IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2017 - 87

The eradication of certain technologies on moral grounds will lead to
better outcomes, but this can occur
only if those technologies are held
to bear responsibility for those outcomes. If we continue to conclude
that all technologies are beyond
moral accountability, and that only
humans are morally responsible for
bad outcomes, the technologies that
might otherwise be eradicated will
continue to threaten and cause tragedy, and technologies that might otherwise be rehabilitated will continue
to cause nuisance and accident.
But to make decisions about
which technologies are to be eradicated, a nd why, a nd how, a nd
which are to be rehabilitated, and
why, and how, requires a mode of
technology assessment capable
of reaching these decisions. To
allow that technologies are legitimate subjects of moral assessment
alters the grounds for assessment in
ways that allow this. While considered
beyond the ken of moral assess-

OpiniOn

ment, technologies may be judged
only in instrumental terms. They
may be held to be inefficient, inaccurate, slow, costly, cumbersome
to use, and so on. But surely these
are inadequate yardsticks to use to
get the full measure of these powerful actors? An assessment of the
actions of technologies that is limited to questions of accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness, or cost, does
not begin to come to grips with
their significance as actors, and
falls far short of exhausting their
implications. To draw on concepts
from the moral domain is to assess
their actions within an appropriate
framework. Right and wrong, virtue and wickedness, good and bad,
are yardsticks by which we can
more meaningfully comment upon
the actions of cluster bombs, CF2
spray, or automated spam. A position at the intersection of moral
axes provides a more meaningful
conceptual context, and provides a
more appropriate language for the

assessment of technologies than a
position on instrumental axes. Only
in a moral context can the actions of
technologies be assessed with appropriate conceptual tools, and with
appropriate power and authority.

Author Information
Michael Arnold is with the School of
Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Christopher Pearce is with the
School of Medicine, Dentistry and
Health Sciences, the University of
Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.

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

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

(continued from page 35)

The election of Donald Trump
as President of the United States,
with the help of Russian hackers
and boatloads of blatantly deceptive
"news" on the Internet, is a case in
point. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
initially called accusations that fake
news influenced the election "a
pretty crazy idea" - but eventually
conceded that maybe it wasn't such
a crazy idea after all. The denial of
a former software engineer for TwitJune 2017

ter cracked more quickly. "For my @
twitter alum friends," he tweeted the
day after Trump's victory, "What did
we build?"
Dystopian works of science fiction
are, for these reasons, an expression
not only of understandable anxiety
but of appropriate concern. They
could, if taken seriously, serve as
petitions for restraint. Unfortunately,
as exercises in fiction and entertainment, they are too easily dismissed,
∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

overshadowed by the real-world temptations of technological power. Would
that the risks they foresee were taken
more to heart. To paraphrase the wisdom of one of my favorite bumper
stickers: "If you're not worried, you're
not paying attention."

Author Information
Doug Hill is the author of Not So Fast:
Thinking Twice About Technology.

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