It seems plausible, then, to attribute a specific form of intentionality to artifacts. This ‘material’ form of intentionality is quite different from human intentionality, in that it cannot exist without human intentionalities supporting it. Only within the relations between human beings and reality can artifacts play their ‘intending’ mediating roles. When mediating the relations between humans and reality, artifacts help to constitute both the objects in reality that are experienced or acted upon and the subjects that are experiencing and acting. This implies that the subjects who act or make decisions about actions are never purely human, but rather a complex blend of humanity and technology. When making a decision about abortion on the basis of technologically mediated knowledge about the chances that the child will suffer from a serious disease, this decision is not ‘purely’ human, but neither is it entirely induced by technology. The very situation of having to make this decision and the very ways in which the decision is made, are co-shaped by technological artifacts. Without these technologies, either there would not be a situation of choice, or the decision would be made on the basis of a different relation to the situation. At the same time, the technologies involved do not determine human decisions here. Moral decision-making is a joint effort of human beings and technological artifacts.
Strictly speaking, then, there is no such thing as ‘technological intentionality’; intentionality is always a hybrid affair, involving both human and nonhuman intentions, or, better, ‘composite intentions’ with intentionality distributed over the human and the nonhuman elements in human-technology-world relationships. Rather than being ‘derived’ from human agents, this intentionality comes about in associations between humans and nonhumans. For that reason, it could be called ‘hybrid intentionality’, or ‘distributed intentionality’.
What about the second requirement for moral agency we discerned at the beginning of this chapter: freedom, or even autonomy? Now that we have concluded that artifacts may have some form of intentionality, can we also say that they have freedom? Obviously not. Again, freedom requires the possession of a mind, which artifacts do not have. Technologies, therefore, cannot be free agents like human beings are. Nevertheless there are good arguments not to exclude artifacts entirely from the realm of freedom that is required for moral agency. In order to show this, I will first elaborate that human freedom in moral decision-making is never absolute, but always bound to the specific situations in which decisions are to be made, including their material infrastructure. Second, I will argue that in the human-technology associations that embody hybrid intentionality, freedom should also be seen as distributed over the human and nonhuman elements in the associations.
Even though freedom is obviously needed to be accountable for one’s actions, the thoroughly technologically mediated character of our daily lives makes it difficult to take freedom as an absolute criterion for moral agency. After all, as became clear above, technologies play an important role in virtually every moral decision we make. The decision how fast to drive and therefore how much risk to run of harming other people is always mediated by the lay-out of the road, the power of the engine of the car, the presence or absence of speed bumps and speed camera’s, et cetera. The decision to have surgery or not is most often mediated by all kinds of imaging technologies, blood tests et cetera, which help us to constitute the body in specific ways, thus organizing specific situations of choice.
To be sure, moral agency does not necessarily require complete autonomy. Some degree of freedom can be enough to be held morally accountable for an action. And not all freedom is taken away by technological mediations, as the examples of abortion and driving speed make clear. In these examples, human behavior is not determined by technology, but rather co-shaped by it, with humans still being able to reflect on their behavior and make decisions about it. This does not take away the fact, however, that most mediations, like those provided by speed bumps and by the presence of ultrasound scanners as a common option in medical practice, occur in a pre-reflexive manner, and can in no way be escaped in moral decision-making. The moral dilemmas of whether or not to have an abortion and of how fast to drive would not exist in the same way without the technologies involved in these practices, such dilemma’s are rather shaped by these technologies. Technologies cannot be defined away from our daily lives. The concept of freedom presupposes a form of sovereignty with respect to technology that human beings simply no longer possess.
This conclusion can be read in two distinct ways. The first is that mediation has nothing to do with morality whatsoever. If moral agency requires freedom and technological mediation limits or even annihilates human freedom, only non-technologically mediated situations leave room for morality. Technological artifacts are unable to make moral decisions, and technology-induced human behavior has a non-moral character. A good example of this criticism are the commonly heard negative reactions to explicit behavior-steering technologies like speed limiters in cars. Usually, the resistance against such technologies is supported by two kinds of arguments. One, there is the fear that human freedom is threatened and that democracy is exchanged for technocracy. Should all human actions be guided by technology, the criticism goes, the outcome would be a technocratic society in which moral problems are solved by machines instead of people. Two, there is the charge of immorality or, at best, amorality. Actions not the product of our own free will but induced by technology can not be described as ‘moral’; and, what is worse, behavior-steering technologies might create a form of moral laziness that is fatal to the moral abilities of citizens.
These criticisms are deeply problematic. The analyses of technological mediation given above show that human actions are always mediated. To phrase it in Latour’s words: “Without technological detours, the properly human cannot exist. (...) Morality is no more human than technology, in the sense that it would originate from an already constituted human who would be master of itself as well as of the universe. Let us say that it traverses the world and, like technology, that it engenders in its wake forms of humanity, choices of subjectivity, modes of objectification, various types of attachment.” (Latour, 2002). This is precisely what opponents of speed limitation forget. Also without speed limiters, the actions of drivers are continually mediated: indeed, cars can easily exceed speed limits and because our roads are so wide and the bends so gentle that we can drive too fast, we are constantly invited to explore the space between the accelerator and the floor. Therefore, giving the inevitable technological mediations a desirable form rather than rejecting outright the idea of a ‘moralized technology’ in fact attests to a sense of responsibility.
The conclusion that mediation and morality are at odds with each other, therefore, is not satisfying. It is virtually impossible to think of any morally relevant situation in which technology does not play a role. And it would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater to conclude that there is no room for morality and moral judgments in all situations in which technologies play a role. Therefore, an alternative solution is needed of the apparent tension between technological mediation and ethics. Rather than taking absolute freedom as a prerequisite for moral agency, we need to reinterpret freedom as an agent’s ability to relate to what determines him or her. Human actions always take place in a stubborn reality, and for this reason, absolute freedom can only be attained by ignoring reality, and therefore by giving up the possibility to act at all. Freedom is not a lack of forces and constraints; it rather is the existential space human beings have within which to realize their existence. Humans have a relation to their own existence and to the ways in which this is co-shaped by the material culture in which it takes place. The material situatedness of human existence creates specific forms of freedom, rather than impedes them. Freedom exists in the possibilities that are opened up for human beings to have a relationship with the environment in which they live and to which they are bound.