Technology and Ethics. The Ethos of Technology

Technology is manifest not simply in the mechanical, chemical, and electrical achievements from the first third of the twentieth century (e.g., automobiles, airplanes, synthetic materials, drugs, radios, motion pictures), the creations of physics that dominated in mid-century (e.g., nuclear weapons and space flight), and the electronic and biological inventions of the last third of the century (e.g., computers and genetic engineering) but also in the manifold social influences and impacts of these and related products, process, and systems.

Such implications range from the economic and cultural to the legal and political—from new forms of production and consumption to the development of distinct governmental regulations and agencies. Yet underlying all such responses—and, indeed, originally calling forth the technologies them- selves—are cultural and ethical commitments. As Aristotle argues in the opening pages of his Ethics, all human actions arise from some vision of the good; the critical examination of such visions as are present in the Greek ‘‘ethos,’’ which we now call culture, is what constitutes ‘‘ethics.’’

The Ethos of Technology. From its sixteenth century beginnings the momentous cultural commitment to distinctly modern forms of making and using has rested on a vision of technology as a way to achieve the good if not a form of it. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leo Baekeland, the inventor of Bakelite—the archetype for a whole family of plastics whose protean slickness contributed a new molecular level of artifice to such devices as the telephone and record player—summed up the prevailing moral assessment of technology as doing:

''more for the betterment of the race than all the art, all the civilizing efforts, all the so-called classical literature'' [Baekeland 1910, p. 40].

He continues: ''The modern engineer, in partnership with the scientist, is asserting the possibilities of our race to a degree never dreamt of before: instead of cowering in wonder or fear like a savage before the forces of nature, instead of finding in them merely an inspiration for literary or artistic effort, ... he fulfills the mission of the elect and sets himself to the task of applying his knowledge for the benefit of the whole race'' [Baekeland 1910, pp. 38-39].

Taking hold of a baton passed from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the first half of the twentieth sought to extend what has been called ‘‘a second creation of the world,’’ technologically transforming reality from something to which human beings adapted into that which they designed in their own image.

This view of technology as justified by its pursuit and realization of material welfare and human freedom was reiterated fifty years later by C.P. Snow (1959) in his famous ‘‘two cultures’’ lecture, where he castigated literary intellectuals as ‘‘natural Luddites’’ for their worries about the materialistic values inherent in the great, ongoing achievements of the scientific and industrial revolutions: improved health care, increased food production, and the democratization of education. The primary ethical justification of modern technology across the century was the conquest of nature and the promotion of humanization as the pursuit of freedom.

During the second half of the century, however, the new technological world itself came to be recognized as requiring its own adaptations. Freedoms were not themselves always free. Thus, although the 1900s opened with a confidence in and remained throughout deeply sympathetic to an almost unqualified faith in the moral probity of technology, the later twentieth century witnessed the emergence, even within the techno-scientific community, of a series of critical ethical questions addressed to technological humanism.