Peter-Paul Verbeek's Moralizing Technology:Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things Pushing some boundaries

摘要

Peter-Paul Verbeek views his book Moralizing Technology: Understanding and designing the morality of things [5] as the beginning of a third turn in the history of modern philosophy of technology. Those who are familiar with Verbeek's philosophy would find it a sequel to his earlier book What Things Do [4]. It was during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century that philosophizing about technology started to turn from historically incoherent notes into an independent field with its own original questions. In that period, as Verbeek has shown in his What Things Do, philosophers such as Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger were concerned about hermeneutic and existential aspects of Technology. The phenomenon of Technology, beyond concrete instances of technological artefacts, was mostly approached as an abstract entity imposing given social and historical orders. Normative judgments about Technology were mostly made on the basis of scenarios that depicted Technology as a great danger to or as a salvation tool for humanity, prescribing a full abandonment or em-bracement of Technology. But then philosophy of technology underwent an empirical turn. From the mid twentieth century up to the end of it phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Don Ihde, instead of giving general normative judgments about the phenomenon of Technology, investigated concrete cases of human-technology relations and the structures through which technologies mediate human perception of the world. On the analytic side, too, and mostly as a continuation of John Searle's philosophy, philosophers of technology tried to approach metaphysical and epistemological aspects of technological artefacts. Some others started developing theories of technological functions and compared them to theories of biological functions. A second turn, known as the ethical turn, in the history of modern philosophy of technology developed in the first decade of the twenty first century and is the dominating trend.