education, political structures, and indeed most aspects of our lives. ... of situations in which advanced technology makes or can make profoundly positive ...
COMMENTARY
Philosophy of Technology vs. Technology Paul Levinson A common theme in philosophy of technology is the conflict between culture and technology-usually taken to be the ways that technology challenges, undermines, or otherwise puts under pressure ways of thinking and living that operate in tandem with technology, yet in some sense are independent of technology or at least the specific technology under scrutiny. ‘@pical cultural victims are said to be morals, “traditional” ways of doing things, education, political structures, and indeed most aspects of our lives. However, nothing in the notion of conflict between culture and technology need make culture always the victim. I briefly explore here the other side of the street: the extent to which technology is itself a victim of the small but influential part of our culture that we call philosophy of technology. I discuss (1) the degree to which philosophy of technology has to date been a negative philosophy of technology, such discussion touching upon both the rarity of such negativity in philosophic perspectives, and the damage that such negativity does to our understanding and constructive application of technology, and (2) two examples-one real, one hypotheticalof situations in which advanced technology makes or can make profoundly positive contributions to life. I offer these examples as a challenge to any humanly-interested philosophy of technology. 1.
Need Philosophy of Technology Be Unremittingly Negative?
Philosophy and its sibling science necessarily start from a critical or sceptical stance-the need to wipe the slate clean, take nothing for granted, other than tools of inquiry (e.g., rationality) whose efficacy must be assumed in order to proceed. (Even those who seek to argue against the use and value of rationality inevitably do so via rational means-e.g., Nietzsche in the last century, and Paul Feyerabend in ours.) Most philosophies, and certainly scientific theories, employ this critical method as a ladder upon which to arrive at principles or bodies of thought which are then accepted and used as foundations for further work. Thereafter the critical faculty is still used, but in conjunction with ideas and perspectives which, while not absolutely or eternally immune to criticism, nonetheless join the initial enabling assumptions as structures with which to further PaulLevimon,Editor-in-Chief. JOWM~
Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems
of Social and Evohtionary
Systems 15(1):1-6. All
1992 by Press, Inc. any form reserved. 1
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explore (Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms, to use an overused but still apt term). Thus, John Dewey attacked the metaphysics of disembodied, abstract knowledge and arrived at “pragmatism” as a guiding principle in philosophy, and Karl Popper replaced induction and its suppositions with falsificationism and fallibilism as less logically troubled methods of science, to give but two examples in the 20th century. For a variety of reasons, philosophy of technology has been stuck in the first stageunable to arrive at a plateau of principles that entail positive aspects of technology. One might argue that such a perpetually critical stance is after all appropriate to a philosophy that seeks not to understand the general nature and purpose of knowledge (such as Dewey, Kant, and Descartes, et al. before him), but to alert the world to the consequences of a particular human activity. Yet Popper’s falsificationism is a philosophy of science, and he chooses not merely to demolish the standard explanation of science but replace it with a better one (Feyerabend would be an example of a philosopher who only demolishes). Similarly, philosophies of biology, politics, and the like are at once critical of prior perspectives and constructive of new ones in their areas of study. So why is philosophy of technology so unremittingly negative? One might point to the now decades-old search for “appropriate” technologies-i.e., the attempt to discover specific technologies apt for jobs at hand-and similar attempts to distinguish “life-affirming” from “death-a%ming” technologies as the beginning of a “postcritical” positive philosophy of technology. This may indeed be so, yet perusal of tables of contents of such philosophy of technology organs as the JAI and Reidel series of volumes shows critical pieces outweighing positive ones by a ratio of more than 10 to 1. Further, those writers who do take a more positive stance towards technology are often referred to as nonphilosophers (e.g., Buckminster Fuller, Samuel Florman) or “blind” champions of technology (see, e.g., Michael Heim’s critique of pioneers in his Electric Language and online lecture for Connected Education in 1990). The implication is that to talk about the ways technologies enhance our lives and culture is to be ignorant of the weighty critiques that have been levelled against the technological enterprise. Speaking for myself, and no doubt others, I can say that my relationship to critics of technology is not one of blindness or ignorance, but of careful reading and then rejection of their arguments (see, e.g., my treatment of Jacques Ellul in Mind at Large: Knowing in the Technological Age). The reasons for this negative tide are not hard to fathom. In the West, technology is associated with commercialism, long anathema to academe. Therefore technology-like science fiction, rock music, and most popular “commercial” culture-becomes an easy target. In the East, technology is associated with the (now discredited) totalitarian state, and one danger which I hope commentaries like mine can help avert is the sweeping out of technology along with yesterday’s oppressive political structures. (In fact, technologies of communication have long been the backbone of freedom, and in the cases of the photocopier and its use by the White Rose against Nazi Germany, and samizdat video in Breshnev’s Soviet Union, sophisticated personal technologies in fact worked very much against totalitarian structures. See my discussion in Electronic Chronicles, New Haven, Anamnesis Press, 1992, for more.) Probably the main reason for the negativity of philosophy of technology is that its subject matter is rightly seen as having life and death consequences for our species. This brings us to the criteria of reality and truth. If technology is indeed on most or many fronts threatening our and our planet’s survival- if Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Exxon
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Valdez are the whole or most of the story of technology-then the critics are right to sink their teeth into this iron wolf and not let go. But if, on the other hand, the reality of technology is that it has already provided unique assistance to our current survival, and indeed may hold solutions to ethical quandaries which likely go back to the origins of our species, and which have defied solution until now precisely because of the absence of technological remedies, then we owe it to our philosophy and ourselves to move beyond mere criticism. In the next section, I discuss one example of the service technology has already rendered to us, and one example in which, rather than creating an ethical problem as it is usually depicted as doing, technology may help remedy a perennial problem not of technology’s making. 2.
Technology in the Service of Humans and Culture 2a.
Earthquakes and Technologies in Two Cities
The earthquake in Soviet Armenia in December 1988 quite rightly commanded the whole world’s attention. Although reports of damage to lives and property differ, everyone agrees that at very least hundreds of thousands of people were killed or seriously injured; large cities like Leninakan were levelled in most parts. Nearly a year later, an earthquake of almost identical magnitude struck San Francisco. Again, final reports of damage differ, but everyone agrees that the loss and severe impairment of life was less by a factor of at least 1,000 than the loss in Armenia-i.e., San Francisco lost hundreds, not hundreds of thousands, of people. Property loss was less on a similar scale. This extraordinary difference in damage has little to do with the natural topographies of Armenia and San Francisco; experts agree that it rather arose from the differences in technology in the two areas, more specifically from differences in the structures of buildings. In San Francisco, skyscrapers and other constructions built to sway rather than crack in the throes of an earthquake by and large withstood the natural assault. In Armenia, smaller structures, closer to the ground and seemingly more resistant to earthquakes, crumbled likes houses of cards. The inescapable conclusion is that “high-tech” technology literally carried the &y, and saved large numbers of lives, in San Francisco. In the “pre-technological” environment of little or no artificial shelter, the human being is and has long been vulnerable to being swallowed up in an earthquake. In a “low-tech” environment such as that in Armenia, earthquake damage is compounded by unstable structures that fall from above as the earthquake rends from below. In the earthquake-wiser technological construction of San Francisco, embodying the most advanced technological knowledge available, the human denizen is at last afforded considerable safety and security, albeit never entirely free of risk. Further, the damage levels in San Francisco and Armenia, which provide testimony to the positive contribution of advanced technology, may also be usefully compared to the damage resulting from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, rightfully seen as the cutting edge of advanced technology gone wrong. The loss of life and property in Armenia (natural disaster and inadequate technology) was far greater than that of Chernobyl (advanced tech-
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nological harm), just as the loss in San Francisco (natural disaster and advanced technology) was far greater than that of Three Mile Island (advanced technological harm). The conclusion from this comparison is that the greatest threats to human existence continue to be natural in origin, and the employment of advanced technologies to help reduce these threats poses far less danger than the natural threats themselves. This is not to say that certain technologies such as production of energy via fission are not so hazardous that they should not be opposed-I believe they are, and indeed advocate the elimination of all fission energy facilities- but that these hazards even at their worst realization to date have taken far less of a toll than natural disasters upon humanity. (In further support of this conclusion, ABC-TV’s “Nightline” news program reported in early 1992 that a series of nuclear accidents and release of large amounts of harmful radiation since the 19.50s in a central Asian complex of the former Soviet Union, largely unreported in the West until this past year, apparently resulted in a far lower increase in cancer rates and other consequences of exposure to such radiation than expected.) And since the technological enterprise as a whole is the only defense we have against natural disasters-not only earthquakes, but disease, drought, and volcanic eruptions-we are warranted to conclude that the technological enterprise, including the risk of hazards, is eminently worth pursuing. A philosophy of technology that fails to take account of these realities is something far less than a philosophy, in the ethical as well as ontological dimension. 2b.
Technology and Abortion
Technology is often portrayed as a creator of problems: certainly the deliberate use of new technologies to create ever more addictive and deadly drugs, and the unintended pollution and destruction of natural habitats, are two examples of serious problems that technology engenders as well as exacerbates. But overlooked in most philosophy of technology is the extent to which technology, intended and unintended, can provide solutions to problems longstanding and not of technology’s making. Abortion is such a problem-an exquisite and agonizing ethical dilemma not of technological origin, yet which I think could be amenable to some technological amelioration. The exquisiteness of the dilemma derives from its pitting of two profound ethical principles against each other: the right of people (in this case, women) to have control over their own bodies, and the universally acknowledged responsibility of governments to protect human lives (in this case, the life of the fetus, of ambiguous human status). The ambiguity of fetal life makes this conflict irreducible by any current or classical ethics or philosophy. J. S. Mill’s dictum that freedom to swing one’s arm must be unimpeded to the extent that the arm does not hit someone else’s nose provides no bearing on whether the fetus is entitled to such “nose” protection; Kant’s golden rule that we should behave towards others in a way that we would behave towards ourselves similarly founders here on the crucial question of whether the fetus is such an “other”; and Aristotle’s golden mean of moderation provides no help in a situation whose only choices are imposition of pregnancy and birth on an unwilling mother or destruction of the fetus. The natural situation of abortion is that no moderate option, no compromise that can satisfy the vital concerns of both parties to the debate, exists. But let us imagine, for an instant, that technology could change this. Let’s say that a fetus at any time could be successfully moved to a womb other than the mother’s, perhaps
of ~c~ologic~ construction. Such a procedure would by no means end the current abortion controversy; biological mothers who wanted abortion, for example, might still say that they preferred their fetuses not being brought to term even outside of their wombs, since this would oblige the biological mother to be a biological mother against her will. Nonetheless, the option of removing a fetus from an unwilling mother in a way that does not destroy the fetus would immediately cast the abortion issue in a very different light. Societal opponents of “removal via transfer”-i.e. Fthose who might want to insist that biological mothers be required to bring their fetuses to term- could no longer categorize their position as a “right to life,” since the fetus’ and eventual child’s life would be safeguarded even in the event of removal from the biological mother’s body. At the same time, any “pro-choice” point of view which advocated the option not only of ~moving the fetus but des~oying itas in the above hy~~etical example of the biological mother who might insist on destruction rstber than transfer-would be no different in principle from a point of view that advocated the parent’s right to choose infauticide after childbirth. Just as giving away a baby for adoption is rightly seen as a far more ethical option than infanticide, so moving the fetus to a surrogate womb would be far more ethical than destruction of the fetus. (Cases of rape, extreme deformity of the fetus, and similar extraordinary situations would still pose profound ethical quandaries that would not be greatly lessened by technological tramplantation of the fetus.)’ Moreover, technology of a different sort-and far more practicable today than the above-could make an important con~bution to the abortion dilemma at the con~ac~tive level. Tbe goal of con~~eptives with better than 99% eff~tiven~ss, for both sexes, with no negative health effects, smugly be very close to a~ainment, since the “pill” has been around for nearly 30 years, and comes close to achieving this (the pill’s main deficiencies being dangerous side-effects for women, and the fact that no pill yet has been developed for men). Such contraceptives would obviously go a very long way to preventing unwanted pregnancies that are the sources of abortion. {Improved prophylactics for sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS would have a similar beneficial contraceptive effect.) But a negative philosophy of technology that focuses only the damage done by technology-on the destruction of culture by technology-provides no context or encouragement for the development of such technol~gic~ remedies. So we critique technology, worthy and unworthy+ and writhe in problems that we may well have the means of diminishing.
even
Conclusion The view that technology can be of immense help to us in our problems will not come as any surprise to the proverbial person in the street-the non-philosopher of technology. Only critics of technology, only the great majority of current philosophers of technology, are startled to see the commonsense notion of technology as a two-edge sword entered into philosophical considerations. Yet as G. E. Moore so aptly remarked at the turn of this century, philosophy expires when it wafts too far from common sense. Beyond common sense, we also can find a positive role for technology in our very relationship with the cosmos and its entropy. For as much as we may think about reversing the motor of the infinite down escalator upon which we run up, only t~~ology~nly human ideas embodied in tangible actions and devices--can actually reverse this motor.
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Philosophy of technology this facet of our existence.
is not only wrong but irrelevant
to the degree that it ignores
Acknowledgement This commentary is based on a paper presented at the NY Colloquium on Philosophy and Technology: Differences in Technology and Culture, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York, April 9, 1990.
Note 1. After exploring this hypothetical technological transplantation option in a course I’ve been teaching for several years, “Ethics in the Technological Age,” I came upon a fIctiona suggestion and treatment of this possibility, referred to as “transoption, ” in Victor Koman’s Solomon’s Knife, New York: Watts, 1989.
