Towards an Ethics of Technology and Human Development

Abstract

One of the societal challenges that engineering in a global world faces is that of making technology work in the context of developing countries and poverty reduction, to make it truly contribute to human development. This makes the relatively young field of development ethics potentially highly relevant to engineering, but unfortunately it has so far hardly addressed technology. To make its application to technology more than superficial, it is important to thoroughly explore its connections to engineering ethics, to ethics of technology, and even philosophy of technology more broadly. This claim is illustrated with the so-called ‘capability approach’, which is nowadays very popular within development ethics and which attaches central moral importance to individual human capabilities. The chapter discusses how insights from philosophy and ethics of technology are useful, among others, to better conceptualize the relation between technical artifacts and valuable human capabilities. In this way the chapter makes a small theoretical contribution towards an endeavor to create an ethics of ‘technology and human development.’