title: When technologies makes good people do bad things: another argument against the value-neutrality of technologies.
abstract: Although many scientists and engineers insist that technologies are value-neutral, philosophers of technology have long argued that they are wrong. In this paper, I introduce a new argument against the claim that technologies are value-neutral. This argument complements and extends, rather than replaces, existing arguments against value-neutrality. I formulate the Value-Neutrality Thesis, roughly, as the claim that a technological innovation can have bad effects, on balance, only if its users have "vicious" or condemnable preferences. After sketching a microeconomic model for explaining or predicting a technology's impact on individuals' behavior, I argue that a particular technological innovation can create or exacerbate collective action problems, even in the absence of vicious preferences. Technologies do this by increasing the net utility of refusing to cooperate. I also argue that a particular technological innovation can induce short-sighted behavior because of humans' tendency to discount future benefits too steeply. I suggest some possible extensions of my microeconomic model of technological impacts. These extensions would enable philosophers of technology to consider agents with mixed motives-i.e., agents who harbor some vicious preferences but also some aversion to acting on them-and to apply the model to questions about the professional responsibilities of engineers, scientists, and other inventors.
authors: Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 900 13th Street South, Birmingham, AL, 35294, USA, davidmorrow@uab.edu.
authors: David R
authors: DR
authors: Morrow
mesh_terms: D004738:Engineering; D006801:Humans; D009014:Morals; D009042:Motivation; D012586:Science; D012919:Social Behavior; D012941:Social Responsibility; D012945:Social Values; D013672:Technology / Q000941:ethics*
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