technological development and the inclusion of
ordinary people in the shaping of technology (Winner 1983; Sclove
1995; Feenberg 1999). Such ideas are also echoed in recent
interdisciplinary approaches, such as Responsible Research and
Innovation (RRI), that aim at opening up the innovation process to a
broader range of stakeholders and concerns (Owen et al. 2013).



Although political approaches have obviously ethical ramifications,
many philosophers who initially adopted such approaches do not engage
in explicit ethical reflection. Also in political philosophy,
technology does not seem to have been taken up as an important topic.
Nevertheless, particularly in relation to digital technologies such as
social media, algorithms and more generally Artificial Intelligence
(AI), a range of political themes has recently been discussed, such as
threats to democracy (from e.g. social media), the power of Big Tech
companies, and new forms of exploitation, domination and colonialism
that may come with AI (e.g., Coeckelbergh 2022; Susskind 2022; Zuboff
2017; Adams 2021). An important emerging theme is also justice, which
does not just encompass distributive justice (Rawls 1999), but also
recognition justice (Fraser and Honneth 2003) and procedural justice.
Questions about justice have not only been raised by digital
technologies, but also by climate change and energy technologies,
leading to the coinage of new notions like climate justice (Caney
2014) and energy justice (Jenkins et al. 2016).


#### 3.2.2 Engineering ethics



Engineering ethics started off in the 1980s in the United States,
merely as an educational effort. Engineering ethics is concerned with
"the actions and decisions made by persons, individually or
collectively, who belong to the profession of engineering" (Baum
1980: 1). According to this approach, engineering is a profession, in
the same way as medicine is a profession.



Although there is no agreement on how a profession exactly should be
defined, the following characteristics are often mentioned:


* A profession relies on specialized knowledge and skills that
require a long period of study;
* The occupational group has a monopoly on the carrying out of the
occupation;
* The assessment of whether the professional work is carried out in
a competent way is done by, and it is accepted that this can only be
done by, professional peers;
* A profession provides society with products, services or values
that are useful or worthwhile for society, and is characterized by an
ideal of serving society;
* The daily practice of professional work is regulated by ethical
standards, which are derived from or relate to the society-serving
ideal of the profession.



Typical ethical issues that are discussed in engineering ethics are
professional obligations of engineers as exemplified in, for example,
codes of ethics of engineers, the role of engineers versus managers,
competence, honesty, whistle-blowing, concern for safety and conflicts
of interest (Davis 1998, 2005). Over the years, the scope of
engineering ethics has been broadened. Whereas it initially often
focused on decisions of individual engineers and on questions like
whistle-blowing and loyalty, textbooks now also discuss the wider
context in which such decisions are made and pay attention to for
example, the so-called problem of many hands (van de Poel and
Royakkers 2011; Peterson 2020) (see also section 3.3.2). Initially,
the focus was often primarily on safety concerns and issues like
competence and conflicts of interests, but nowadays also issues of
sustainability, social justice, privacy, global issues and the role of
technology in society are discussed (Harris, Pritchard, and Rabins
2014; Martin and Schinzinger 2022; Taebi 2021; Peterson 2020; van de
Poel and Royakkers 2011).


#### 3.2.3 Ethics of specific technologies



The last decades have witnessed an enormous increase in ethical
inquiries into specific technologies. This may now be the largest of
the three strands discussed, especially given the rapid growth in
technology-specific ethical inquiries in the last two decades. One of
the most visible new fields nowadays is digital ethics, which evolved
from computer ethics (e.g., Moor 1985; Floridi 2010; Johnson 2009;
Weckert 2007; van den Hoven & Weckert 2008), with more recently a
focus on robotics, artificial intelligence, machine ethics, and the
ethics of algorithms (Lin, Abney, & Jenkins 2017; Nucci &
Santoni de Sio 2016; Mittelstadt et al. 2016; Bostrom & Yudkowsky
2014; Wallach & Allen 2009, Coeckelbergh 2020b). Other
technologies like biotechnology have also spurred dedicated ethical
investigations (e.g., Sherlock & Morrey 2002; P. Thompson 2007).
More traditional fields like architecture and urban planning have also
attracted specific ethical attention (Fox 2000). Nanotechnology and
so-called converging technologies have led to the establishment of
what is called nanoethics (Allhoff et al. 2007). Other examples are
the ethics of nuclear deterrence (Finnis et al. 1988), nuclear energy
(Taebi & Roeser 2015) and geoengineering (Christopher Preston
2016).



Obviously the establishment of such new fields of ethical reflection
is a response to social and technological developments. Still, the
question can be asked whether the social demand is best met by
establishing new fields of applied ethics. This issue is in fact
regularly discussed as new fields emerge. Several authors have for
example argued that there is no need for nanoethics because
nanotechnology does not raise any really new ethical issues (e.g.,
McGinn 2010). The alleged absence of newness here is supported by the
claim that the ethical issues raised by nanotechnology are a variation
on, and sometimes an intensification of, existing ethical issues, but
hardly really new, and by the claim that these issues can be dealt
with the existing theories and concepts from moral philosophy. For an
earlier, similar discussion concerning the supposed new character of
ethical issues in computer engineering, see Tavani 2002.



The new fields of ethical reflection are often characterized as
applied ethics, that is, as applications of theories, normative
standards, concepts and methods developed in moral philosophy. For
each of these elements, however, application is usually not
straightforward but requires a further specification or revision. This
is the case because general moral standards, concepts and methods are
often not specific enough to be applicable in any direct sense to
specific moral problems. 'Application' therefore often
leads to new insights which might well result in the reformulation or
at least refinement of existing normative standards, concepts and
methods. In some cases, ethical issues in a specific field might
require new standards, concepts or methods. Beauchamp and Childress
for example have proposed a number of general ethical principles for
biomedical ethics (Beauchamp & Childress 2001). These principles
are more specific than general normative standards, but still so
general and abstract that they apply to different issues in biomedical
ethics. In computer ethics, existing moral concepts relating to for
example privacy and ownership has been redefined and adapted to deal
with issues which are typical for the computer age (Johnson 2003). An
example is Nissenbaum's proposal to understand privacy in terms
of contextual integrity (Nissenbaum 2010). New fields of ethical
application might also require new methods for, for example,
discerning ethical issues that take into account relevant empirical
facts about these fields, like the fact that technological research
and development usually takes place in networks of people rather than
by individuals (Zwart et al. 2006). Another more general issue that
applies to many new technologies is how to deal with the uncertainties
about (potential) social and ethical impacts that typically surround
new emerging technologies. Brey's (2012) proposal for an
anticipatory ethics may be seen as a reply to this challenge. The
issue of anticipation is also one of the central concerns in the more
recent interdisciplinary field of Responsible Research and Innovation
(RRI) (e.g., Owen et al. 2013).



Although different fields of ethical reflection on specific
technologies might well raise their own philosophical and ethical
issues, it can be questioned whether this justifies the development of
separate subfields or even subdisciplines. One obvious argument might
be that in order to say something ethically meaningful about new
technologies, one needs specialized and detailed knowledge of a
specific technology. Moreover such subfields allow interaction with
relevant non-philosophical experts in for example law, psychology,
economy, science and technology studies (STS) or technology assessment
(TA), as well as the relevant STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering,
Medicine) disciplines. On the other side, it could also be argued that
a lot can be learned from interaction and discussion between ethicists
specializing in different technologies, and a fruitful interaction
with the two other strands discussed above (cultural and political
approaches and engineering ethics). In particular more political
approaches to technology can be complementary to approaches that focus
on ethical issue of specific technologies (such as AI) by drawing
attention to justice issues, power differences and the role of larger
institutional and international contexts. Currently, such interaction
in many cases seems absent, although there are of course
exceptions.


### 3.3 Some Recurrent Themes in the Ethics of Technology



We now turn to the description of some specific themes in the ethics
of technology. We focus on a number of general themes that provide an
illustration of general issues in the ethics of technology and the way
these are treated.


#### 3.3.1 Neutrality versus moral agency



One important general theme in the ethics of technology is the
question whether technology is value-laden. Some authors have
maintained that technology is value-neutral, in the sense that
technology is just a neutral means to an end, and accordingly can be
put to good or bad use (e.g., Pitt 2000). This view might have some
plausibility in as far as technology is considered to be just a bare
physical structure. Most philosophers of technology, however, agree
that technological development is a goal-oriented process and that
technological artifacts by definition have certain functions, so that
they can be used for certain goals but not, or far more difficulty or
less effectively, for other goals. This conceptual connection between
technological artifacts, functions and goals makes it hard to maintain
that technology is value-neutral. Even if this point is granted, the
value-ladenness of technology can be construed in a host of different
ways. Some authors have maintained that technology can have moral
agency. This claim suggests that technologies can autonomously and
freely 'act' in a moral sense and can be held morally
responsible for their actions.



The debate whether technologies can have moral agency started off in
computer ethics (Bechtel 1985; Snapper 1985; Dennett 1997; Floridi
& Sanders 2004) but has since broadened. Typically, the authors
who claim that technologies (can) have moral agency often redefine the
notion of agency or its connection to human will and freedom (e.g.,
Latour 1993; Floridi & Sanders 2004, Verbeek 2011). A disadvantage
of this strategy is that it tends to blur the morally relevant
distinctions between people and technological artifacts. More
generally, the claim that technologies have moral agency sometimes
seems to have become shorthand for claiming that technology is morally
relevant. This, however, overlooks the fact technologies can be
value-laden in other ways than by having moral agency (see, e.g.,
Johnson 2006; Radder 2009; Illies & Meijers 2009; Peterson &
Spahn 2011; Miller 2020; Klenk 2021). One might, for example, claim
that technology enables (or even invites) and constrains (or even
inhibits) certain human actions and the attainment of certain human
goals and therefore is to some extent value-laden, without claiming
moral agency for technological artifacts. A good overview of the
debate can be found in Kroes and Verbeek 2014.



The debate about moral agency and technology is now particularly
salient with respect to the design of intelligent artificial agents.
James Moor (2006) has distinguished between four ways in which
artificial agents may be or become moral agents:


1. Ethical impact agents are robots and computer systems that
ethically impact their environment; this is probably true of all
artificial agents.
2. Implicit ethical agents are artificial agents that have been
programmed to act according to certain values.
3. Explicit ethical agents are machines that can represent ethical
categories and that can 'reason' (in machine language)
about these.
4. Full ethical agents in addition also possess some characteristics
we often consider crucial for human agency, like consciousness, free
will and intentionality.



It might perhaps never be possible to technologically design full
ethical agents, and if it were to become possible it might be
questionable whether it is morally desirable to do so (Bostrom &
Yudkowsky 2014; van Wynsberghe and Robbins 2019). As Wallach and Allen
(2009) have pointed out, the main problem might not be to design
artificial agents that can function autonomously and that can adapt
themselves in interaction with the environment, but rather to build
enough, and the right kind of, ethical sensitivity into such
machines.



Apart from the question whether intelligent artificial agents can have
moral agency, there are (broader) questions about their moral status;
for example would they--and if so under what
conditions--qualify as moral patients, to which humans have
certain moral obligations. Traditionally, moral status is connected to
consciousness, but a number of authors have proposed more minimal
criteria for moral status, particularly for (social) robots. For
example, Danaher (2020) has suggested that behaviouristic criteria
might suffice whereas Coeckelbergh (2014) and Gunkel (2018) have
suggested a relational approach. Mosakas (2021) has argued that such
approaches do not ground moral status, and hence humans have no direct
moral duties towards social robots (although they may still be morally
relevant in other ways). Others have suggested that social robots
sometimes may deceive us into believing they have certain cognitive
and emotional capabilities (that may give them also moral status)
while they have not (Sharkey and Sharkey 2021).


#### 3.3.2 Responsibility



Responsibility has always been a central theme in the ethics of
technology. The traditional philosophy and ethics of technology,
however, tended to discuss responsibility in rather general terms and
were rather pessimistic about the possibility of engineers to assume
responsibility for the technologies they developed. Ellul, for
example, has characterized engineers as the high priests of
technology, who cherish technology but cannot steer it. Hans Jonas
(1979 [1984]) has argued that technology requires an ethics in which
responsibility is the central imperative because for the first time in
history we are able to destroy the earth and humanity.



In engineering ethics, the responsibility of engineers is often
discussed in relation to code of ethics that articulate specific
responsibilities of engineers. Such codes of ethics stress three types
of responsibilities of engineers: (1) conducting the profession with
integrity and honesty and in a competent way, (2) responsibilities
towards employers and clients and (3) responsibility towards the
public and society. With respect to the latter, most US codes of
ethics maintain that engineers 'should hold paramount the
safety, health and welfare of the public'.



As has been pointed out by several authors (Nissenbaum 1996; Johnson
& Powers 2005; Swierstra & Jelsma 2006), it may be hard to
pinpoint individual responsibility in engineering. The reason is that
the conditions for the proper attribution of individual responsibility
that have been discussed in the philosophical literature (like freedom
to act, knowledge, and causality) are often not met by individual
engineers. For example, engineers may feel compelled to act in a
certain way due to hierarchical or market constraints, and negative
consequences may be very hard or impossible to predict beforehand. The
causality condition is often difficult to meet as well due to the long
chain from research and development of a technology till its use and
the many people involved in this chain. Davis (2012) nevertheless
maintains that despite such difficulties individual engineers can and
do take responsibility.



One issue that is at stake in this debate is the notion of
responsibility. Davis (2012), and also for example Ladd (1991), argue
for a notion of responsibility that focuses less on blame and stresses
the forward-looking or virtuous character of assuming responsibility.
But many others focus on backward-looking notions of responsibility
that stress accountability, blameworthiness or liability. Zandvoort
(2000), for example has pleaded for a notion of responsibility in
engineering that is more like the legal notion of strict liability, in
which the knowledge condition for responsibility is seriously
weakened. Doorn (2012) compares three perspectives on responsibility
ascription in engineering--a merit-based, a right-based and a
consequentialist perspective--and argues that the
consequentialist perspective, which applies a forward-looking notion
of responsibility, is most powerful in influencing engineering
practice.



The difficulty of attributing individual responsibility may lead to
the Problem of Many Hands (PMH). The term was first coined by Dennis
Thompson (1980) in an article about the responsibility of public
officials. The term is used to describe problems with the ascription
of individual responsibility in collective settings. Doorn (2010) has
proposed a procedurals approach, based on Rawls' reflective
equilibrium model, to deal with the PMH; other ways of dealing with
the PMH include the design of institutions that help to avoid it or an
emphasis on virtuous behavior in organizations (van de Poel, Royakers,
& Zwart 2015).



Whereas the PMH refers to the problem of attributing responsibility
among a collective of human agents, technological developments have
also made it possible to allocate tasks to self-learning and
intelligent systems. Such systems may function and learn in ways that
are hard to understand, predict and control for humans, leading to
so-called 'responsibility gaps' (Matthias 2004). Since
knowledge and control are usually seen as (essential) preconditions
for responsibility, lack thereof may make it increasingly difficult to
hold humans responsible for the actions and consequences of
intelligent systems.



Initially, such responsibility gaps were mainly discussed in relation
to autonomous weapon systems and self-driving cars (Sparrow 2007;
Danaher 2016). As a possible solution, the notion of meaningful human
control has been proposed as a precondition for the development and
employment of such systems to ensure that human can retain control,
and hence responsibility over these systems (Santoni de Sio and van
den Hoven 2018). Nyholm (2018) has argued that many alleged cases of
responsibility gaps are better understood in terms collaborative
human-technology agency (with humans in a supervising role) rather
than the technology taking over control. While responsibility gaps may
not impossible, the more difficult issue may be to attribute
responsibility to the various humans involved (which brings the PMH
back on the table).



More recently, responsibility gaps have become a more general concern
in relation to AI. Due to the advance of machine learning, AI systems
may learn in ways that are hard, or almost impossible to understand
for humans. Initially, the dominant notion of responsibility addressed
in the literature on responsibility gaps was blameworthiness or
culpability, but Santoni de Sio and Mecacci (2021) have recently
proposed to distinguish between what they call culpability gaps, moral
accountability gaps, public accountability gaps, and active
responsibility gaps.


#### 3.3.3 Design



In the last decades, increasingly attention is paid not only to
ethical issues that arise during the use of a technology, but also
during the design phase. An important consideration behind this
development is the thought that during the design phase technologies,
and their social consequences, are still malleable whereas during the
use phase technologies are more or less given and negative social
consequences may be harder to avoid or positive effects harder to
achieve.



In computer ethics, an approach known as Value Sensitive Design (VSD)
has been developed to explicitly address the ethical nature of design.
VSD aims at integrating values of ethical importance in engineering
design in a systematic way (Friedman & Hendry 2019). The approach
combines conceptual, empirical and technical investigations. There is
also a range of other approaches aimed at including values in design.
'Design for X' approaches in engineering aim at including
instrumental values (like maintainability, reliability and costs) but
they also include design for sustainability, inclusive design, and
affective design (Holt & Barnes 2010). Inclusive design aims at
making designs accessible to the whole population including, for
example, handicapped people and the elderly (Erlandson 2008).
Affective design aims at designs that evoke positive emotions with the
users and so contributes to human well-being. Van de Hoven, Vermaas,
and van de Poel 2015 gives a good overview of the state-of-the art of
value sensitive design for various values and application domains.



If one tries to integrate values into design one may run into the
problem of a conflict of values. The safest car is, due to its weight,
not likely to be the most sustainability. Here safety and
sustainability conflict in the design of cars. Traditional methods in
which engineers deal with such conflicts and make trade-off between
different requirements for design include cost-benefit analysis and
multiple criteria analysis. Such methods are, however, beset with
methodological problems like those discussed in
 Section 2.4
 (Franssen 2005; Hansson 2007). Van de Poel (2009) discusses various
alternatives for dealing with value conflicts in design including the
setting of thresholds (satisficing), reasoning about values,
innovation and diversity.


#### 3.3.4 Technological risks



The risks of technology are one of the traditional ethical concerns in
the ethics of technology. Risks raise not only ethical issues but
other philosophical issues, such as epistemological and
decision-theoretical issues as well (Roeser et al. 2012).



Risk is usually defined as the product of the probability of an
undesirable event and the effect of that event, although there are
also other definitions around (Hansson 2004b). In general it seems
desirable to keep technological risks as small as possible. The larger
the risk, the larger either the likeliness or the impact of an
undesirable event is. Risk reduction therefore is an important goal in
technological development and engineering codes of ethics often
attribute a responsibility to engineers in reducing risks and
designing safe products. Still, risk reduction is not always feasible
or desirable. It is sometimes not feasible, because there are no
absolutely safe products and technologies. But even if risk reduction
is feasible it may not be acceptable from a moral point of view.
Reducing risk often comes at a cost. Safer products may be more
difficult to use, more expensive or less sustainable. So sooner or
later, one is confronted with the question: what is safe enough? What
makes a risk (un)acceptable?



The process of dealing with risks is often divided into three stages:
risk assessment, risk evaluation and risk management. Of these, the
second is most obviously ethically relevant. However, risk assessment
already involves value judgments, for example about which risks should
be assessed in the first place (Shrader-Frechette 1991). An important,
and morally relevant, issue is also the degree of evidence that is
needed to establish a risk. In establishing a risk on the basis of a
body of empirical data one might make two kinds of mistakes. One can
establish a risk when there is actually none (type I error) or one can
mistakenly conclude that there is no risk while there actually is a
risk (type II error). Science traditionally aims at avoiding type I
errors. Several authors have argued that in the specific context of
risk assessment it is often more important to avoid type II errors
(Cranor 1990; Shrader-Frechette 1991). The reason for this is that
risk assessment not just aims at establishing scientific truth but has
a practical aim, i.e., to provide the knowledge on basis of which
decisions can be made about whether it is desirable to reduce or avoid
certain technological risks in order to protect users or the
public.



Risk evaluation is carried out in a number of ways (see, e.g.,
Shrader-Frechette 1985). One possible approach is to judge the
acceptability of risks by comparing them to other risks or to certain
standards. One could, for example, compare technological risks with
naturally occurring risks. This approach, however, runs the danger of
committing a naturalistic fallacy: naturally occurring risks may
(sometimes) be unavoidable but that does not necessarily make them
morally acceptable. More generally, it is often dubious to judge the
acceptability of the risk of technology A by comparing it to the risk
of technology B if A and B are not alternatives in a decision (for
this and other fallacies in reasoning about risks, see Hansson
2004a).



A second approach to risk evaluation is risk-cost benefit analysis,
which is based on weighing the risks against the benefits of an
activity. Different decision criteria can be applied if a (risk) cost
benefit analysis is carried out (Kneese, Ben-David, and Schulze 1983).
According to Hansson (2003: 306), usually the following criterion is
applied: 



> 
> 
> ... a risk is acceptable if and only if the total benefits that
> the exposure gives rise to outweigh the total risks, measured as the
> probability-weighted disutility of outcomes.
> 
> 
> 



A third approach is to base risk acceptance on the consent of people
who suffer the risks after they have been informed about these risks
(informed consent). A problem of this approach is that technological
risks usually affect a large number of people at once. Informed
consent may therefore lead to a "society of stalemates"
(Hansson 2003: 300).



Several authors have proposed alternatives to the traditional
approaches of risk evaluation on the basis of philosophical and
ethical arguments. Shrader-Frechette (1991) has proposed a number of
reforms in risk assessment and evaluation procedures on the basis of a
philosophical critique of current practices. Roeser (2012) argues for
a role of emotions in judging the acceptability of risks. Hansson has
proposed the following alternative principle for risk evaluation: 



> 
> 
> Exposure of a person to a risk is acceptable if and only if this
> exposure is part of an equitable social system of risk-taking that
> works to her advantage. (Hansson 2003: 305) 
> 
> 
> 



Hansson's proposal introduces a number of moral considerations
in risk evaluation that are traditionally not addressed or only
marginally addressed. These are the consideration whether individuals
profit from a risky activity and the consideration whether the
distribution of risks and benefits is fair.



Questions about acceptable risk may also be framed in terms of risk
imposition. The question is then under what conditions it is
acceptable for some agent A to impose a risk on some other agent B.
The criteria for acceptable risk imposition are in part similar to the
ones discussed above. A risk imposition may, for example, be (more)
acceptable if agent B gave their informed consent, or if the risky
activity that generates the risk is beneficial for agent B. However,
other considerations come in as well, like the relation between agent
A and agent B. It might perhaps be acceptable for parents to impose
certain risks on their children, while it would be improper for the
government to impose such risks on children.



Risk impositions may particularly be problematic if they lead to
domination or domination-like effects (Maheshwari and Nyholm 2022).
Domination is here understood in the republican sense proposed by
philosophers like Pettit (2012). Freedom from domination does not just
require people to have different options to choose from, but also to
be free from the (potential) arbitrary interference in the
(availability of) these options by others. Non-domination thus
requires that others do not have the power to arbitrary interfere with
one's options (whether that power is exercised or not). Risk
imposition may lead to domination (or at least dominating-like
effects) if agent A (the risk imposer) by imposing a risk on agent B
(the risk bearer) can arbitrary affect the range of safe options
available to agent B.



Some authors have criticized the focus on risks in the ethics of
technology. One strand of criticism argues that we often lack the
knowledge to reliably assess the risks of a new technology before it
has come into use. We often do not know the probability that something
might go wrong, and sometimes we even do not know, or at least not
fully, what might go wrong and what possible negative consequences may
be. To deal with this, some authors have proposed to conceive of the
introduction of new technology in society as a social experiment and
have urged to think about the conditions under which such experiments
are morally acceptable (Martin & Schinzinger 2022; van de Poel
2016). Another strand of criticism states that the focus on risks has
led to a reduction of the impacts of technology that are considered
(Swierstra & te Molder 2012). Only impacts related to safety and
health, which can be calculated as risks, are considered, whereas
'soft' impacts, for example of a social or psychological
nature, are neglected, thereby impoverishing the moral evaluation of
new technologies.