Materializing Morality

TLDR

The script concept, central to STS, explains how technologies prescribe human actions and, by co‑shaping behavior, provide material answers to ethical questions, implying engineers enact ethics through technology. The article applies the script concept normatively to explore how engineering ethics can be enacted through technology and to develop methods for anticipating mediation in design. The authors extend the script concept with technological mediation and propose mediation analyses and an augmented constructive technology assessment to anticipate moral implications during design.

Abstract

During the past decade, the “script” concept, indicating how technologies prescribe human actions, has acquired a central place in STS. Until now, the concept has mainly functioned in descriptive settings. This article will deploy it in a normative setting. When technologies coshape human actions, they give material answers to the ethical question of how to act. This implies that engineers are doing “ethics by other means”: they materialize morality. The article will explore the implications of this insight for engineering ethics. It first augments the script concept by developing the notion of technological mediation. After this, it investigates how the concept of mediation could be made fruitful for design ethics. It discusses how the ambition to design behaviorinfluencing technologies raises moral questions itself and elaborates two methods for anticipating technological mediation in the design process: performing mediation analyses and using an augmented version of constructive technology assessment.