A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Ethical Issues

SCOT offers a variety of entry points for ethical analysis of technology, especially because of the core idea that “things could have been otherwise.” However, the one thing that SCOT does not provide is a conceptual framework to characterize ethical technologies in any context-independent and intrinsic way – that import technological determinism through the back door (philosophers who criticized constructivist studies of science and technology for this are Radder [1992] and Winner [1993]). A pragmatist approach seems most fruitful (Keulartz et al. 2004).