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Situating Moral Agency: How Postphenomenology Can Benefit Engineering Ethics

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Abstract

This article identifies limitations in traditional approaches to engineering ethics pedagogy, reflected in an overreliance on disaster case studies. Researchers in the field have pointed out that these approaches tend to occlude ethically significant aspects of day-to-day engineering practice and thus reductively individualize and decontextualize ethical decision-making. Some have proposed, as a remedy for these defects, the use of research and theory from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to enrich our understanding of the ways in which technology and engineering practice are intricated in social and institutional contexts. While endorsing this approach, this article also argues that STS scholarship may not sufficiently address the kinds of questions about normativity and agency that are essential to engineering ethics. It proposes making use of the growing body of research in a field called “postphenomenology,” an approach that combines STS research with the traditional phenomenological concern with the standpoint of lived-experience. Postphenomenology offers a method of inquiry that combines STS’s investigation into social and institutional dimensions of technology with phenomenological reflection on our lived experience of embodied engagement with technical objects and sociotechnical systems, particularly the ways in which these involvements affect our moral perception and agency. The aim in using this approach in engineering ethics is thus to illuminate moral dimensions of everyday professional life of which practitioners may not typically be aware. The article concludes with some concrete curricular interventions for engineering ethics classrooms.

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Notes

  1. For another example of this line of criticism of modern ethics as it relates to technology see Schmidt and Marratto (2008).

  2. See Conlon and Zandvoort (2011) and Nussbaum's (2000) discussion of the importance of recognizing the 'tragic question' that admits of no morally correct solution.

  3. On the Defining Issues Test as a tool for assessing moral judgment, see Thoma (2014).

  4. Ihde (1995). Peter-Paul Verbeek, Evan Selinger also identify their work as “postphenomenology.” See also Conlon and Zandvoort (2011), Riley (2008), Swierstra and Jelsma (2006).

  5. Ihde (1990) uses the term “technics” as shorthand for social practices involving technological mediation.

  6. In the last 15 years the use of this expensive medical procedure has become routine and ubiquitous across the globe, despite many ethical concerns around its use. Some argue that it is being over-used, unjustifiably, to generate revenue for private medical corporations. It is also a matter of concern that medical practitioners are disclosing “soft makers” (minor and often fleeting anatomical variations that can indicate a somewhat increased likelihood of fetal chromosomal aberrations) to parents with insufficient evidence. Others argue that socially and economically vulnerable women, with little need for the procedure, are being “morally” pressured to use it, and that some medical workers who administer the procedure are ethically and psychologically conflicted due to its ambivalence (Getz and Kirkengen 2003; Upadhyay et al. 2017; Ahman 2019; Gammeltoft and Nguyen 2007).

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  1. Department of Humanities, Michigan Technological University, Walker Building Rm 326, 1400 Townsend Drive, Houghton, MI, 49930-1295, USA

    L. Alexandra Morrison

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Morrison, L.A. Situating Moral Agency: How Postphenomenology Can Benefit Engineering Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 26, 1377–1401 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00163-7

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