Material morality: towards a posthumanist ethics of technology

Abstract

Morality is commonly understood to consist of the values, norms, and habits that are taken to be self-evident in a specific group of people. In daily life, morality is thought to come forward in people’s judgments, their expressions of praise and blame, but their morality can also remain implicit in what people think they have to do, what it is worthwhile to strive for, their feelings of achievement and satisfaction, and their sense of shame, guilt, regret or uneasiness about how things are going. Ethics, by contrast, is taken to be a reflective discipline about this morality of people. Ethics investigates morality and asks what the meaning of our moral judgments actually is, what they are about, and how we can justify them or find out that something should be changed. What comes forward in these presuppositions is that in the most common understandings, morality and ethics figure as distinctively human affairs. This humanist understanding of ethics is a heritage of our Enlightenment past, in which modern sciences were construed on the basis of an ontological distinction between subjects and objects which also influenced the most influential approaches to ethics that were formed during that period. A Kantian deontologist ethics focuses on the subject as a source of ethics, making autonomous choice the source of moral agency. Utilitarian consequentialist ethics, such as Jeremy Bentham proposed, shapes ethics according to a scientific model. By means of an analogy between the meaning of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and experiences of pain and pleasure, Bentham gave moral judgments a basis in experiences of the objective world. In view of this past, it is unsurprising that ethical reflections on technology have most commonly focused on human beings as well. Ethics of technology was just a variation of applied ethics—biomedical ethics, ethics of information technology, ethics of nanotechnology—which investigate specific problems that technologies