Abstract
Information technologies seem promising when it comes to improving elderly care, but they also raise ethical worries, for example about privacy, human contact, and justice. This paper argues that the capability approach is a helpful tool to make explicit what is at stake in this context and to discuss the relevant ethical issues. However, it is also proposed that we modify the capability approach by adopting a non-instrumental view of technology that takes into account how particular technologies change the meaning of the capabilities. This idea is further developed into suggestions for an ethical-hermeneutical interpretation of the capability approach, which involves the use of techno-moral imagination. To illustrate this, the paper explores and discusses an elderly care scenario in which people’s capabilities for social affiliation and engagement in relations with non-humans are transformed by information technology.
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Notes
- 1.
I limit the topic of this chapter to ethics of elderly care but the capability approach can be more widely applied across various domains of ethics and ethics of technology.
- 2.
- 3.
Note that judging a particular life to be ‘not worth living’ does not necessarily imply that it is therefore justified to end such a life (e.g. suicide or euthanasia). On the contrary, it seems that a capability approach would rather require us to help the person to reach the minimum level. And if this were impossible, then there may be other ethical considerations for blocking the suicide or euthanasia option.
- 4.
My use of a fictional scenario is inspired by my research on moral imagination (Coeckelbergh 2007) and by collaboration with Tsjalling Swierstra on moral change and techno-moral scenarios, in particular my experience of writing scenarios about nanotechnology for his ‘Vignetten en scenario’s’ Nanopodium project (2009–2010).
- 5.
Care Capsule: semi-closed system for habitation, monitoring, and care of elderly people over 100.
- 6.
The term ‘realizability’ suggests that the capabilities and their meaning are fixed, whereas there might be different interpretations about how to realize them in practice. This may be right, but in the light of the ideas presented in this chapter, I prefer to interpret Nussbaum on this point as meaning that the capabilities themselves are also up to interpretation (and indeed negotiation).
References
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Coeckelbergh, M. (2012). “How I Learned to Love the Robot”: Capabilities, Information Technologies, and Elderly Care. In: Oosterlaken, I., van den Hoven, J. (eds) The Capability Approach, Technology and Design. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3879-9_5
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