18 augustus 2021
Technological Mediation and Ethics
According to the theory of technological mediation, technological artifacts are not ‘passive’; they play an active role in our lives, always mediating the way we engage with the world around us. And this is not only true for artefacts that seem to ‘act’, like robots, digital avatars or the like. No, even simple artifacts like hammers, glasses or the fountain pen mediate our lives. They do so by mediating two important aspects of my existence in the world: my perception of the world, and my actions in it. And in so doing, they also help change who and what we are. The rich tradition of ethical reflection on technology mostly deals with how humans should act, how we should (not) handle/design/implement/regulate artifacts. It relies on the idea that only humans have agency (and thus on the instrumentalist notion that artefacts do not). For mediation theory, this will not do: if no human engagement in the world is unmediated or non-technological, then the question of what artifacts do deserves to be taken more seriously in ethics. Meditation theory has uses in both descriptive and prescriptive ethics of technology.