Solicitude, Emotions, and Narrative in Technology Design Ethics

Abstract

The first objective of this paper is to recognize the role of emotion and feeling in Ricœur’s “little ethics” and what they can further add to it, then to explore in more detail how solicitude as a virtue, and affective disposition more broadly, can contribute to a modern ethics of technology. Ultimately, emotions help us to understand technologies and technological ways of being today; Ricœur’s “little ethics”, along with his narrative theory, provide a framework for understanding the ethically salient aspects of technical practice, especially through the openness to the other demanded by solicitude, and essentially by emphasising emotion or feeling as a way of being in the world, and a mode of existence: one which is done with, if not sometimes because of, technology and technical practice.