What sort of ethics does technology require?

Abstract

This essay critically examines the non-essentialist and anti-deterministic philosophy of technology developed in the work of Andrew Feenberg. As I interpret the work, Feenberg achieves an important "demystiflcation" of technology. His analysis peels away the facade of ironclad efficiency, rationality, and necessity that permeates our experience of technology. Through theoretical argument and rich examples, he illuminated the contingent interests, values, meanings, and voices that are built into specific technologies, often by experts. He shows how technology is transformed by lay actors who challenge its design on behalf of a wider agenda of interests, values, meanings and voices. My critique focuses on Feenberg's attempt to argue from his demystiflcation of technology to the full democratization of all technical design and decision-making. I argue that Feenberg's framework lacks the ethical resources required both to (1) justify the democratization of technical decisions, and more basically, (2) to determine when lay challenges to technology do and when they don't, advance democratic ideals, and why. I trace these problems to ethical inadequacies in his notions of interests, democratization, and an alternative modernity. A sub-theme of my argument is that our society's Lockean morality of property rights and market freedoms poses fundamental ethical objections to his philosophy of technology with which it is ill-equipped to deal. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers.