Moralizing Technology and the Ethics of Things | Peter-Paul Verbeek

The idea that I would like to share with you today here is the ethics of things. That there can be an ethics in things. That's actually a very counterintuitive idea, right? I mean ethics is something humans do. We need freedom and intentions to do ethics. Things don't have freedom, don't have intentions. So how could you possibly think in ethical terms about things? So I think it's very important to do that. Not only because it's philosophically interesting, but also because it can really inspire the design of better things. To take some form of responsibility for the influence of technology in society. To make the point, I think it's good to start with the work of Hans Achterhuis, my mentor and teacher, who already in 1992 wrote an article called The Moralization of Devices. In the article he was speaking about moralization, about the permanent pressure that we have to make ethical choices in our lives. Actually he said let's stop moralizing each other and let's start moralizing things. Because if you need to think all the time about how long you can shower, if you need to slow down on the road if there's fog on the road, etc. If you need to think about it all the time, then ultimately the pressure will be just too high. Let's delegate or outsource part of our ethics to things. So why not have an intelligent speed adaptation system in cars that slows down your car if there's fog on the road. We all know we should do it. Many people fail to do it and there are many accidents every year. Why not have a water-saving showerhead, a speed bump on the road near a school to make people slow down if there are kids on the street, etc. So Hans Achterhuis really wanted to put ethics into things. And that actually caused a lot of resistance. People really felt, okay, this is going back to technocracy. Here illustrated with the image of modern times, Charlie Chaplin, the machines taking over. Hans Achterhuis was accused of giving up on human freedom, on technology, the machines to be the boss of society as it were, rather than human beings. I think that whole idea that ethics is ultimately only about autonomy, that we need somehow to defend human beings against technologies, I think is an idea that we should really somehow get rid of in our thinking. Because that idea of autonomy as the sole and most important thing to keep in mind when designing things, when thinking about things, is a major impediment, a major obstacle to think in a deeper way about the ethics of things. Still, it's a very influential idea. If you look at current attempts to think about the ethics of things, many approaches that are now trying to design ethics into things also will have autonomy as a starting point. Persuasive technology, for instance, BJ Fox's big project at Stanford, is all focusing on designing information technologies that persuade people to change their behavior by having an intelligent interaction with how people behave. But the most important thing in ethical terms there is that the persuasions are transparent, that people know that they are persuaded in order to keep up their freedom. Or the nudge approach, which is currently also quite influential. Nudging is the idea that you actually can give people a specific push in a certain direction in order to change their behavior. Taylor and Sonsheim are two theorists in the US who have developed this idea. And the whole idea of nudging is that we need to design the material infrastructure of our world in which we make choices. Choices take place, they say, in a choice architecture. For instance, if a photocopying machine has as a default setting to make single-sided copies, more people will make single-sided copies. If the default setting is double-sided, more people will make double-sided copies. Thinking better about this choice infrastructure is a task for designers, they say. And that means that they actually defend some kind of paternalism. We should actually design the right choices in our things. But not too much, they say. It should be a libertarian form of paternalism. Libertarian because they want to keep up freedom. There should always be an opt-out. There should always be a possibility for people to step out of the influences being exerted upon them. So autonomy is really a central thing in the ethics of things. So how to deal with that idea of the ethics of things, then? I think what we should do is to solve somehow this blackmail of autonomy, as you could call it, with a nod to Foucault. The blackmail of autonomy, by that I mean that there is some kind of idea that whoever questions the relevance or the importance of the concept of autonomy is immediately accused of being against freedom or against the human being. Of course I'm not against freedom. But I think it's really in the service of design, in the service of people, to move beyond the idea of autonomy. So how to get rid of this fear for autonomy? I think I should take us into a short psychotherapy, having some ideas of Freud to help us here. Of course I will not take you into a psychoanalysis, but I want to discuss with you very briefly the ideas that Freud had about our narcissistic self-image. And maybe we need to have a bit more humble idea of who we are. Freud explained that the sciences might give us the idea that we are very special, very important, but at the same time they make us feel more humble. Like, for instance, Copernicus, who showed that not everything is somehow rotating around the earth, but the earth is rotating around the Sun. The first blow to our narcissistic self-image. The second one was by Darwin, who showed that we actually might be as close, at least as close, to the apes as we are to God. And he himself gave the third blow, he said, claiming that what we see as our self, our person, is actually only a form of resistance against a lot of things deep inside us that we don't even dare to look straight into the eyes. Maybe technology should be accepted as the fourth blow to our narcissistic self-image. The fourth blow, in the sense that technology is also, well, a reason for us to think in a more humble way about our autonomy. And in order to explain that to you, I would like to discuss with you that idea of the morality of things. I think there are good reasons to claim that there is ethics in things. And that, actually, for people who really believe in autonomy, is maybe the worst thing to claim. I mean, if the machines help to shape our ethics, then we are lost, right? We are the ones who determine what's good and what's bad. If technology is going to tell us that what could remain of humanity and human dignity. Still, I think, if you look carefully at some technologies around us, that the idea is actually quite common. That might help us to take those ideas very seriously. For instance, the coin lock in a supermarket cart. A very mundane technology which embodies a clear norm. That the norm returned the cart to the place where you got it when you started to do your shopping. Of course, the price of the thing is much higher than the 50 euro cents we need to put into it. It's kind of a nudge. You don't buy it for the 50 cents. There's a norm embodied in that you return the cart to the place where you got it. There can also be values in things. For instance, if you look at the design of shaving devices, there's a clear difference between many lady shaves and shaving devices for men. If you own this lady shave and it breaks down, there's no way to open it. There are no screws. They're sealed. So, apparently, if a woman has a problem with her device, she's not supposed to be interested in or capable of opening her device. Men, to the contrary, typically get some kind of an exploded view with their technology. Also, if they're lucky, some kind of a little tool box with a screwdriver to open it and a brush to do some maintenance. That's a completely different idea of masculinity and femininity in the very design of these technologies. So, there are values embedded in technologies too. Another example. Technologies can actually also play a profound role in our moral decisions, in the frameworks on the basis of which we make choices. A very nice example of this, I borrow from Annemarie Moll, a Dutch anthropologist and philosopher. That example is the anti-conceptive pill. Annemarie once made a very interesting analysis of the role of the anti-conceptive pill in liberation. She said, obviously, it played a huge role in the liberation of women because since we have the anti-conceptive pill, not only men but also women can enjoy sex without having to have the burden and to run the risk to get a child from it. But much more importantly, or at least as important, she claims, is the role of the pill in the liberation of homosexuals. Which is a counterintuitive idea, of course, because homosexuals don't need the pill. But in a sense, that's part of the argumentation because the interesting point that she makes is that until the large-scale introduction of the pill in the 1960s, a rather self-evident argument against homosexuality was that it was unnatural or strange or weird to have sex with somebody with whom you could never get a child. But of course, since we have the pill, we completely disconnected, well not completely, we still have to have sex to get a child, still, but we disconnected sexuality and human reproduction. So against that background, apparently, we have changed our ideas of what ethics is and about how to do ethics. Which is a big thing, I think. So what we need to do, I think, is to develop a different approach to the relations between humans and technology. Not dividing the world into categories, the subjects and the objects, and the subjects have freedom and intentions and the objects are dead and mute and at best instruments for humans to realize their intentions. There is more technology in us than we think. We are fundamentally technologically mediated beings. I think that insight, that technological mediation is somehow the basis of our existence, is a very, very important insight in our world. And you can borrow those ideas and deepen them from studying the work of Don Eide, a North American philosopher of technology, who had this post-phenomenological approach to technology, where technology is not seen as something opposed to the human being. The technology is kind of a medium for how we live our lives, a medium for experience, a medium for action. Technologies are mediated. So rather than seeing the human being as an autonomous being, he sees the human being as a fundamentally technologically mediated being. So, having blurred the boundaries between humans and technology is a bit then what remains of the ethics of design. Because two major obstacles occur now to keep up that idea of autonomy as the most central value to keep in mind when designing behavior influencing technologies. First of all, the theory of mediation shows that any design, whether you want it or not, does have an impact on human behavior. There is no way to get around an impact. So autonomy in that sense is a fiction. We only have mediated actions, mediated perception. Any technology you design will have some kind of an impact. It will not only be functional, but it will help to shape how people live their lives. Secondly, the moral frameworks from which we assess these mediations themselves are also mediated by technologies. There is no outside place from which we can assess a technology in terms of if it's good or bad. So that's a very central insight and we should take that to the design of technology. The ethics of design should then not only be by the question are we allowed or are we not allowed to influence the behavior of people. The question is more how do we give a good shape to this influence. And a major source of inspiration for me there is the work of Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault, a French thinker, has developed a lot of ethical thoughts in his last two books just before he died. Most people know him of the philosopher as thinking about power, power relations and the overwhelming powers in society. But his last two books are about the ethics of dealing with power. And those ideas I developed with Steven Dorstein, a design thinker here from Twente. Those ideas that he developed can be very nicely applied to technological mediation. The core idea of Foucault is that we should not somehow oppose power, but that we should see power as the foundations of our existence. Power is the basis for the way in which we live our lives. So ethics is not about getting rid of power, but about entering into a productive interaction with power. It results in an ethics that does not step outside of the situation you want to assess. I have a normative framework in your hand and say that this is what we should do, this is what we should not do. It's an ethics from within. Within the situation you try to make a judgment. You take seriously that even your moral framework is mediated by technologies and you try to arrange the framework itself. That results in a completely different idea of ethics. The major concept that Foucault developed to explain that idea is the technologies of the self, which is already a very nice combination of subject and object, technology and self. So he says ethics is not about getting rid of power, or in my words of mediation, it's about finding a productive interaction with power, shaping yourself in interaction with these mediations. So it's shaping yourself, designing yourself. And that has two dimensions, you could say, if you think about the interaction between humans and technologies. The first one is the dimension of use. Foucault there speaks about subjectivation. It's interesting, you hear an echo of the word subjection. You subject yourself to the powers in order to become a subject. And it's not a passive subjection, and you're the victim of technology. It's an active and critical way of doing that. If you have an ultrasound scan made of your unborn child, you can just see that as a fact that happens. But you can also try to understand what that ultrasound scan is doing to the way in which you experience your unborn child. How you suddenly become responsible for diseases that your child could get. How you become a new parent, not only expecting, but also having to choose about the life of your unborn child. How your unborn child becomes a potential patient. Seeing that, understanding that, is part of the technologies of the self. But most importantly, I think, it also helps us to design technologies, to design morality in technology. And that is, in a sense, quite a big step. And the idea that we can design ethics in technology is not a very self-evident thing to do. Still, I think we need to do that. Not only because, well, as I said, there is no way to get around all these mediations, but especially because it's very important to take seriously how we can have this interaction, this free interaction with technology. So the most important thing to keep in mind is that if you influence people's behavior with technology, it's not about saving autonomy against the impact of technology. It's all about how to deal with that impact. So many people would feel that autonomy needs to be saved, but actually the influence that technologies can have upon us are not only about overpowering us. And the work that Niki Tromp did with Paul Hekater and myself in Delft and in Twente, very nicely shows that. That actually you can say that there are at least four types of influence that the technology can have on human beings. First of all, you have a dimension of the visibility of the impact. And second, you have a dimension of, you could say, the force of the impact. So you have highly visible and highly influential impacts. So then you speak about coercion, an automatic speed limiter in cars, a system that makes cars slow down when they're on the road. But a persuasive technology is highly visible, but has a weak impact. It gives you an advice to do something, a system in primary schools that gives children a signal if they forget to wash their hands after using the toilet. They don't need to do that. It becomes more scary for many people, I think, if the impact is more hidden. So for instance, you can have hidden and strong impacts, like designing a building without an elevator. So the people have to use the stairs and they exercise more. That can be a deliberate intention of a designer without people being aware of that. There are also hidden weak impacts. A seduction, you could say, helping to seduce people to do something. So for instance, I've been working for a while with a group of industrial designers who try to design for sustainability. And their core idea was that actually they should help people to get more attachment to the things that they use. But the main problem, they said, in our environmental crisis is that we throw away our stuff way too soon, long before they're actually worn out. So how could we make sure that people get more attachment to those things? One of the things that they designed, for instance, Sigrid Smits did that at Eindhoven University. She designed the upholstery for a couch, which is actually a two-layer upholstery, where the top layer, when it wears out, shows the second layer. So actually, that couch has a second skin. It gets younger by getting older, it gets newer by getting older. Which, of course, is not a way to force people to keep that couch. But it's a way that seduces people to stay attached to it, even when it gets older. I think if we open our minds for ideas like this, the whole idea of autonomy becomes less and less important. Of course, we should not choose against freedom. But basically, I think all the values that we have, that we find so important in our culture, we can still install if we give up the idea that we need to protect humans against the impact of technology. It's rather finding a good way of dealing with it. So I hope that designers can replace the word autonomy with the word mediation. And that they can foster in their work the ways in which people can appropriate these mediations, in which people can develop technologies of the self and, well, enter into practice of shaping their existence in interaction with technology. And most of all, I hope that they can actively engage in the moralization of technology. Because if there's one thing, I think that we can learn from the idea that there's an ethics of things, that designing is actually doing ethics, but by other means.