Abstract
The discussion about moral agency and technology is troubled by some severe misunderstandings. Too often, the claim that technologies are involved in moral agency is misread for the claim that technologies are moral agents themselves. Much of the discussion then focuses on the question whether not only humans but also technologies can have intentionality, freedom, responsibility, and, ultimately, moral agency. From the perspective of mediation theory, this discussion remains caught in a dualist paradigm that locates human beings and technological artifacts in two separate realms, humans being intentional and free, technologies being instrumental and mute. Against the question to what extent technologies can be moral agents, mediation theory makes it possible to investigate how intentionality, freedom, and agency are in fact the result of intricate connections and interactions between human beings and technological artifacts. Rather than checking if technologies can meet a pre-given criterion of moral agency, we need to re-conceptualize the phenomenon of moral agency itself in order to understand the roles of technologies in our daily lives.
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Notes
- 1.
This contribution incorporates and substantially expands elements of the brief ‘reply to critics’ I gave in the journal Philosophy and Technology, in a symposium on my book Moralizing Technology (Verbeek 2012).
- 2.
I am well aware that a proper definition of moral agency requires other elements as well, including the capacity of moral reasoning, as Illies and Meijers argue in their contribution to this volume. But for this capacity the same type of arguments can be developed that I will develop for intentionality and freedom, i.e. that they should be seen as the result of a complex interplay between human and nonhuman entities, rather than a property that both humans and nonhumans can possess.
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Verbeek, PP. (2014). Some Misunderstandings About the Moral Significance of Technology. In: Kroes, P., Verbeek, PP. (eds) The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7914-3_5
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