The Bicentenary of Technology Assessment

Abstract

My thesis in this paper is that because technology assessment has an irreducible moral component it challenges some rather common assumptions among scientists, moral philosophers, democratic theorists and philosophers of science. Quite apart from my sympathy both with technology assessment in general and with its moral component in particular, I think the challenge to established modes of thought is very wholesome. Philosophers of science would be failing in their ordinary jobs, let alone in their moral responsibilities, if, having noticed the social phenomenon of a resurgence of interest in technology assessment, they refrained from inspecting its repercussions upon the ontological, epistemological and axiological presuppositions of science, especially of political science and of economics.It has sometimes been suggested that technology assessment is a child of the 1960’s, born in North America, weaned in 1972 with the enactment of the Technology Assessment Act by the congress of the U.S.A.