Towards an Ethics for the Technological World
by Jorge Linares
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México lisjor@unam.mx
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Abstract
This article synthesizes and updates, in part, what I have developed in the book Ethics and the Technological World (2008). The central thesis is that the current technological world has become a global system of dominance over nature and society; It is a network of technical systems that interact by increasing the complexity of interrelations and their temporal and geographical effects, because it is governed by a uniform techno-scientific reason, based on the new “force majeure”. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze and rethink the conditions and structures of the technological world in which we live, as well as to question its rationality and technological imperative of transformation and domination of all natural or technical objects. Technological projects can be reoriented or modified if they involve greater risks to nature and human life. To do this, it is necessary and achievable to rebuild an ethics for the technological world. The four fundamental principles of that ethics that assesses the effects of technological power are briefly exposed: (1) social responsibility, (2) precaution, (3) distributive justice and (4) individual and communitarian autonomy.
Keywords: Ethics; Technological World; Technoscience; Techno-Scientific Reason; Technological Risks.
Introduction
What follows is a synthesis and update, in part, of what I have shared in my book Ethics and the Technological World (Linares, 2008). Contemporary technology has become the determining factor of social praxis, and in the horizon of cognitive and pragmatic relationships between the human being and his world, because it is much more than a set of instruments and technical systems; it is rather a global system in expansion, a network of technical systems (operating through computer mediations and a telecommunications and transport network) that interact increasing the complexity of technological interrelations and the global reach of their effects on the nature and society. The next level of interaction between artifacts, technical systems and human agents anticipates a fourth industrial revolution that will interconnect with the exchange of information, action and knowledge, through artificial intelligence, to artifacts and human agents (Schwab, 2016 ). Therefore, the extension of technological power has also transformed the self-understanding of the human being (both of its own nature and its relations with the natural world), making it the main object of this great project of ontological transformation of the world.
We do not, however, currently have adequate categories to carry out an exhaustive ethical evaluation of the technological world. A discrepancy has arisen between technological power and our ethical conscience, because that power has exceeded our capacity for control – and even understanding – of what we are now capable of producing. Therefore, it is necessary to reflect on the ends, means and circumstances that must guide the transforming capacity that humanity has displayed in this new era, as well as its interactions with the artifactual world.
The intrinsic purposes of the technological system are not an inexorable necessity. Technological projects and systems can be reoriented or modified if they involve greater risks for nature and for human life. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the need and the possibility of an ethics for the technological world. And for this, I have proposed in Ethics and Technological World (Linares, 2008) four fundamental principles of an ethics that guides individuals and social institutions to analyze and evaluate the effects of technological power: social responsibility, precaution, distributive justice and individual and community autonomy.
2. The announcers of the greatest danger
During the twentieth century, the ends of technological development became a crucial issue of ethical and ontological reflection, even though technology was not one of the topics that most worried philosophers. Among diverse conceptions, a philosophical current emerged that questioned the course of technological progress. Some of the thinkers of this current undertook critical diagnoses very similar to the modern project that advocated a total control of the human being over nature. They also warned of the beginning of a historical crisis that shrouded the foundations of the contemporary world, jeopardizing the viability of many ecosystems, the sources of natural resources, as well as the fragile environmental balances between humanity and the entire planet. This skeptical reflection of different thinkers in the face of technological progress was motivated by a common feeling of fear about the possibility of a major disaster, which could be a direct consequence of the disproportionate and accelerated expansion of technological power, because it would endanger the permanence of the essential features of the human condition, and even the very survival of our species.
Among these thinkers I chose the five who represent in the most complete way a philosophy of “suspicion” about technological progress: Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Günther Anders, Hans Jonas and Eduardo Nicol1. They read the signs of the Apocalypse in the achievements of the techno-scientific reason, because they warned that the realization of the technological utopia implied the danger of a radical and irreparable deformation of the human condition: the human being would cease to be an agent of his own destiny, because of the imposition of a technological reason that constrains him to a single end. The loss of its diversity of life forms and self-projection capacity would be linked to the destruction of its environment and the imbalance between ethical reason and technological reason. Consequently, these thinkers argued the need to generate a moral reaction that criticized the foundations of the technological world, and that revealed the blindness and unconsciousness with which human beings had given themselves to the imperative of technological reason, without noticing that perhaps they were going towards the dissolution of his own historical being (“being a protean”, Nicol called him), of his inherent freedom to be, instead of heading towards a state of full well-being and overcoming all the restrictions and sufferings imposed on us by nature from our origins.
However, the diagnoses of these five thinkers lead to paradoxical conclusions and place us before the imminence of an inevitable future from which we can not escape, either due to environmental destruction and the depletion of vital resources for our survival, either because of the new technological wars that loom over a humanity that has overpopulated the planet, or because of the radical and irreversible transformation of human nature, the dissolution of its self-conscious reason, the irreparable alteration of the genome or of the human brain, and therefore, of our moral and self-reflective capacities. The analyzes of the five mentioned thinkers lead us to a final observation: our final hour is approaching.
So, I have called those five thinkers the announcers of the greatest danger. They raised their voices in the desert of a society that has been blinded by technological achievements (many of them beneficial and indispensable, without a doubt, but also irrevocable), and that has been blinded by the dangers caused by the expansive human domain over the nature and on its own natural condition. Now we even begin to think (with a certain naive enthusiasm) that the Anthropocene Era has begun, and that terrestrial nature will never be again like before: we have altered and transformed practically all its ecosystems (Mckibben, 2003). Other contemporary thinkers already announce the integration and fusion of the world of natural objects, artifacts and humans in a new “infosphere” in which all objects are integrated through the exchange and processing of digital information (Floridi, 2014).
The characteristic of the diagnoses of the advertisers of the danger inserted in the technological world consists in the anticipation and forecast of catastrophes that are beginning to take shape in the present. The catastrophes that these five thinkers announce are ecological, historical, political-social and even reach an ontological dimension; but, above all, man himself would be in danger as being free and self-conscious, capable of self-containment and of taking responsibility for the entire planet. But his warning calls are like voices of prophets in the desert. Few believe that they were right, few are affected by the “heuristic fear” advocated by Hans Jonas, because most of us remain prisoners of what Anders called the “Promethean mismatch”: we are no longer able to imagine what “We” are provoking. We have lost the moral sensitivity to become aware and responsible for many of the effects of the technological world. Therefore, the philosophical discourse of these announcers is not exempt from an apocalyptic tone and from a pessimistic view of the human condition.
However, behind this pessimism, a firm hope is revealed in the human capacity to recover and preserve the ethical sense of its existence2, while it is still possible.
In a more calm perspective, the central problem for the ethics of the technological world consists in preserving, on the one hand, the civilizing force of social emancipation and individual autonomy that technological systems still entail; but, on the other hand, it implies generating a new sense of collective responsibility (extended planetarily and with scope for the future) that reorients and restrains the negative excesses of technological power, both on the nature and on human life. We need to generate a new sense of collective prudence that is far-sighted and anticipatory, and for this it is possible to have the expanded cognitive capacities of the computer technologies themselves and of the systemic interrelation between artifacts and human agents. At the same time, we will have to distribute in a fairer manner both the benefits and the risks of the technological world, and that distributive justice must include many other living beings that we have affected.
But why? And why put limits to technological power, if it has reported such great general benefits? Is not its course inexorable, impassable? It is precisely the ontological features of the technological world and the particular form of rationality that governs it that denote the source of the greatest danger that advertisers envisioned: its accelerated expansion and its disproportion, its lack of limits, its hubris.
3. The technological world as a primary environment
The technique in its current state stopped being mere instrumentum to become a horizon of possibilities that shapes our primary environment. For the first time, we inhabit an environment of bio-artefactual and industrialized nature, which is full of artifactual objects, separate and -in part- confronted with the environment in which we evolved. Thus, contemporary technology has become a technological world. The return to a natural world would only be possible after a catastrophic destruction of technological civilization. Many of the negative utopias, Mad Max style, have anticipated this in literature and film. The radical transformation of our environment, which goes from the natural environment to the bio-artifactual, does not imply a simple transposition or a conversion in an artificial world that we can lead and govern fully. The technological world subsumes, of course, parts of an untransformed nature, living organisms and natural forces that we can not control or drive because we do not understand them at all.
The technological world is a more complex and entangled hybrid, a hybrid of physis and techne, which is being developed in a systemic and almost organic way, independently of our own designs. We do not yet know how the causes that produce many of the effects of the natural world that remain and articulate with the artifactual systems and the technical socio-systems act. Our current artifactual world is of greater complexity and has become so immediate and, at the same time, inaccessible.
As the authors of Next Nature (Van Mensvoort, 2011), coordinated by Koert Van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink point out, in our time we should reconsider the usual conceptual difference between nature and culture, or between born and grown naturally and what is produced or done technically; since, on the one hand, human intervention has managed to transform many natural entities and, on the other hand, the systems created by humans have become so autonomous that they seem to assimilate to the things that naturally arise without our intervention. Instead of continuing to think about the classical Aristotelian division between things produced by nature and those made by technique (Aristotle, 2001), the Next Nature authors propose to think now of the distinction between what we can dominate or control (technique) and what is not yet, or that is beyond the possibility of being controlled (the truly other). In this way, it should no longer be relevant, if living organisms (micro or macroscopic) are “natural” or have been bio-technologically intervened, but if we can control their design, production and operations, as we can do, to a certain extent, with conventional devices such as telephones, machines or robots3.
We have been able to achieve technical mastery of living beings through a long process of domestication that began thousands of years ago, which now reaches a new level thanks to genetic engineering and synthetic biology. We can extract and modify natural entities such as oil and many minerals; In a certain way we could say that we can “control” the nuclear energy coming from fission; but we can not yet technically control many viruses, microorganisms, climatic phenomena such as hurricanes or tornadoes, or anomalous biological processes such as cancer and other genetic mutations. In the same way, we can not fully anticipate the behavior of systems and things created by human technology: computer viruses, vehicle traffic in cities, or information traffic on the Internet. Thus, our notion of the “natural” must evolve to account for the multiple ways in which we now intervene and modify natural entities and create cultural hybrids, naturoids (Negrotti, 2012) and bioartefacts (Linares & Arriaga, 2016) that are of a different nature from the contemporary technological world. The distinction between what is controllable and what is not will change our old notions (of Aristotelian heritage) about physis and techne: a genetically modified tomato is part of the cultural field of what can be controlled by technology (at least that is what biotechnologists assume), whereas computer viruses or vehicular traffic in large cities would belong to the scope of a new modality of the “natural” or uncontrollable by technology, although its origin may be artifactual or cultural. So the essential distinction between the technical (artifactual or artificial) and the natural would slide towards what can be intervened and controlled and what is not, no matter what its origin. In this way, a new modality of nature is being developed, a next nature; and for that reason Mensvoort maintains that now “real nature is not green”.
Virtually no nature exists that has not been affected or touched by human technical action. Nature in its natural state is fading due to the expansive effect of intervention and technical mastery over all the entities and ecosystems of the Earth (Mckibben, 2003, Purdy, 2015). This implies that, from the epistemic and aesthetic point of view, the differences, previously ostensible, between the natural and the technical, also fade. This process is due to the growing capacity of biotechnologies to modify, alter, (re) design and control the operations of living organisms, tissues, microorganisms, biological molecules, but also all the technologies that have altered the chemical components and equilibria and physical ecosystems, for more than a century. This is due to the advancement of biotechnologies in their capacity to intervene in living matter, and to abiotic technologies, in their ability to transform matter and energy in general. The digital and computerized convergence seen now will be between abiotic artifacts, bioartefacts and human subjects, exchanging digital information and genetic information, combining their materials and structures through nanotechnologies and info-bio-technologies. Thus, in the technological world, the onto-technological transformation of matter, both inert and alive, in new forms of objects, materials and living organisms unprecedented in natural nature will most likely occur.
The underlying process, in any case, for this radical mutation in the contemporary world is the development of technoscience and technologies since the 20th century, as the last manifestation of the modern project of technical domination of the whole natural reality. The main objective of this global civilizatory project is the domain and technological intervention in nature, both biotic and abiotic. It has consisted in a colossal project of technical colonization of nature to adapt forces, entities and natural processes to human ends, to provide sufficient means for the material well-being of humanity, as pointed out by Ortega y Gasset in his Meditation on Technique (Ortega y Gasset, 2015). From the modern view of technoscience, every natural entity and, in general, nature as a whole system are shown as available to be raw material of very different kinds of productions; to be transformed, altered and adapted to the forms and functions that humans need, imagine or desire. This universal device of technical modification that compels all current societies is what Heidegger called the “essence of technique,” or Gestell (Heidegger, 1995).
Thus, every natural entity acquires only an instrumental value, while its inherent value is irrelevant to the techno-scientific vision. In this dichotomy between the instrumental and the natural, the onto-technical distinction between the natural and the artefactual emerges4. Following the classical Aristotelian conception between what is generated by physis and what is produced by techne, the natural is that which has not been intervened by the human agency in none of its four causes (material, formal, efficient and final). The artifact necessarily implies that something, however natural it may be, has been intentionally intervened in at least one of its causes. The artifactual only exists and remains because of the purposes, purposes and human designs, while the natural remains totally apart from these. The artefactual must contain an extrinsic purpose, assigned by human agents (in the future they could be IA agents); while natural entities (living organisms, typically) have intrinsic or immanent purposes (hence their “inherent value”, in addition to being manifestations of an evolutionary chain). However, as Keekok Lee points out:
The most radical and powerful technologies of the late twentieth and twenty-first century are able to produce artifacts with an increasing level of art-facticity. The challenge posed by the modern homo faber is the systematic elimination of nature, both on the empirical and the ontological levels, and in this way, generating a narcissistic civilization (Lee, 1999, 2).
Consequently, the project of the techno-scientific civilization intends to convert everything that exists in nature into an artifactual product; Within this purpose, radical transformation is included, in ontological, axiological and aesthetic terms of all living organism in an artefactual living organism, that is, in a bioartect, with different degrees of artifactuality or artifact, depending on the degree of scientific knowledge and technical control that has been achieved.
This is the work plan of biotechnologies, nanobiotechnology, genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Nature thus becomes, through these powerful biotechniques, a bio-artefactual hybrid, acquires a cultural, flexible, plastic form and evolves along with our cultural representations, ends, ideals or debates and social controversies. In this way, the philosophical challenge that disturbs and causes astonishment is whether this advancement of the technosciences can lead us to a situation in which the difference between the natural and the artefactual is completely diluted, that is, in which the artifactual replace everything natural irreversibly. This is the ultimate purpose in the Age of the Anthropocene. In this way, we would have a completely manufactured nature, nothing would be left of nature in its natural state. This is what we can call a bioartefactual revolution in progress.
The worrying thing about long-term modern technology might not be that it threatens life on Earth as we know, because of its polluting effects, but it could ultimately be the humanization of all nature. Nature, as “the Other”, would be eliminated (Lee, 1999, 4).
4. The Rationality of the Technological World
The rationality that governs this technological world is a new and powerful modality of pragmatic instrumentality whose goal is the achievement of maximum efficiency in the control and domination of natural entities and social systems. This rationality is characterized by its ability to reduce the entirety of nature – not just the human being itself- to act as a reserve available for manipulation or technical transformation. The danger to man’s being (which the five announcers envisioned) resides precisely in the illusion that everything that comes our way exists only insofar as it can be used or technically transformed. To this end, the technological reason has managed to subordinate scientific reason and has been able to displace the theoretical reason (scientific or philosophical) of the central position it occupied in the history of Western civilization.
Technology has become the necessary and indispensable environment for the pragmatic ends of human beings because they have become primary goals, displacing the theoretical and contemplative, the aesthetic or religious and any other modality that does not respond directly to the pressure of the need. The new technological reason is, as Nicol thought, a force majeure that predominates in all areas of social activity. The technological reason now configures the conditions of human experience: the way in which we represent the world, the way in which we act in it and the criteria we use to value it. It is no coincidence that we are obsessed with measuring, calculating, transforming, instrumentalizing, reifying, converting everything we find in the world into an object, commodity and economic value.
Now the technological rationality (uniform and universal pragmatic rationality) has become predominant and threatens to extinguish the theoretical rationality and all disinterested forms of relating to things. This is the phenomenon that Eduardo Nicol calls force majeure: it consists in the emergence of a unilateral reason that is imposed by necessity on free actions (hence its greater force), which does not run dialogically, which does not give reasons, that it is indifferent to the truth, that it is violent because it is based on force, that it subordinates individuals and institutions to a new form of unnatural necessity in a totally artifactual world. The two forms of reason are now confronted, theoretical reflection, detached from pragmatic and productive needs, struggles to survive, bearing witness to the emergence of reason of force majeure. If the theoretical reason declines until eclipsing itself (Nicol, 1972), the independence of human reason and the possibility of a free connection with the totality of being would be lost through the search for truth, beauty or simple shared reality. It is no coincidence that in the technological world of instantaneous communication networks, truth is no longer a social reference. In the technological world of digital virtuality, anything can seem true, real or current. Only the dialogical logos of reason that gives reasons is capable of recovering the world of objectivity and reality, both natural and social.
Technological rationality is imposed as a kind of imperative that places the human being to transform and exploit the natural reality. This “technological imperative” implies that everything that can be done technically is morally justified and that, at least, everything technically possible is in the process of being realized and must materialize. There again appears the greatest force of technological reason: our destiny is already defined by it. Of course, technology is conditioned by a series of social, economic and political factors, but the idea of the “technological imperative” points to the foundation of technological rationality: a relentless collective will of power over all the objects that are or should arise in the world. The increase of power (maximum effectiveness and efficiency to convert every object into a commodity, and all value in exchange value for the world market) is the ultimate goal to which all other conditions and all the ends of human agents are subordinated.
5. Artifacts, Systems and Technological World
We usually think of technology only as an object or instrument “at-hand”6 that we can use and control at will. That was the general condition of the technique in past history, but it is not now. Until the beginnings of modernity, the technical world was composed of instruments, tools and simple systems. The present is a technological and techno-scientific world that concatenates multiple technical systems, artifacts, natural systems and human agents, and that gives them more and more agency to all artifacts and technical systems. The medium that has been developed to interconnect them is digitalization and computer systems, but this was only possible on the basis of a material interrelation of the industrial and productive systems that transformed matter and energy as a global base of new technological systems. The most serious problems in the technological world derive from this extractive and productive material base: they are still based on the extraction and exploitation of land and sea resources, the combustion of fossil energy and its transformation into materials of different nature, as well as in their conversion by combustion in electrical energy. This material world of high extraction is the base of the technological world of telecommunications networks and digitalization of all information.
Now, the concrete artifact is not, in general, the nucleus in which the problem of the ends and values that determine the actions of the contemporary technological world is revealed, but precisely the place in which they are hidden. Before the instruments and devices of the technological world, the ends seem clear and explicit in the immediacy of the actions. The whole problem would be reduced to choosing between an appropriate use and an inappropriate use of the artifacts. It would seem that the relationship of ends and means is transparent and that it is easy to evaluate technologies and anticipate or prevent risks. This has been the thesis of the anthropological-instrumental conception -as Heidegger called it- that still predominates in our common sense. This conception supposes that the subject can always manage the instrument at will and determine its purpose, and that the technique is no more than an inert medium and without its own agency to do something, which is under our control, which is left to use as soon as you want and that has no own purposes or complexity. But it’s not like that. To a large extent, one of the primary objectives of an ethics for the technological world is to deconstruct this instrumental representation of technology and show its limitations. Artifacts and devices only exist, have function and agency in a network of multiagency interactions in the technological world. This is a “hyperobject” that does not already have an encompassable and manipulable dimension (neither fully comprehensible) as a thing or a conventional object and spatially and temporally delimited7 (Morton, 2013). But it is the most concrete, and in it unfold ends and causes that are not visible, nor easily predictable, nor do they depend on the intentionality and will of the human subjects. The system of the technological world has not come alive by itself, like a huge Frankenstein, but has reached a level of complexity and almost organic systematics that works by its own logic and impulse compelling human subjects to subordinate themselves to the technological world.
As we pointed out, the interconnection and communication between abiotic artefacts and human agents through computer technologies is already being seen as the next necessary step (Schwab, 2016), which will accelerate the systematic and organic action of the technological world. Therefore, contemporary technology is much more than a set of instruments and technical objects, it is rather a global system in expansion (as Ellul thought); it is a network of technical systems8 that interact by increasing the complexity of the interrelationships and the global reach of their effects on nature and society, both in the geographical space and in physical and historical time. Its effects and consequences are cumulative and entropic, some irreversible, but many of them practically unpredictable. For this reason, the epistemic complexity to understand, evaluate and calculate or measure the causes and effects of the technological world has increased beyond our natural cognitive capacities.
Much help is now required by the systems and computing devices that already carry out the massive data mining (big data) that generates and drives the technological systems. But that world that we have built with our actions and decisions is no longer within reach, neither in cognitive terms nor in practical terms. An ethics of the technological world must understand how technology acts in both the hyper-objective and the world-system, through an action imperative manifested in large technological systems, for example, in the telecommunications and information technology network, or in the industrial production chains, their distribution and global commercialization and their environmental waste or their incorporation into the human body.
Faced with this systemic dimension (not instrumental) of the technological world, which is not evident in the immediate technical objects, the philosophy of our time faces the challenge of discerning what is the meaning and ultimate goal of the technological world; that is, to clarify the purpose of the deployment of a will to power that compels the human being to carry out and develop everything technically possible, transcending the limits of culture, society and nature itself.9
The properties of the technological world that impel ethical limits
An ontological conception of the technological world must delimit what are the essential features and emergent properties of our current world, because these concepts constitute the basis for a more effective ethical inquiry that is not reduced to a personal or local dilemma, but that includes the planetary dimensions of what is at stake.
1. Artifactuality and artificiality. The technological world is not natural; nature has been subsumed, transformed into the technological environment and converted or subsumed into artifactual and artificial systems.10
2. Pragmatic and economic rationality. In the technological world any natural object can be converted into an artifact and any artifact into a commodity or object with exchange value, enhancing its use value. Its ultimate purpose is the search for maximum efficiency and operational efficiency in all orders of human praxis. However, in the technological world, values and technical goals are often in conflict with the economic ones of the capitalist world. We must point out that the current technological world is completely subordinated to the world of globalized capitalism.
3. Artifactual location of nature and living beings (bioartefactuality). The technological world is based on a universal availability of every entity to be reduced to the object of transformation and technological manipulation, to convert all nature, in its parts and in its systems, to living organisms and their biochemical and cellular components, genetic and genomic, in an artifact or technological product, patentable and marketable, before being used effectively.
4. Progressive self-growth and global dimension of its scope, both in space and time. This self-growth entails a relative form of autonomy with respect to social systems (economic, political, ethical). Self-growth is the basis of the ideology of technological progress and the imperative of artifactual innovation. This imperative of innovation arises not only from social needs, but from the needs of growth of capital and markets. One consequence of this geographical expansion is the uniformity of values, ways of life and cultural criteria. The technological world is a homogenized and normalized world.
5. Complex, organic and systemic interconnection. The technological world is a system of increasing complexity due to the intentional or accidental interconnection between the different and different technological subsystems. The interconnection has advanced in two dimensions. First, by interconnecting abiotic devices with each other through computer devices; then to these with the human agents. A third level will be the computer interconnection between artifacts, humans and computerized bio-devices. In a first dimension, it is physical information, through electronic supports, what is communicated and processed. The second dimension is the exchange of genetic and biological information between living organisms (including, of course, humans). The third dimension of interconnection could be the combination of physical and biological information at a molecular or atomic level, at a bio-nanotechnological level. The interconnections build new technological systems of greater reach and penetration, both in the material structures of objects or organisms and in the global networks of interaction of the systems.
6. Generalized but diffuse risk and danger of systemic collapse. We now live in a “risk society” as characterized by Ulrich Beck (1998), because technological power can cause irreversible damage to nature, to living organisms and to human life. The systems can collapse and, nevertheless, remain functional, as long as the sources of energy or matter are not exhausted, this is already the case with ecosystems or urban systems. Risks increase, and are complicated by the effects of global climate change and biodiversity loss, but their social perception becomes diffuse and this is derived from the characters I mentioned previously -centralization and increasing dependence, self-growth, systemic interdependence. The possibility of catastrophic accidents occurring in technological systems is increasing due to interdependence, the global dimension, centralization and progressive chain-linking. Chernobyl was just one example of the major technological risk in the contemporary world. If technological catastrophes are possible (although they seem unlikely), this rationally obliges us to anticipate and foresee the worst. The risk has increased, in addition, to the extent that techno-political decisions are concentrated in a few people,11 because the technological systems are centralized and depend on artifactual monitoring systems and still on human agents who must make crucial decisions.
7. Relative autonomy of technological systems. The technological world seems to progress and grow in an autonomous way. Therefore, the challenge for the ethics and politics of our time is to establish bases for the control and social evaluation of technologies, through a new culture of ethical values and co-responsible actions among scientists, technologists and the rest of the society. Technology and technoscience can not equip them themselves with ethical ends and criteria. It is the entire society that must evaluate, conduct and guide them according to principles and rules based on the vital interests of humanity, and through more open deliberation and decision processes involving all users and possible affected.
The autonomy of technological systems is not only ethical and political, it is in itself an epistemic challenge. As the power of intervention and action in the technological world grows, the effects and consequences (both planned and unforeseen) have spread geographically to the entire planet and temporarily to the remote future.
A new social power, arising from the ethical awareness of the traits that characterize the technological world, is necessary and possible to face the negative consequences of technological power, without having to renounce its undeniable achievements and without restricting the freedom of techno-scientific research.
7. The Principles of Ethics for the Technological World
Based on an ontological conception of the technological world, we can formulate a series of basic principles for an ethic that faces its consequences, unprecedented challenges and risks that are difficult to predict. But this implies the need to question and surpass certain limits of the western ethical tradition. According to Hans Jonas (1995), ethics hitherto were based on two premises that prevent fully face the new conditions of globalized technological action:
the human condition is fixed and immutable
b) the scope of the human action and, consequently, responsibility has short reach in space and time.
From my point of view, anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism and limited spatio-temporal scope12 are the three features that have aggravated the “Promethean mismatch” (Anders, 2011) that occurs between a technological power that expands in an unlimited way and our conceptions and institutions, as well as ethical and political decisions, which are disjointed and do not respond to new historical conditions. In particular we can point out:
Anthropocentrism. Our ethical tradition has not incorporated as objects of moral consideration other living beings, as well as the natural environment as a whole as “moral patients” that receive the effects of human action. In the purest Kantian tradition, only the human remains a source of moral duty for the majority. At the same time, we continue to think that human “nature” is fixed and invulnerable, that human beings can not be the object of radical technological transformation. However, one of the most challenging technological goals is the overcoming of the human condition, technological transhumanism.
Ethnocentrism. The Western ethical tradition has given priority in its moral consideration only to a cultural group that is supposed to be homogenous (the Western, Christian, “white” world, which uses technological reason and believes blindly in the benefits of the world capitalist market and in representative democracies, now tele-governed by technocratic elites). In this way, the illustrated project of technological reason has also involved the project of dominating one culture over the others, trying to impose “their” universal values. The result has been a violent and, at times, genocidal and ecocidal domain. Technological ethnocentrism – which has been fundamentally Eurocentric and Occidentalist – clad in techno-idolatry and blind faith in technological progress – has prevented humankind from reaching a truly universal vision of the elementary ethical principles that will be necessary to face the new global challenges.
Ethnocentric prejudices have been analogous and joint to the prejudices of “species” (which justified anthropocentric domination over other animals): racism, slavery, anti-Semitism, etc. Ethics for the technological world must be affirmed in a paradigm that recognizes the community (biocultural, genetic) and, at the same time, the diversity (historical and cultural) of the human condition. It must rescue and protect traditional knowledge and avoid the biopiracy of the technical and bio-cultural goods of many communities; it must avoid environmental destruction and the excessive extraction of natural resources or the plundering of territories where the ancestral communities live or that predate the technological modernity.13
The limited vision of the spatio-temporal reaches of human actions. Western ethical tradition has functioned as an ethic of proximity, both spatial and temporal. Hans Jonas (1995) points out that this conception can continue to apply to the sphere of interpersonal relationships, but not to the technological world in which human actions are integrated into a complex system and, therefore, have remote reaches, affecting the future generations of human beings and the entire biosphere. For the first time in history, the humans of the future must count on their survival interests, as well as those of the present. At the same time, “an ethic for the future” implies building an ethic that enforces the inheritance that our ancestors left us and that repairs the damages to those who have already been victims of the technological world. These victims have not been only human, thousands of species have become extinct or are seriously threatened by the relentless development of technological power.
Based on the thesis of the announcers of the greatest danger, ethics for the technological world can argue that signs already exist in the current situation that would imply the possibility of different catastrophic scenarios. If there is the possibility of this greater danger, then the new moral imperatives will enunciate the basic principles to ensure the continuity of the existence of a humanity capable of responsibility, a humanity that preserves its essential ethical condition. But this is only possible if what is left of the natural world is protected and preserved. The technological world can not end up engulfing all ecosystems or continue to deplete natural resources or accelerate the extinction of species and the loss of biodiversity. Water, land, sky, living organisms are the new objects of protection of collective responsibility, a precautionary responsibility and that is capable of acting with justice among humans, as well as between humans and the rest of living beings.
In particular, a task of ethics for the technological world focuses on the critique of the ontological and moral anthropocentrism of the Western tradition: the limits of the moral community are not identical with the limits of the human species. All the individual living beings and the collectives formed by them deserve moral consideration because they possess an intrinsic value (not instrumental, not technical), and are in charge of our responsibility precisely because our technological actions can endanger their existence. The critique of technological anthropocentrism does not imply denying the uniqueness and ethical irreducibility of our species: only human beings are moral agents, capable of obligation and ethical responsibility. On the contrary, it emphasizes our ontological singularity: as long as the technological reason of force majeure does not obliterate our ethical reason and our capacity for awareness and empathy with all that is alive, we are obliged to respond and react to save what remains of the natural world.
However, our ethical tradition requires a radical transformation that must go in the sense of extending the field of moral consideration beyond human beings, but without betting on a superficial and egalitarian biocentrism that advocates an identical value for all forms of life. It would be, rather, to look for an intermediate and perhaps provisional position (a moderate anthropocentrism and a hierarchical biocentrism), since it must be constantly revised by a global and intercultural dialogue. Among the most complicated decisions are how to intervene or act to protect other living beings and whole ecosystems, because any technical intervention will have effects. Furthermore, for living organisms that have been transformed into bioartefacts, different obligations are imposed than for living organisms (especially plants and animals) that have not been transformed, dominated or incorporated into the technological world, since they must be preserved in natural reserves. These are basic principles of environmental justice between living beings that must put ethics into practice for the technological world. As an ethic of self-containment of technological power (Riechmann, 2004), the enormous challenge in the technological world will be to limit the excesses of that power and to deactivate the rhythm of production, extraction, exploitation and destruction of nature. Much more problematic will be the necessary actions of remediation and ecological recovery of the ecosystems. In these actions, a technical intervention is necessary that must be prudential and with very limited objectives.14
The principles of an ethics for the technological world must be in correlation and in constant confrontation, but on the condition that they do not eliminate each other, maintaining a minimum level of individual and collective action. These principles will aim to revitalize a set of universalizable values to reinforce the ethical links of humanity with its world, both natural and artifactual. The technological rationality can be contained and reoriented taking its own criteria of operational efficiency, as well as its resources and computing and cognitive, productive and reconstructive devices of the natural and social world.
My hypothesis is that it is possible to achieve the formulation of global and transcultural principles that support criteria of technoscientific action valid for all humanity, recognizing and respecting the historical-cultural plurality of existing moral conceptions and practices, as well as traditional knowledge and values local. And this is possible if the global, systematic and extended scope of actions and interconnections of the technological world are taken advantage of. The negative features that the critics of the technological world pointed out could be reversed, because they contain the potential to support a set of universal and differentiable values that have practical efficacy, as long as it is possible to establish social and international agreements for the evaluation and effective regulation of technological systems.
8. Conclusion
To conclude this synthesis, I will comment on the principles of an ethics for a technological world.
A) Principle of responsibility that determines what we are obliged to care for and preserve the integrity and dignity of human life in the first place; that is, the primordial object of responsibility is a human life that preserves its characters of ethical conscience and free action, of finitude (birth-mortality), vulnerability, unity and biological-genetic community. The first moral obligation is, then, to ensure the existence of moral beings with responsibility. Therefore, the analysis and evaluation of eugenic or transhumanist anthropotechnologies is problematic.
Responsibility implies the development of scientific knowledge to prevent and anticipate the negative effects of technological intervention, as well as the widest possible dissemination of what is known about risks and harms, so that society can make decisions through democratic procedures that involve those directly affected. The principle of responsibility implies a profound questioning of our democratic institutions and practices, as well as the individualism and fragmentation of social life. If the danger that lurks is common (the global ecological crisis), the ethical response must be coordinated and the risks must be shared equally. If the technological world is systemic and global, the ethical-political response must also be systemic and globalized.
B) Principle of precaution that indicates that, in the event of a danger based on reasonable forecasts, although there is no conclusive scientific evidence, and if the possible damage is incalculable or greater than the expected benefit, it is necessary to review the technological action planned, stop it, modify it or inhibit it. The precautionary principle does not reject every risk and every type of damage that is the effect of a technological action, first of all, because many of the effects are unpredictable; but it indicates that the damage or badly expected, with well-founded reasons, can not be incalculable or ostensibly greater than the projected benefit. The damages and risks must be maintained at a rationally acceptable level, as long as they do not imply an unfair distribution among society.
C) Principle of protection of individual and community autonomy. Technological actions must protect, favor and strengthen individual autonomy so that each subject can decide in a responsible way about their body and their own life, without affecting or restricting the autonomy and freedom of others. Individual autonomy can collide against the principle of responsibility. The biotechnological possibilities of transformation of corporality would be an exemplary case. The biotechnological modification of the body would be an individual right, but at the same time, it could put at risk some trait of the human condition. Therefore, this technological intervention on the human body and mind must be very prudent, and advance first in negative eugenics actions to cure diseases and disabilities and equalize development opportunities. Likewise, the principle of community autonomy implies recognizing the right of different communities to use other means or to reject, with well-founded reasons, technological systems and innovations that affect their territories, natural resources or material cultures. The loss of bio-cultural diversity (such as sowing and cultivation methods or therapeutic and medicinal techniques that use natural resources) is also a serious decrease in natural and biological heritage.
D) Principle of distributive justice of technological benefits, but also of risks. Not only does it mean that more and more people benefit from technological development and that the gap in living standards between rich and poor countries is narrowing, but also that the risks are reasonable and socially and internationally shared. Ecological problems affect everyone, but the risks and harms increase for the most vulnerable in the socioeconomic scale.
The ethical principles indicated are only the axiological bases for ensuring the continuity of a humanity capable of being responsible for the effects of its techno-scientific power, a humanity that preserves its essential ethical condition, that is capable of being responsible for the natural environment on which it depends. to survive, as well as the bio-cultural and techno-scientific heritage that will bequeath to future generations.
Footnotes
1 Main works in chronological order: M. Heidegger, The question by technique (1949); J. Ellul, The technique or the bet of the century (1954); G. Anders, The Obsolescence of Man (1956); E. Ni-col, El pro-venir de la filosofía (1972), and H. Jonas, The principle of responsibility (1979). In Ethics and technological world, I dedicate separate chapters to each one to analyze and evaluate their diagnoses.
2 The ethics of anticipation of catastrophes reveals that it is precisely the indeterminacy of the historical events that we are witnessing (techno-scientific innovations and their repercussions in the world) that allows us (and does not oblige) to think about the possibility of a scenario. negative, result of present actions. Posing the possibility of catastrophe does not imply a deterministic conception of history and a denial of human freedom, but quite the opposite. It is the call to collective responsibility to preserve the limits of the human condition. The greater evil is possible as a consequence of our own actions; Our responsibility is to anticipate, anticipate and avoid it at all costs.
3 The concept of technical control is fundamental in current technological operations. Control involves a wide range of cognitive and practical actions. It includes the actions of inspecting, monitoring, checking, supervising, as well as intervening, regulating, moderating, limiting, governing and, finally, the highest degree of control is the domination of an object or system of objects.
4 We will always refer to the relationship and dichotomy between natural / artefactual and not between natural / artificial, as they say. The artificial can come to replicate the natural, at least in its forms and functions; while the artifactual can also be natural, at least in its intrinsic materiality and ends, but it will always contain a degree of artificiality, since human work inserts functions or purposes that are not natural in the bioartefacts, but simulate or imitate processes natural, as is the case of transgenesis or genetic horizontal transfer between species, which is produced technically in GMOs replicating what, rarely, happens in the biological interaction between natural species.
5 Keekok Lee uses the term artefacticity, “artifact”. I have preferred to use artifactuality and bioartefactuality. Both terms are adjectives that indicate the quality of being products of the technique (art) and not only of nature. Thus, the terms I use are the following: a) artifact or abiotic artifact, which is done by technique and is not a living organism in and of itself; b) bioartefact, the biotic artifact that is the result of technically modifying a living organism, but as such it subsists by itself and in itself as a “natural entity” linked to other living organisms and linked, in principle, to evolution; d) bioartefactual, quality that is predicated of a living being after having been modified by technique; e) bioartefactuality, a substance that indicates the scope in which and for what occurs the bioartefactual; f) bioartificial, a quality that is predicated on an artificial biotic artifact or without natural biotic material that imitates or replicates in its basic operations a natural entity, with different biochemical components and structures (another form of genetic code or chemical compounds), but which it would not be by itself a living natural organism evolutionarily linked to others; g) bioartificiality, a noun that indicates the sphere in which bioartificial events take place. This last modality of artificial bio-artifacts has not yet been produced.
6 This is the usual conception of the technique that Heidegger called “anthropological-instrumental” in his famous The Question for Technique (1949).
7 According to Timothy Morton (2013), “hyperobjects” are characterized by their viscosity or elasticity, their non-locality or spatial dispersion, their “temporal undulation” or diffuse persistence, their discontinuity in phases, and their interobjectivity or interaction with many other objects. Hyperobjects can be natural phenomena, social or artifactual systems.
8 The concept of “technical system” has been coined by Miguel Ángel Quintanilla in Technology: a philosophical approach, Fundesco, Madrid, 1989. (2nd ed. In Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, 2017). A technical system comprises artifacts, materials, energy, human agents (operators, designers, users, etc.), specialized knowledge, techniques, actions and operative processes, values, purposes and specific purposes.
9 The rationality that dominates in the technological world supposes that the natural reality (including human reality) is modifiable in accordance with the goals that we propose, because nature can be reconfigured at our whim. The technological world has no limits, both in the sense of its geographical expansion and in that of its action capabilities, since everything is in an evolutionary flow, nothing has a fixed structure and structure, nature and man himself can be reconfigured and rebuilt, everything is technically possible. The liquidity of technological ontology is a principle of neutralization of the value of all entities, natural or artifactual, equating them as objects-instruments-goods. For this reason, Anders commented that in the technological world a new form of axiological “nihilism” predominated: everything is equal or not valid if it can not be transformed, used and converted into a technical object with value in the world market.
10 It is convenient to distinguish between artifactuality and artificiality. The first expresses the transformation of any object, matter or process into an artifact or technical object, a transformation that implies, at least, the modification of some of its causes and the introduction of a purpose or function assigned by humans. In contrast, artificiality involves the construction of artifacts that simulate, imitate, replicate or substitute natural objects, processes and systems, but which are made of non-biotic materials, such as artificial hearts, artificial legs or arms, artificial pearls, artificial textiles, artificial teeth, artificial intelligence, artificial respirator, artificial flavors, etc. The artificial is also called synthetic and normally the prostheses are artificial artifacts. The next step posed by synthetic biology is the construction of artificial bioartefacts, made of materials, components and biochemical (genetic, cellular and molecular) structures that are not natural or unprecedented in nature, but that replicate or imitate the way they work, The living organisms develop and reproduce.
11 The great imminent risks in fossil, nuclear, chemical, informatics, genetic and biochemical, neurological or nanotechnological technologies now have a potential global reach that would extend over time, which is why they are not compensable in economic terms. There would be no insurance premium to cover the destruction that these technologies would cause, if they were to fail (Beck, 1998).
12 We can also add androcentrism, since it has become more evident in our time than in many of the debates and technological controversies there is a problem of gender equity. Currently, both the development of technosciences and the crucial decisions on technological innovation and regulation remain in the hands of men. The lack of prudence and the overvaluation of risk-opportunity for techno-scientific development are usually identified as more masculine than feminine values. What would happen to a more feminized technoscience, more empathetic with nature and living organisms, more prudent and balanced, with less effort to dominate and exponential growth in the production and extraction of natural resources?
13 There have been many problems and debates about technological projects that, backed by governments, expropriate or allow the exploitation of natural resources in places where traditional communities live. This was the case in Mexico with the case of Wirikuta, sacred site of the Huicholes Indians (in Nayarit, northwestern Mexico), which was granted to foreign companies for the massive extraction of minerals. See: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirikuta
14 For example, it would make sense to revive biologically extinct species if their ecosystem functions are essential, but not to try to revive species that went extinct millions of years ago or viruses and bacteria that have been eradicated due to their dangerous and lethal effect on human health.
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