“Guns Don’t Kill, People Kill”; Values in and/or Around Technologies

Abstract

This paper presents a defense of the Value Neutrality Thesis with respect to technological artifacts. While it may be case that people build artifacts with certain ends in mind – the values of the people doing the building are not in the artifacts. Why this is so is a function of three things: (1) lack of empirically identifying characteristics of values and (2) an endorsement of a pragmatic conception of values as motivators of human action, and (3) a conception of decision-making that necessarily includes values.