A post by Char Brecevic

This past summer, I taught a course on technology and innovation ethics at the University of Notre Dame. To my surprise, many of my students proved to be staunch technological determinists. According to these students, humans may be the creators of technologies, but their fate is ultimately controlled by their creations. We have little say in what technologies we develop, how we design them, and where they get applied. To make matters worse, although not unexpected given their determinist leanings, many students seemed fairly unconcerned about the lack of democratic deliberation in these various decision-making processes.

I had hoped that discussing nuanced accounts of responsibility in the innovation ethics literature (e.g., Grinbaum & Groves 2013; Vallor 2016; Ladd 1991) would help shine a light on how these young people might chart a new course—one marked by mindful, intentional, and answerable approaches to technological innovation. I was also hoping that the need for identifying key stakeholders and allowing them to take their rightful seats at the proverbial table would become readily apparent. The result was largely underwhelming. Perhaps the readings were a tad too long to hold an undergraduate’s attention. Perhaps the beautiful summer weather made it difficult to fully appreciate the import of what we were discussing. Or, perhaps, I needed a new pedagogical vantage point from which to make sense of my students’ seemingly apathetic and unfazed response to the mounting ethical challenges we humans face in our increasingly technologized environments.

Starting from the final hypothesis, my intent in this short piece is to offer a humble reflection rather than a declarative proposal concerning how educators working in this area ought to proceed. Serendipitously, I recently found myself crossing intellectual paths with John Dewey, and this encounter made me realize that he might have some valuable insight for educators, like me, who are hoping to change the hearts and minds of our future scientists, engineers, and innovators. Put very simply, I read Dewey as suggesting that the pedagogical obstacle at play is not one concerning the content of assigned readings, disciplinary differences among enrolled students, or general indifference. Rather, the obstacle is an imaginative one.   

Imaginative activity plays a critical role in John Dewey’s political philosophy. Imaginative capacities are needed to achieve the critical awareness, intellectual flexibility, and cooperativity required for a flourishing democracy. Given the foundational role of imagination in inquiry, more generally, Dewey also understands imaginative activity to be deeply relevant for practicing scientists and innovators. In Deweyan terms, cultivating the capacity for imaginative activity among all citizens, including scientists and innovators, is essential for establishing and preserving a just democratic society. There are many reasons for this, but for the sake of brevity, I will home in on one in particular: the failure to control one’s imaginative attention in matters of science and technology often results in considerable moral harm.

In matters of science and technology, Dewey argues that failing to use one’s imagination effectively has serious moral costs. As a result of the advancement of science and technology,

man [sic] has suffered the impact of an enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any corresponding ability to control himself and his own affairs. Knowledge divided against itself, a science to whose incompleteness is added an artificial split, has played its part in generating enslavement of men, women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to tend inanimate machines. It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and discontented careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives and noxious gases in times of war. Man [sic], a child in understanding of himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power. He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is largely a matter of accident” (1927 [2016], 201, added emphasis).

 While comparing humans engaged with matters of science and technology to children may seem to be little more than an insult, I believe Dewey is intending to say something far more profound—namely, that scientists, engineers, and users of technologies who fail to direct their activities toward human needs act like children who are incapable of controlling the trajectory of their imagination for ends beyond the imaginative act itself.

In his work on mental development, Dewey argues that the thinking of both adults and children relies on imagination—where imagination is broadly defined as mentally representing a certain state of affairs that does not presently hold in a mind-independent way. However, unlike adults, children are unable to distinguish between imaginative situations and the non-imagined situation before them, for the former fully absorbs their attention and is, at the moment, “the only reality in existence” (Dewey 1899 [1976], 200). While imaginative activities typically serve an external and instrumental purpose for adults, children’s “interest is wholly inside the activity itself” (Dewey 1899 [1976], 200). Consequently,

the child conceives and executes that which represents objects, not as they are in themselves, or in their relations to each other, but as they are in relation to his own dominant interests. He conceives things not as part of an external world, but as elements in a sort of drama. His standard for judging size, proportion, material composition and structure is his own activity of interest” (Dewey 1899 [1976], 200, added emphasis).

This is precisely why, for example, children often draw birds that are larger than the trees in which they live. Their aim is not to mimetically reproduce the world as it is, but to exemplify those features that dominate the imaginative vision in which they currently find themselves immersed. Children are fully immersed in their imaginative worlds. They do not stop and decide whether or not they should pursue one imaginative scenario as opposed to another. The imagination is beyond the control of the child, which leaves its contents susceptible to the guiding force of external factors rather than deliberate, internal choice.

Similar to children in this respect, Dewey believes many of those who engage in scientific inquiry or use technologies do not actively and purposively direct their imaginations toward the realization of specific ends, but instead allow the imagination to be dominated by external factors—e.g. economic incentives, social pressures, etc. This failure to deliberately engage one’s imaginative capacities for the purposes of realizing goods and/or producing knowledge to resolve human problems leads to an inferior form of inquiry, one that fails to direct investigation toward pressing public problems, to transparently disseminate the results of inquiry in a useful format, and, most importantly, to deliberately guide one’s activities toward the realization of some common good. Thus, “the ultimate harm is that the understanding by man [sic] of his own affairs and his ability to direct them are sapped at their root when knowledge of nature is disconnected from its human function” (1927 [2016], 201). Science and technology undoubtedly serve as powerful means of structuring and navigating our lived environments. But if the trajectory of our technological advances is determined from without rather than from within, if our imaginations are dominated by external factors rather than the deliberate intention to achieve a specified end, we relinquish much of our ability to control the consequences of our scientific and technological activities, all while retaining full moral responsibility for them.

Fast forward nearly a century later and Dewey’s concerns are all the more pressing. The call for a more deliberate and intention-directed use of imagination in the development of novel technologies dovetails nicely with Shannon Vallor’s claim that the rapidly advancing state of technological innovation is marked by a failure in knowing what to wish for: 

In the absence of some deliberate intervention, contemporary technosocial life is likely to be marked by a progressive paralysis of practical wisdom, in which our expanding technical knowledge of effective means receives less and less direction by meaningful desires and moral ends. Like nerve cells gradually cut off by a neurodegenerative disease from their directing impulses in the brain, a technosocial crisis of wishing would result in actions that appear increasingly spasmodic, uncoordinated, and lacking in purpose (2016, 248).

Assuming that Dewey and Vallor have diagnosed the situation at hand correctly, how do we as moral educators proceed? What is worth wishing for, exactly? How does one go about teaching the art of knowing what is, in fact, worth wishing for? How does the innovator in today’s rather unjust technoscientific landscape learn the skill of intentionally directing their imaginative activities toward socially responsible ends? How might philosophers encourage the next generation of scientists, engineers, and innovators to mobilize their imaginations for some greater good?

As an early-career teaching professional, I do not have conclusive answers to these questions. But I do believe the insights presented above shed light on how we might galvanize students to step out from behind their apathetic appeals to technological determinism and embrace the powerful responsibility they have in shaping what comes next in humanity’s technological futures. Of course, doing this well will require ample technical expertise and scientific know-how. Nevertheless, without strong imaginative capacities coupled with the strong reflexivity needed to guide one’s imagination to something beyond the present imagining, our crisis of wishing will only continue.

References

Dewey, John. 1899/1976. “Mental Development.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, Vol. 1. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 192-226. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

———1927/2016. The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry. Edited by Melvin L. Rogers. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press.

Grinbaum, Alexei, and Christopher Groves. 2013. “What Is ‘Responsible’ About Responsible Innovation? Understanding the Ethical Issues.” In Responsible Innovation. Edited by Richard Owen, J.R. Bessant, and Maggy Heintz, 119-42. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118551424.ch7.

Ladd, John. 1991. “Bhopal: An Essay on Moral Responsibility and Civic Virtue.” Journal of Social Philosophy 22(1): 73–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.1991.tb00022.x.

Vallor, Shannon. 2016. Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190498511.001.0001.