Abstract
In the history of ethical thought there has always been an intimate relationship between agency and questions of morality. But what does this mean for artefacts? It would not be too controversial to claim that the idea that artefacts have, or embody, some level of agency—even if it is very limited or derived in some way—has become generally accepted. However, there still seems to be wide disagreements as to what is meant by the agency of artefacts, how it is accounted for, and the subsequent moral implications of such agency. I will suggest that one’s account of the agency of artefacts is fundamental to the subsequent discussion of the moral status and implications of artefacts, or technology more generally. In this contribution I will outline two different accounts of sociomaterial agency: (a) a human-centred inter-actional account (Johnson and VSD) and (b) a post-human intra-actional account (drawing on Latour, Barad and Heidegger). I will show that the post-human intra-actional account of sociomaterial agency posits the social and technical as ontologically inseparable from the start. Such a position has important implications for how one might understand sociomaterial agency and how one might deal with it. I will propose that the authors in the post-human approach all share what I call a ‘co-constitutive’ account of agency in which agency is not an attribute of the human or the technical as such but rather the outcome of intra-action. I will endeavour to illustrate the implications of such an account for our understanding of sociomaterial agency by considering the phenomenon of plagiarism detection. I will conclude by proposing disclosive ethics (in particular disclosive archaeology) as a possible way forward in dealing with the ethical and political implications of post-human intra-agencies.
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- 1.
Philosophers of action in the analytical tradition have asserted that an action, in some basic sense, is something an agent does that is ‘intentional under some description’ (Donald Davidson 1980). They argue that there is a conceptual tie between genuine action, on the one hand, and intention, on the other. However tracking down the link between intention and action is not a simple matter at all—the large amount of work in action philosophy is testimony to this fact. In the continental tradition, especially in the work of Michel Foucault (1977) the original (or originating) subject is taken as deeply problematic. For Foucault subjects are the outcomes of discursive formations (constituted through prevailing power/knowledge regimes). Each regime of power/knowledge sustains a different type of subjectivity (i.e. the religious subject, the academic subject, the business subject, and so forth). If the original subject does not exist does it mean that particular ‘subject centred’ notion of agency does not make sense? Foucault would suggest not. To reject the autonomy (of the original subject) is not to reject agency. What is disputed is the necessary connection with an originating intention. Actions are intentional (under some description) but the intentionality does not originate in the subject and it transcends the subject in it being exercised. According to him there is often nobody (no specific actor) there to have ‘invented’ it as such (Foucault 1977). In social theory the relation between social structure and human agency has been a central and enduring problem as exemplified in the work of, for example, Anthony Giddens (1984).
- 2.
Central to Heidegger’s ideas is his notion of the ‘ontological difference’. The ontological difference is the difference between being and entities. What an entity is depends on meaning-conditions that make entities stand out as that which it is. These conditions make up the being of entities. As Heidegger suggests “the being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity” (Heidegger 1927/1962, p. 6); the being of entities is rather the implied conditions of possibilities (or horizon) against which entities make sense at all. Thus, the being of technology is not itself an artefact or system but rather the condition of possibilities against which artefacts emerge as meaningful. As such the being of technology reveals or discloses worlds.
- 3.
It is therefore no surprise that for Heidegger the essence of modern technology is the way of being of modern humans—a way of conducting themselves towards the world—that sees the world as something to be ordered and shaped in line with our projects, intentions and desires—a ‘will to power’ that manifest itself a “will to technology”. It is in this technological mood that problems show up as requiring technical solutions. The term ‘mood’ here is used in a collective sense, like the ‘mood of the meeting’ or the ‘mood of our times’. He calls this technological mood ‘enframing’ (Gestell in German). For us, in the technological age the world is already ‘framed’ as a world available ‘to be made’, ‘to be shaped’ for our ongoing possibilities to express our existence, to be whatever we are, as business men, engineers, consultants, academics, teenagers, etc. In short: the need for modern technology makes sense because we already live in the technological age or mood where the world (and us as beings that are never ‘out’ of the world) are already framed in this way—as available resources for the ongoing challenging and ordering of the world by us, which is for him the essence of the ‘modern’ mood.
- 4.
Here I am using Rouse’s (2007) normative conception of practice.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Detection here is defined as being outside of the ‘green’ zone in the originality report, i.e. having a correspondence of greater that 24 % with the texts in the Turnitin database. This percentage was determined by Turnitin themselves to compensate for incidental matches or false positives (which one would expect in a nine billion document database) and legitimate quotations.
- 8.
A more technical definition of hash function is “A hash function is a function that converts an input from a (typically) large domain [input values] into an output in a (typically) smaller range (the hash value, often a subset of the integers) (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function).
- 9.
Refer to Schleimer et al. (2003) for a more detailed discussion.
- 10.
Blue: less than 20 matching words; Green: 0–24 % matching text; Yellow: 25–49 % matching text; Orange: 50–74 % matching text; Red: 75–100 % matching text.
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Introna, L.D. (2014). Towards a Post-human Intra-actional Account of Sociomaterial Agency (and Morality). 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_3
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