Many of our actions and interpretations of the world are co-shaped by the technologies we use. Telephones mediate the way we communicate with others, cars help to determine the acceptable distance from home to work, thermometers co-shape our experience of health and disease, and antenatal diagnostic technologies generate difficult questions regarding pregnancy and abortion. This mediating role of technologies also pertains to actions and decisions we usually call ‘moral’, ranging from the driving speed we find morally acceptable to our decisions about unborn life. If ethics is about the question ‘how to act’, and technologies help to answer this question, technologies appear to do ethics, or at least to help us to do so. Analogously to Winner’s claim that artifacts have politics, therefore, the conclusion seems justified that artifacts have morality: technologies play an active role in moral action and decision-making.
How can we understand this material morality? Does it actually imply that artifacts can be considered moral agents? In ethical theory, to qualify as a moral agent at least requires the possession of intentionality and some degree of freedom. In order to be held morally accountable for an action, an agent needs to have the intention to act in a specific way, and the freedom to realize this intention. Both requirements seem problematic with respect to artifacts, at least, at first sight. Artifacts, after all, do not seem to be able to form intentions, and neither do they possess any form of autonomy. Yet, both requirements for moral agency deserve further analysis.
At a first glance, it might seem absurd to speak about artifacts in terms of intentionality. A closer inspection of what we mean by ‘intentionality’ in relation to what artifacts actually ‘do’, however, makes it possible to attribute a specific form of intentionality to artifacts. To show this, it is important to make a distinction here between two aspects of ‘intentionality.’ One, intentionality entails the ability to form intentions, and two, this forming of intentions can be considered something original or spontaneous in the sense that it literally ‘springs from’ or is ‘originated by’ the agent possessing intentionality. Both aspects of intentionality will appear not to be as alien to technological artifacts as at first they might seem.
First, the ‘mediation approach’ to technology, already mentioned above, makes it possible to attribute to artifacts the ability to form intentions. In this approach, technologies are analyzed in terms of their mediating roles in relations between humans and reality. The core idea is that technologies, when used, always establish a relation between users and their environment. Technologies enable us to perform actions and have experiences that were scarcely possible before, and in doing so, they also help us to shape how we act and experience things. Technologies are not neutral instruments or intermediaries, but active mediators that help shape the relation between people and reality. This mediation has two directions: one pragmatic, concerning action, and the other hermeneutic, concerning interpretation.
Latour’s work offers many examples of the pragmatic dimension of technological mediation. With Madeleine Akrich, he coined the term ‘script’ to indicate that artifacts can prescribe specific actions, just like the script of a film or play which prescribes who does what and when (Latour, 1992; Akrich, 1992). The speed bump mentioned above, for instance, embodies the script ‘slow down before reaching me’. Everyday life is loaded with examples of technologies that help to shape our actions. In Dutch supermarkets, shopping carts are equipped with a coin lock, to encourage users to put the cart back in place rather than leaving it at the parking lot. Recently, carts have been introduced with a wheel lock blocking the wheels when the cart is moved outside a designated area, thus preventing it from being stolen.
Don Ihde’s work concerns the hermeneutic dimension of technological mediation. Ihde analyzes the structure of the relations between human beings and technological artifacts, and investigates how technologies help to shape, on the basis of these relations, human perceptions and interpretations of reality (e.g., Ihde, 1990; 1998). A good example to illustrate this hermeneutic intentionality, which I have already briefly elaborated elsewhere (see Verbeek, 2006), is obstetrical ultrasound. This technology is not simply a functional means to make visible an unborn child in the womb. It actively helps to shape the way the unborn child is seen in human experience, and in doing so it informs the choices his or her expecting parents make. Because of the ways in which ultrasound mediates the relations between the fetus and the future parents, it constitutes both the fetus and parents in specific ways.
Ultrasound brings about a number of ‘translations’ of the relations between expecting parents and the fetus, while mediating their visual contact. One, ultrasound isolates the fetus from the female body. In doing so, it creates a new ontological status of the fetus, as a separate living being rather than forming a unity with his or her mother. This creates the space to make decisions about the fetus apart from the pregnant woman in whose body it is growing. Two, ultrasound places the fetus in a context of medical norms. It makes visible defects of the neural tube, and makes it possible to measure the thickness of the fetal neck fold, which gives an indication of the risk that the child will suffer from Down’s Syndrome. In doing so, ultrasound translates pregnancy into a medical process; the fetus into a possible patient; and congenital defects into preventable suffering. As a result, pregnancy becomes a process of choices: the choice to have tests like neck fold measurements done at all, and the choice of what to do if anything is ‘wrong’. Moreover, parents are constituted as decision-makers regarding the life of their unborn child. To be sure, the role of ultrasound is ambivalent here: on the one hand it may encourage abortion, making it possible to prevent suffering; on the other hand it may discourage abortion, enhancing emotional bonds between parents and the unborn child by visualizing ‘fetal personhood’.
In all of these examples, artifacts are active: they help to shape human actions, interpretations, and decisions, which would have been different without the artifact. To be sure, artifacts do not have intentions like human beings do, because they cannot deliberately do something. But their lack of consciousness does not take away the fact that artifacts can have intentions in the literal sense of the Latin word ‘intendere’, which means ‘to direct’, ‘to direct one’s course’, ‘to direct one’s mind’. The inten-tionality of artifacts is to be found in their directing role in the actions and experiences of human beings. Technological mediation, therefore, can be seen as a specific, material form of intentionality.
With regard to the second aspect of intentionality, the ‘originality’ of intentions, a similar argumentation can be given. For even though artifacts evidently cannot form intentions entirely on their own, again because of their lack of consciousness, their mediating roles cannot be entirely reduced to the intentions of their designers and users either. Otherwise, the intentionalities of artifacts would be a variant of what Searle denoted ‘derived intentionality’ (Searle, 1983), entirely reducible to human intentionalities. Quite often, technologies mediate human actions and experiences without human beings having told them to do so. Some technologies, for instance, are used in different ways from those their designers envisaged. The first cars, which only made 15 km/h, were used primarily for sport, and for medical purposes; driving at a speed of 15 km/h was considered to create an environment of ‘thin air’, which was supposed be healthy for people with lung diseases. Only after cars were interpreted as a means for providing long distance transport did the car get to play its current role in the division between labor and leisure (Baudet, 1986). In this case, unexpected mediations come about in specific use contexts. But unforeseen mediations can also emerge when technologies are used as intended. The very fact that the introduction of mobile phones has led to changes in youth culture - such as that young people appear to make ever less appointments with each other, since everyone can call and be called at any time and place - was not intended by the designers of the cell phone, even though it is used here in precisely the context the designers had envisaged.