Moralische Produkte - Politik und Ethik von Artefakten

Wissenschaftliche Jahrestagung
der Gesellschaft für Technikgeschichte und des Gesprächskreises Technikgeschichte

"Moralische Produkte - Politik und Ethik von Artefakten"

Im Rahmen der Tagung laden die Veranstalter zu einem öffentlichen Vortrag in englischer Sprache ein (keine Teilnahmegebühr und Anmeldung erforderlich):

Zeit: Sonnabend, 9. Mai 2015, 19.00-20.30 Uhr
Ort: Potsdam Museum
Am Alten Markt 9, 14467 Potsdam

Keynote Lecture:

Prof. Dr. Peter-Paul Verbeek(University of Twente)

"Rethinking the morality of things: moral mediation, mediated morality and the ethics of technology"

The moral and political significance of material artifacts has been puzzling historians, ethicists and philosophers of technology for quite some time now. After Langdon Winner’s claim that artifacts have politics, and Bruno Latour’s normative analysis of speed bumps and door springs, a fierce philosophical discussion started about the possibility and the desirability of attributing morality to nonhuman entities.
In his lecture, Peter-Paul Verbeek will argue that the question if artifacts can ‘have’ morality is in fact misleading. From the approach of technological mediation, the question is not whether things, just like humans, have moral agency, but rather how material artifacts mediate moral actions and decisions. Things do not ‘have’ morality, but neither do humans: morality comes about in human-technology relations. We should replace the notion of ‘moral agency’ with ‘moral mediation’. This notion of moral mediation has major implications for ethical theory and practice. After all, it implies that technologies also help to shape the normative frameworks that we use for assessing technologies. There is no ‘outside’ of technology from which we can ethically reflect on it; ethics can only take place ‘from within’ our technologically mediated situation. By analyzing the examples of Google Glass and a lab-on-a-chip technology for sex selection I will investigate the complex interplay between the technological disclosure of reality, the technological mediation of practices, and its implications for the ethics of technology and design.

About Peter-Paul Verbeek:
Peter-Paul Verbeek is professor of philosophy of technology and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Twente. He is president of the Society for Philosophy and Technology and a member of the Dutch Council for the Humanities. Verbeek is an editor of Tijdschrift voor Filosofie and a member of the scientific advisory board of Philosophy & Technology. More see Website University of Twente

Tagungsprogramm und Hinweise zu Übernachtungsmöglichkeiten in Potsdam und Berlin (pdf)


Übersichtskarte über die Tagungsorte in Potsdam, GTG Tagung 2015 (pdf)