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.’
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Notes
- 1.
http://humanitarian.mines.edu/, accessed September 16th 2012.
- 2.
Of course, not all technology projects and engineering efforts in the global South explicitly aim at contributing to development. It may therefore be useful to distinguish between ‘technology for development’ and merely ‘technology in developing countries’ – as Brown and Grant (2010) also propose to do for ICT for Development (ICT4D) research. One might argue that it makes sense for engineering students involved in the former to get introduced to development ethics, but that this not needed for the latter group. Yet, so Robbins and Crow (2007, p. 77) point out, even if not part of “intentional development”, it is still the case that “design work for a corporation constructing a hotel, or other commercial development, constitutes work within immanent development. In both roles, engineers may also contribute to the accretion or generation of a vision of development.” Their view, which I would like to support, is that “reflexivity involves an awareness of these different locations (immanent, intentional, vision-making) in trajectories of social change, and their relation to each other.” Hence, in a globalized world development ethics may also offer a useful expansion of the ethics training of a much broader group of engineering students, not just the ones planning to work in “intentional development.”
- 3.
Whitbeck (1998) just mentions an engineer building a water pump in Latin-America in the epilogue, as one example of finding meaningful work in the engineering profession. Van de Poel and Royakkers (2011) do a little bit better by discussing the Shell/Nigeria/Ogoni case, codes of conduct for multinationals, and – very briefly – some general ethical principles as discussed by Luegenbiehl (2010) and Harris (1998). The developing country context is most extensively being discussed in the textbook by Harris et al. (2000), which includes a chapter “International Engineering Professionalism” that discusses e.g. common conditions in the South, codes of conduct in international context, human rights, and the problems of paternalism and exploitation. This certainly suffices for a general introduction course in ethics, but the ‘humanitarian engineer’ would need more.
- 4.
This should, among others, lead to acknowledging that technology affects human lives in many ways beyond extending or destroying people’s livelihoods – and that many of these impacts will also be relevant from an ethical perspective.
- 5.
- 6.
It might be that all maturing areas of applied ethics go through a similar evolution – I’m just able to say something about those two.
- 7.
What is not helping is perhaps that “the tendency within the development literature” in general has been to overlook the active, shaping role of “professional technological agents” like engineers (Wilson 2008) – which arguably implies that the relevance of engineering ethics is not going to be self-evident to this discipline.
- 8.
- 9.
I have clearly not been the only one perceiving this and in recent years philosophers of technology have expressed, clarified and discussed this idea in different ways (i.e. Illies and Meijers forthcoming; Van den Hoven 2012; Lawson 2010). See Sect. 7.5 for a further elaboration on the relation between technology and human capabilities.
- 10.
With technological determinism I do not mean the view that technology develops autonomously, without human influences, but the view that “the physical materiality of technology plays a [determining] causal role in social change” and its social impact (Smith 2006).
- 11.
As said, this still leaves open the question of how to best teach such an ethics, or the capability approach more specifically, to engineers. Experiences with and reflections on teaching the capability approach to engineers can be found in (Boni et al. 2012; Castro-Sitiriche et al. 2012; Frey et al. 2012). See also Frey’s chapter titled Training Responsible Engineers for Global Contexts in this book.
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Oosterlaken, I. (2015). Towards an Ethics of Technology and Human Development. In: Murphy, C., Gardoni, P., Bashir, H., Harris, Jr., C., Masad, E. (eds) Engineering Ethics for a Globalized World. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18260-5_8
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