21 June 2023. Technology | Visioning
The effects of technology on social morality // Images of the future [#469]
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1: The effects of technology on social morality
How does technology change social morality? There’s an interesting if academic paper at the journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice that proposes a taxonomy of how this happens in practice. It is written by the academics John Danaher and Henrik Skaug Saertra.
Their taxonomy suggests six ways in which this happens.
It’s a long and detailed piece, and each of the elements of the taxonomy are described over a couple of pages or more, so I’m going to do no more than scratch the surface of the full article (which is outside of the Springer paywall) in this account.
Of course, six things are too many to take in all at once, since our short-term memory can only hold three-to-four things—but somewhere near the end of the article they break them into three different types. I’m going to pull these three types up to the top here.
The three types are (I’ve added the descriptive letters)
Type A (“decisional”), which are about the impact of technology on decisions. (See mechanisms 1 and 2)
Type B (“relational”) changes social relations, and covers Mechanisms 3-5.
Type C (“perceptual) is about changing perception: “new information, data, mental models and metaphors”. It covers Mechanism 6,
It’s also worth noting that in setting up their discussion, they limit their model of technology as follows:
we assume that technologies are, primarily, material artifacts created by humans to assist with means-ends processes... Technology, so understood, plays a key role in mediating the relationship between humans and the world around them.
A: Decisional
1. Technology Changes Option Sets
The first technology-driven mechanism of moral change is, perhaps, the most obvious: technology changes option sets. (But) it is not always a simple case of adding more options. Adding options for some people can come at the expense options for others. So the net effect of adding technologically mediated options is not straightforward.
Their example: the smartphone adds options to our lives. We can play games on the bus instead of reading the newspaper—but we can still catch up with the news if we want to. We also have “the option of endless online distraction.”
Does it take away options? To some extent, they say, but they don’t spend much time on this argument. I’d have though it deserved a little more discussion than they give it. One of the McLuhan’s four ‘laws’ was that a technology always obsolesces some capability, which implies a reduction in options—sometimes in the options of less well-resourced members of society.
2. Technology Changes Decision-Making Costs
This is related to the first one.
‘Costs’ here must be interpreted broadly to include both the effort and exertion involved in exercising an option, as well as the practical, economic, and moral costs this might entail (costs to values, personal integrity and so forth). By changing costs, technology can make it both harder and easier to (a) access certain values and (b) do the right thing.
They draw here on Isaiah Berlin’s notion of options as ‘doors’ which may be available to us; but it matters how easy they are to open, who has access and so on.
The technology they discuss here is the impact of cheap and effective contraception on extra-marital sex. In summary, it reduced the unwanted effects of extra-marital sex (typically: pregnancy outside of marriage), and made the potential benefits (pleasure, sexual intimacy etc) more available. In many countries, as a result, extra-marital sex is now widely accepted. It is an ethics paper, and so is focussed on morality, but cheap effective contraception also changes the nature of sex within marriage as well, and this effect may be more important.
(Family planning mural in China. Photo by Clpro2/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)
B: Relational
3. Technology Enables New Relationships
Transport and communications technologies make possible human relationships that were previously not possible, because we were unable to make contact with people who were further away. And it might also make possible non-human relationships as well. But:
New relationships are potential sources of value and harm. We have to figure out which is the case.
The discussion here seems to focus on new relationship partners, which seems narrow to me. Technology can also enable different friendships, and therefore may also lead to broader cross-cultural views of morality.
4. Technology Changes the Burdens and Expectations Within Relationships
(T)his mechanism gets to the core of the relational nature of morality. Much of human activity is collaborative in nature. We work together to achieve common ends... This is true in the family, at work and in politics. In order for this collaborative activity to work, people have to know what is expected of them and what they can expect from others.
One example of this in the article is the diffusion of washing machines and other household devices, which reduced the amount of time women spent maintaining households, and allowed them to consider work outside of the home.
5. Technologies Change the Balance of Power Within Relationships
This can be seen as an extension of Mechanism 4, although the authors talk more here about the balance of power in working relationships and elsewhere. Digital technologies, for example, have evened up the balance of power between car salespeople and car buyers by spreading information. Surveillance technologies have increased the power of states, and state agencies, but they have also enabled citizens to record abuses of power in ways that were not previously possible.
C: Perceptual
6. Technology Changes Moral Perception
To have an effect on morality, technology must have an effect on how we see the world. This is, as they say, “trivially true”. But technology also gives us access to new or different information, and may also change our mental models and our worldviews. One striking example—they quote the work of Verbeek here—is about pre-natal ultrasound scans:
By revealing the unborn in terms of variables that mark its health condition, like the fold in the nape of the neck of the fetus, ultrasound ‘translates’ the unborn child into a possible patient, congenital diseases into preventable forms of suffering (pro- vided that abortion is an available option) and expecting a child into choosing for a child.
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Of course, this is all quite a tidy summary, as they acknowledge in the article. But the way in which these changes manifest themselves is more complex. Some of the mechanisms may layer on top of each other; some may interact (although this may mean it isn’t actually a taxonomy). The taxonomy deals largely with first order effects, but technologies will have second and third order effects (and these will also play out over time).
In terms of levels, they describe a ‘micro’, ‘meso’ and ‘macro’ framework, which I have used a version of in the past when scanning for change:
Some moral changes first occur in individuals, as they start thinking differently about what is right, wrong, valuable, not valuable and so on. This is the micro level. Other changes occur in, for example, organizations, as technology leads to changes in metaphors and the logic by which they approach human beings... This is the meso level. Finally, the macro level could relate to changes in power relations, and particularly how constitutive power—the power to change what people are and become—relates to technology.
But all of this seems like valuable thinking to me. So much of the effects of technologies are contextual—about the way they play out in social norms, in different business models, in how we are willing to organise society—that anything that allows us to add some depth to this is welcome.
2: Images of the future
I was at a workshop in Cambridge this week, called ‘People and Patterns”, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The workshop was designed by Sarah Woods and Paul Ingram, as part of a research project that is trying to combine narrative and systems to develop new approaches to thinking about risk. It’s a new project—it’s been running since January 2023–and this was a pilot workshop to test some thinking. I was asked to contribute some remarks on the role of positive images of the future to the group, which had a very diverse range of backgrounds. This is a version of what I said.
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The post-war history of futures can be imagined as a kind of double helix, with two strands wrapped around it. The first strand is positivist and analytical, and built around forecasting, and came out of RAND and SRI in the United States, funded by the Department of Defense. The second strand is normative and more intuitive, and more aligned with visioning, and it emerged in Europe before migrating later to the Pacific—in Australia, Hawai’i, and Tapei.
The book that exemplifies the second strand was written in the early 1950s by Fred Polak, a Dutchman who lived through the second world war and the destruction it wrought on his homeland. Polak was Jewish, and had had spent some of the war in hiding. That book is The Image of the Future, and the money quote in that book goes as follows:
“The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive.”
There’s a thread that runs from Polak to a whole group of futurists who belong to that second strand. We have an English version of Polak’s book because the Quaker and peace activist Elise Boulding taught herself Dutch so that she could translate it. In her own work, collaborating with Warren Ziegler, she ran workshops that asked people to imagine a world without weapons.
Jim Dator, in Hawai’i, also developed the ideas in Polak’s book. Even if we have no future facts, he said, we all have images of the future, and part of the task of futures is to make this process less unconscious and more conscious. His work suggests that when you look across the images of the future in dozens of scenarios sets, there are four dominant image archetypes. These are Growth, Discipline, Collapse, and Transformation.
Why does this matter? Well, Robert Jungk, who spent his life trying to reclaim futures from political and economic elites, tells a story about working with some German young people, selected through a competition run by a German television station. They were, he was told, “deeply pessimistic”. And yet, when he worked with them through his ‘future workshops’ process, the images they produced of the future were much more positive and much more hopeful.
He asked them to explain why this was. One of the youngsters replied:
“It’s obvious. In the competition we were asked what kind of future we expected. Here, we were asked what kind of future we want.”
All of these examples come from the deeper history of futures, so I’d like to bring it up to date for a moment. I’m a big fan of the ‘seeds of change’ approach, developed by the Good Anthropocene Project in Southern Africa. That starts with weak signals of positive change and asks people to imagine what the world would be like if that idea was completely mainstream.
As Rebecca Solnit says in lovely book Hope in the Dark: “What we dream of is already present in the world.” The academic Ruth Levitas might describe this as being about utopia as a form of desire. What this is about—what all of this is about—is lifting the weight of the present off our shoulders, for long enough that we can look up and look out.
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There is a post-script to this: One of the other workshop participants was concerned that my emphasis on positive visions of the future was part of what he called a trend of “toxic positivity”. Wikipedia defines toxic positivity like this:
Toxic positivity is a "pressure to stay upbeat no matter how dire one's circumstance is", which may prevent emotional coping by feeling otherwise natural emotions.
So it’s probably worth a moment of clarification. The best strategic foresight work needs to be brutally honest about the structural and other conditions in which we attempt to make our futures. Misquoting Marx: we make our own futures, but not under the conditions of our own choosing.
But the purpose of creating positive images of the future as part of this work is two-fold. The first is that it generates just enough space for us to imagine that some change for the better is possible. The second is that without being able to imagine a different possible future, we have no space for agency.
This connects to a bigger and longer story: much of the forecasting and planning-focussed futures work in ‘Strand 1’ explicitly believed that it wasn’t the purpose of futures work to try to influence the future. I don’t have time to dive into the reasons for that here, but the effect of this is to take power out of the discussion of the future.
Update: deep sea mining
I wrote about deep-sea mining on Monday. Readers might have deduced that I am not a fan. My son sent me a link to a Greenpeace petition opposing deep-sea mining. The page also comes with a much more detailed map of the ‘Clapton-Clipperton Zone, which the state of Nauru is seeking a permit to mine with a Canadian business partner.
j2t#469
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