The proof of this is how our lives grind to a halt during a power outage. Things we take for granted to work, such as the television or the lights, cease to do so, and we turn to earlier technologies such as matches and candles to light our way. In this way, technology is integral to our way of life and its effect on the human condition is profound. This paper will consider the moral status of technology given its deep relation to the human condition. I will argue against the neutrality thesis, after which I will outline what more must designers of technologies do, given the moral status of technologies.
The Non-Neutrality Thesis
What is the moral status of technologies? Is technology morally neutral? Technological artefacts can be considered merely as instruments designed to carry out specific functions. If an instrument fulfils its function well, it is a good instrument; if not, a bad one. In itself, it is neither good nor bad; it is morally neutral. However, it can be used in good or bad ways, but such use depends on its user. That is the thrust of the neutrality thesis. On the other hand, technologies play an active role in shaping human behaviours and society, contributing to our actions and decisions. What the neutrality thesis does not consider is how technology mediates our moral decisions, our actions and how we live. “When technologies are used, they always help to shape the context in which they fulfil their function. They help to shape human actions and perceptions, and create new practices and ways of living,” asserts Verbeek.[1] However, can artefacts be moral agents?
Likewise, artefacts “help to constitute freedom, by providing the material environment in which human existence takes place.”[4] The association of man and artefacts “create the space for moral decision-making,”[5] making freedom also a hybrid affair. Freedom and agency hence reside in the man-artefact complex. Once we recognise the moral character of technologies and its role in helping us make decisions and impacting how we live, technology design then becomes a moral activity. How an artefact is designed shapes human decisions and practices. “Designers ‘materialise morality’; they are ‘doing ethics by other means,’” writes Verbeek.[6]
Technological mediations take place in the interaction between designers, users and the technologies:
1) They occur during the intended use of the artefact, where the artefact is used in the way that it was designed to be used. 2) They also occur when artefacts are used in unforeseen or unintended ways.
3) Usage of artefacts give rise to side-effects, which also need to be considered.
Hence, Verbeek argues that the designer needs to imagine the ways an artefact can be used in all three modes. “Ethics should deal with these mediations in a responsible way, and try to help design technologies with morally justifiable mediating capacities,” he adds.[7]
The Design Process
A typical design process for a product begins with product definition. In this phase, the designer[8] works closely with the user to understand his needs and what he wants the artefact to do. The designer documents these user’s needs and expectations as User Requirements, which are the behaviours and characteristics the product must show to carry out its desired functions. He then translates these into Technical Specifications, transforming the User Requirements into quantitative and measurable technical requirements. He is now ready for the next phases of Conceptual Design and Detailed Design, where design reviews will happen along the way so that the designer and the user can review the emerging design together. Throughout this process, the designer will need to clearly and unambiguously understand the intent of the user, including what he wants to use the product for, who the end-user is[9] and how these end-users will use it.[10] Franssen elaborates:
Part of the design task is to see to it that the customer’s needs, typically articulated vaguely and fragmentarily in non-technical language, have been translated correctly, i.e., in line with the customer’s intentions, into functional requirements that are delineated sharply enough to allow the setting of the design specifications. (…) It belongs to the responsibility of a designer to understand why it is expected of a landmine under design that it is propelled one meter into the air before exploding (…) A designer must know, for example, whether an elevation of just half a meter or up to two meters would still do.[11]
Franssen concludes that bad artefacts are artefacts that would be morally wrong to design. His argument takes the following steps:[12]
1) States of affairs are brought about by our actions.
2) Bringing into existence an artefact is an action, with design a prior step leading to the existence of the designed artefact.
3) The existence of a bad artefact leads to a bad state of affairs – without the artefact, this new bad state of affairs would not have existed.
4) Since the artefact’s existence is a “crucial feature”[13] of this new state of affairs, bad artefacts should not be designed and brought into existence.
5) Since designers will understand the intent of the user well if they carry out the design process properly, they have a responsibility to decline to design a bad artefact and, in that way, not bring it into existence.
Franssen’s paradigmatic example of a bad artefact is an instrument of torture, while for him, even the nuclear bomb built during the second world war may be “morally justifiable.”[14] Hence, based on his arguments, there will only be a small number of artefacts that will clearly be designated as bad and hence wrong to design. This seems to suggest that the moral responsibility of designers is likewise modest, but I want to argue that even for good artefacts, the designers still have moral responsibility to ensure certain values are embedded in their designs. Hence, a fortiori, for all artefacts, good, bad or neutral, their designers have moral responsibility to ensure certain values are embedded in their designs.
Values in Design
Designers need to go beyond creating designs that merely fulfil user requirements to including values in their design considerations such as:
1) Accessibility: The disabled, the poor or the illiterate should be able to use the product if they fall within the potential user groups.
2) Sustainability: The product should be designed so it can be maintained and/or repaired. Its material should be environmentally responsible and sustainability should also be a consideration in the manufacturing process, for instance, to minimise waste of energy and raw materials.
3) Safety: Safety measures should be incorporated into the design, taking into consideration how users will use the artefact in intended and, as far as possible, unintended ways. Ideally, safety hazards are avoided altogether through good design. If this is not possible, then, in order of decreasing effectiveness, the safety measures incorporated can be safety features, or warning devices, or signages, procedures, training and use of personal protective equipment.[15] Safety measures should also be devised by the designer for the safe manufacture, display, storage, disposal including recycling, and other non-use situations.
4) Other measures may include comprehensive costing, for instance, to include the cost of negative externalities from direct or side-effects, and environmental remediation.
The choice of values depends on the values prized by the society. For instance, a society that values equality for right-handed and left-handed people will desire for artefacts to be designed such that they are as easy to use for both groups. Doors and their knobs, which currently favour right-handed people, will then need to be redesigned such that they can be opened with the same degree of ease with the left or the right hand. Such a solution may include sliding doors which do not have the handedness problem or removing the need to use hands at all, such as automatic doors. The solutions need not necessarily be technical. For instance, a society that values environmental sustainability might simply outlaw single-use plastics instead of trying to design artefacts using a biodegradable material.
Hence, designers need to adopt a holistic systems approach in their design processes. In addition to fulfilling user requirements, they need to ensure that values that are important to their society are incorporated into their designs. In addition, and if necessary, they need to make recommendations to the stakeholders for how the product might have to be managed through its life cycle. Such a systems approach might be suitable to solve the current problem of recycling mobile electronics. Recycling centres have difficulties recycling such devices because they are often powered by lithium-ion batteries which catch fire easily. Previously, the batteries were replaceable and hence could be removed and disposed separately from the device itself. In the quest for thinner and lighter mobile devices, batteries are now tightly integrated into the device’s design and often come sealed into the device. Simply opening up such devices can cause the battery to catch fire because of a short circuit resulting from a breach of the separator between its positive and negative parts. Since such batteries have a lifespan of only a few years, customers are forced to replace the entire device in a kind of forced obsolescence.[16]
How can designers of such devices do better? They need to plan disposal and recycling procedures for the devices, even if these plans extend beyond the purview of their firm. It might involve creating new recycling centres if none exist or providing existing ones with the right equipment to safely open up the devices. The designers could also simply design the device such that the batteries can easily be removed, trading off the thinness and weight of the device. However, since it is costly for the device manufacturers to create and equip recycling centres, and since they also profit from forced obsolescence, they have little incentive to remedy the situation. They do not own the existing recycling centres, and hence the increased danger for those workers at the centre from potential fires, or the additional efforts and costs required by the centres to remove the batteries, do not affect them.
Clearly not all the responsibility for the moral status of artefacts fall solely on the designers. Other responsible parties include the manufacturers, other corporations such as the recycling centres in the example, the users and importantly, policymakers and legislators. If the systems approach is extended to consider society-at-large as the system under analysis, policymakers and legislators have the responsibility to ensure that the values that their society hold dear be upheld, through putting in place institutions, infrastructure, equipment, investments, education, training, personnel and regulations to ensure that these values are embedded in product design on an artefactual and on a systems level. Laws, for instance, can be introduced to force device manufacturers to be responsible for any environmental remediation required from the life-cycle usage of its products. Conclusion
Given how closely entwined human life is with technologies and how technological artefacts mediate our moral decisions, designers need to realise the extent of their ethical responsibility when designing artefacts. They need to refuse to design morally bad artefacts to avoid bringing about bad states of affairs which arises from the existence of such artefacts. However, their responsibility does not stop there. For all artefacts, they also need to consider, in their design, values that are important to society. This society may be their immediate society of co-workers or countrymen but may also be all of mankind. Climate change, for instance, may not affect his society of co-workers much since they may already have passed away by the time of the environmental apocalypse but the duty to all man and all lifeforms, including the yet to be born, remains. Designers need to adopt a holistic systems approach, even if aspects of their plans and designs extend beyond their firm. Policymakers and legislators need to get involved, to ensure these values are upheld on a product and societal level.
Bibliography
Franssen, Maarten. “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly… and the Poor: Instrumental and Non-Instrumental Value of Artefacts.” In The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts, edited by Peter Kroes and Peter-Paul Verbeek, 17:213–34. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2014. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-7914-3_12.
Geoffrey, A. Fowler. “The Explosive Problem with Recycling IPads, IPhones and Other Gadgets: They Literally Catch Fire.” Washington Post, 2018. http://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/11/explosive-problem-with-recycling-ipads-iphones-other-gadgets-they-literally-catch-fire/.
“MIL-STD-882E: System Safety.” US Department of Defense Standard Practice, 2012.
NASA Systems Engineering Handbook. Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2016. https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering-handbook.
Sorli, Mikel, and Dragan Stokic. Innovating in Product/Process Development: Gaining Pace in New Product Development. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. “Morality in Design: Design Ethics and the Morality of Technological Artifacts.” In Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture, edited by Peter Kroes, Pieter E. Vermaas, Andrew Light, and Steven A. Moore, 91–103. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2008. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4020-6591-0_7.
[1] Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Morality in Design: Design Ethics and the Morality of Technological Artifacts,” in Philosophy and Design: From Engineering to Architecture, ed. Peter Kroes et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2008), 92, doi: 10.1007/978-1-4020-6591-0_7; my italics.
[2] Ibid., 95. [3] Ibid., 96.
[4] Ibid., 98.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 99.
[7] Ibid., 102.
[8] Since we are discussing design of technical artefacts, the term ‘designer’ refers to engineers, architects, industrial designers and their teams of technical personnel. While I employed the word in the singular, it often takes teams of engineering and technical professionals to design, produce and manufacture a product.
[9] The end-user may or may not differ from the user. The user here refers to the customer, for example the Police which is represented by a staff officer from its Plans or Procurement department. The end-users may then be police officers in the field who will use the finished product.
[10] NASA Systems Engineering Handbook (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2016), 14, https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/nasa-systems-engineering-handbook; Maarten Franssen, “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly… and the Poor: Instrumental and Non-Instrumental Value of Artefacts,” in The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts, ed. Peter Kroes and Peter-Paul Verbeek, vol. 17 (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2014), 224, doi:10.1007/978-94-007-7914-3_12; Mikel Sorli and Dragan Stokic, Innovating in Product/Process Development: Gaining Pace in New Product Development (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 11.
[11] Verbeek, “Morality in Design,” 224.
[12] Ibid., 222.
[13] Ibid., 226.
[14] Ibid., 224.
[15] “MIL-STD-882E: System Safety” (US Department of Defense Standard Practice, 2012), 13.
[16] A. Fowler Geoffrey, “The Explosive Problem with Recycling IPads, IPhones and Other Gadgets: They Literally Catch Fire,” Washington Post, 2018, http://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/11/explosive-problem-with-recycling-ipads-iphones-other-gadgets-they-literally-catch-fire/.
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