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term - the technology acts with us,
it performs actions in the world that
are part and parcel of the processes
and outcomes of human action and
human agency. In so much as the
technology acts in this weak sense,
it might be held to account for its
actions against instrumental criteria, which compare the technology's
actions with human will for instrumental action. Where human will or
human purposes are not faithfully
executed by the actions of a technology, the technology might be held
to be deficient in some way - to be
slow, inefficient, faulty, costly, error
prone, difficult to use, and so forth.
The more interesting question
is whether a stronger claim can
be made about the actions of the
technology, and about the agency of technology, which better
represents its role and its place
in our considerations.
A phenomenological approach
to the relation between humans and
artefacts supports such a stronger
claim. In accordance with this stronger
claim, the technology not only acts
to materialize the will of the operator and/or the designer, and in so acting, satisfies the weak claim, it goes
beyond this to recognize that human
will does not exhaust an explanation
of the actions of the human and the
technology in consort. That is, the
technology does not act to materialize
human will in a faithful and entirely
mechanistic way. Technologies are
not passive instruments that merely
express human desires and actions.
Rather, the technology in question
mediates the will of the designer, the
manufacturer and the operator, and
thus expresses its own agency.
This notion of mediation captures
the detours, the compromises, the
extended capacities, the constraints,
the shifts in priorities, the altered
methods, the new points of focus, the
new objectives, the changed criteria,
and all manner of other alterations to
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will that occur when one negotiates
action in partnership with another.
When a human uses a technology,
neither are passive instruments of
the other and the actions that occur
are negotiated in a dance of reciprocal accommodation and resistance.
Neither act in response to independent will. All acts are mediated.
When, for example, a computer
system acts to receive and store an
updated patient record in a medical
doctor's computer system, the computer system is not simply acting in
faithful and mechanistic obeisance to
the doctor's will, any more than it is
acting autonomously, in and of itself.
Rather, by requiring data in a certain
format, by requiring that certain fields
be filled, by limiting the format and
length of that data, by requiring that
certain buttons be clicked in a certain
order, by requiring that the doctor
sit in a certain position to see the
screen and attend to certain things
on the screen, the actions of the computer can be understood as mediating the doctor's relation to the patient
record (an electronic representation
of the patient) and as mediating the
consultation process. The doctor and
the computer system thus work their
way through the consultation in consort. Some tasks are completed more
or less autonomously by computer
or doctor, depending on respective
competencies, whilst most tasks are
completed together, each delegated
particular responsibilities towards the
task as a whole, according to respective competencies. In each case the
computer system acts to shape the
consultation.
To counter this argument it may
be suggested that it is not the computer system that is acting in the
performance of the consultation, but
rather, that it is the programmer who
wrote the software, or the IT company that manufactures the doctor's
system, or some other humans further back in the chain. But this claim
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doesn't undermine the argument; it
merely shifts it to another example,
where the argument still applies. Just
as the technology used by the doctor in the consultation does more
than passively express the will of the
doctor, so the technology used by
the programmer in the construction
of the doctor's system does more
than passively express the will of
the programmer, and so on, all the
way upstream. Neither the doctor's
technologies, nor the programmer's
technologies, nor the IT company's
technologies are passive and faithful
extensions of human will and human
action; all technologies act to a greater or lesser extent to mediate human
action and human will, and to this
extent express their own agency.
But even if one is prepared to concede that technologies are not passive instruments and do act, we are
still a long way from concluding that
technologies can be held to moral
account for their actions. To support
this conclusion we need to refute
the proposition that although technologies act, they act as mere tools
or "dumb instruments" in our hands.
This task will be taken up in Part Four.

Author Information
Michael Arnold is with the School of
Historical and Philosophical Studies,
University of Melbourne, Australia.
Email: mvarnold@unimelb.edu.au.
Christopher Pearce is with the
School of Medicine, Dentistry and
Health Sciences, the University of
Melbourne, Australia.

Acknowledgment
This series of short papers is a
heavily revised version of an earlier
publication [1].

Reference
[1] M. Arnold and C. Pearce, "Is technology innocent? Holding technologies to moral account,"
IEEE Technology and Society Mag., vol. 27,
no. 2, pp. 44-50, 2008.

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