This redefinition of freedom, to be sure, still leaves no room to actually attribute freedom to technological artifacts. But it does take artifacts back into the realm of freedom, rather than excluding them from it altogether. On the one hand, after all, they help to constitute freedom, by providing the material environment in which human existence takes place and takes its form. And on the other hand, artifacts can enter associations with human beings, while these associations, consisting partly of material artifacts, are the places where freedom is to be located. For even though freedom is never absolute but always gets shaped by technological and contextual mediations, these very mediations also create the space for moral decision-making. Just like intentionality, freedom also appears to be a hybrid affair, most often located in associations of humans and artifacts.
This expansion of the concepts of intentionality and freedom might raise the question if we really need to fiddle with such fundamental ethical concepts to understand the moral relevance of technological artifacts. In order to show that the answer to this question is yes, we can connect to an example elaborated by Latour: the debate between the National Rifle Association in the USA and its opponents. In this debate, those opposing the virtually unlimited availability of guns in the USA use the slogan “Guns Kill People”, while the NRA replies with the slogan “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” (Latour, 1999, 176).
The NRA position seems to be most in line with mainstream thinking about ethics. If someone is shot, nobody would ever think about keeping the gun responsible for this. Yet, the anti-gun position evidently also has a point here: in a society without guns, fewer fights would result in murder. A gun is not a mere instrument, a medium for the free will of human beings; it helps to define situations and agents by offering specific possibilities for action. A gun constitutes the person holding the gun as a potential gunman and his or her adversary as a potential lethal victim. Without denying the importance of human responsibility in any way, this example illustrates that when a person is shot, agency should not be located exclusively in either the gun or the person shooting, but in the assembly of both.
The example, therefore, illustrates that we need to develop a new perspective of both concepts. It does not imply that artifacts can ‘have’ intentionality and freedom, just like humans are supposed to have. Rather, the example shows that
(1) intentionality is hardly ever a purely human affair, but most often a matter of human-technology associations; and (2) freedom should not be understood as the absence of ‘external’ influences on agents, but as a practice of dealing with such influences or mediations.
3 Designing Material Moralities
This analysis of the moral agency of technological artifacts has important implications for the ethics of technology and technology design. First, the mediation approach to technology makes clear that moral issues regarding technology development comprise more than weighing technological risks and preventing disasters, however important these activities are. What is also at stake when technologies are introduced in society are the ways in which these technologies will mediate human actions and experiences, thus helping to form our moral decisions and our quality of life. The ethics of technology design, therefore, should also occupy itself with taking responsibility for the future mediating roles of technologies-in-design.
Moreover, our analysis of technological mediation shows that, even without explicit moral reflection, technology design is inherently a moral activity. Designers, by designing artifacts that will inevitably play a mediating role in people’s actions and experience, are thus helping to shape (moral) decisions and practices. Designers ‘materialize morality’; they are ‘doing ethics by other means’ (cf. Verbeek, 2006). This conclusion makes it even more urgent to expand the scope of the ethics of technology to include the moral dimensions of the artifacts themselves, and to try and give shape to these dimensions in a responsible way.
In practice, however, taking this responsibility runs into a number of serious problems. One, to ‘build in’ particular mediations, or to eliminate undesirable ones, it is necessary to predict what mediating roles technologies-in-design will play in their future use contexts, while there is no univocal relationship between the activities of designers and the eventual mediating role of the products they design. Technological mediations are no intrinsic qualities of technologies, but are brought about in complex interactions between designers, users, and the technologies. As became clear above, technologies can be used in unforeseen ways, and therefore are able to play unforeseen mediating roles. The energy-saving light bulb is another example of this, having actually resulted in increased energy consumption since such bulbs often appear to be used in places previously left unlit, such as in the garden or on the fagade of a house, thereby canceling out their economizing effect (Steg, 1999; Weegink, 1996). Moreover, unintentional and unexpected forms of mediation can arise when technologies are used in the way their designers intended. A good example is the revolving door which keeps out both cold air and wheelchair users. In short, designers play a seminal role in realizing particular forms of mediation, but not the only role. Users with their interpretations and forms of appropriation also have a part to play; and so do technologies, which give rise to unintended and unanticipated forms of mediation. These complicated relations between technologies, designers, and users in the mediation of actions and interpretations are illustrated in figure 1.
The figure makes clear that in all human actions, and all interpretations informing moral decisions, three forms of agency are at work: (1) the agency of the human being performing the action or making the moral decision, in interaction with the technology, and also appropriating the technological artifact in a specific way;
(2) the agency of the designer who, either implicitly or in explicit delegations, gives a specific shape to the artifact used, and thus helps to shape the eventual mediating role of the artifact; and (3) the agency of the artifact mediating human actions and decisions, sometimes in unforeseen ways. Taking responsibility for technological mediation, therefore, comes down to entering into an interaction with the agency of future users and the artifact-in-design, rather than acting as a ‘prime mover’ (cf. Smith, 2003).