Distributed Morality in a Technological World Knowledge as Duty 1

This paper aims at presenting a concise treatment of some key themes of my recent book Morality in a Technological World. Knowledge as Duty (Cambridge: Cambridge UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007). In recent times, non-human beings, objects, and structures – for example computational tools and devices have acquired new moral worth and intrinsic values. Kantian tradition in ethics teaches that human beings do not have to be treated solely as “means”, or as “things”, that is in a merely instrumental way, but also have to be treated as “ends”. I contend that human beings can be treated as “things” in the sense that they have to be “respected” as things are sometimes. People have to reclaim instrumental and moral values already dedicated to external things and objects. To the aim of reconfiguring human dignity in our technological world I introduce the concept of moral mediator, which takes advantage of some suggestions deriving from my previous research on epistemic mediators and on manipulative abduction. I also contend that through technology people can simplify and solve moral tasks when they are in presence of incomplete information and possess a diminished capacity to act morally. Moreover, many external things, usually inert from the moral point of view, can be transformed into what we call moral mediators. Hence, not all of the moral tools are inside the head, many of them are shared and distributed in “external” objects and structures which function as ethical devices. For example we can use external “tools”, like computer or biotechnology, to reconfigure previously given social orders morally unsatisfactory. Respecting People as Things When my institution, the University of Pavia, was founded near Milan in 1361, women were viewed very differently from the way we see women today. Back then, a woman living in one of the centuries-old houses I pass each day on my way to work here in Pavia would not have been considered as “human” as men: seven hundred years ago, she would have essentially been property – first her father’s then, later, her husband’s, and she would probably have had little control over matters concerning her family or her own destiny. There is a very good chance that she would have been illiterate, as were most women and many men in medieval Europe, and she would certainly not have been permitted to attend the city’s then-new university. In the fourteenth century, the centers of learning in northern Italy were among the most advanced in the world, yet even they considered women to be unworthy or incapable of being educated. Indeed, it took nearly 400 years for women to gain admission to the University of Pavia, and not until the eighteenth century was a degree awarded to a woman: Maria Pellegrini Amoretti, who was from a wealthy family, not surprisingly, took a law degree amid in 1777. 1 Reprinted with permission from L. Magnani. 2007. Morality in a Technological World. Knowledge as Duty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. B u le ti n o ti in þ if ic Distributed Morality in a Technological World – Knowledge as Duty 2 At the institution today, however, women work alongside men as both students and faculty members, and while we must continue to strive for gender equity, the current level of intellectual interaction between female and male scholars would have been unimaginable to medieval peoples. Attitudes towards gender roles did not evolve because of some inherent change in women, of course, but because people have learned a great deal more about the human condition since 1361. By what mechanism did this shift occur? What knowledge allowed humankind to change the way it views women? And for the purposes of the book, how can we learn from that transformation so that others may enjoy greater status as well? Before turning to my book’s central theme of regarding knowledge as a duty, it is useful to think about how knowledge can affect an entity’s moral status. In addition to women, many other kinds of entities – both living and non-living – that were once considered much less valuable than they are today have also acquired a different kind of moral worth: intrinsic value, or value as an end in itself. An entity’s intrinsic value, of course, arises not from a change in the thing itself but from changes in human thinking and knowledge; if various acts of cognition can imbue things with new moral value, I submit that certain undervalued humans beings can reclaim the sort of moral esteem currently held by some “external things,” like endangered species, artwork, data bases, or even some overvalued political institutions. As the subtitle of the book Knowledge as a Duty suggests, morality is distributed in our technological world in a way that makes some scientific problems particularly relevant to ethics: ecological imbalances, the medicalization of life, and advances in biotechnology – themselves all products of knowledge – seem to me to be especially pertinent topics of discussion. The system of designating certain animals as endangered, for example, teaches us that there is a continuous delegation of moral values to externalities; it may also cause some people to complain that wildlife receives greater moral and legal protection than, for example, disappearing cultural traditions. I wondered what reasoning process would result in a non-human thing’s being valued over a living, breathing person and asked myself what might be done to elevate the status of human beings. One solution, I believe, is to re-examine the respect we have developed for particular externalities and then use those things as a vehicle to return value to people. The well-known Kantian tradition in ethics teaches that human beings should not be treated solely as “means” or “things” in a merely instrumental way but should, instead, be regarded as “ends. ” I believe, however, that if we rigidly adhere to Kant’s directive, then we make it impossible to embrace an important new strategy I propose in chapter one of my book: “respecting people as things,” the notion that people must be regarded as “means” (things) insofar these means involve “ends. ” In essence, the idea holds that human beings often can and even should be treated as “things,” and that in the process they become “respected as things” that had been ascribed more value than some people. We must reappropriate the instrumental and moral values that people have lavished on external things and objects, which I contend is central to reconfiguring human dignity in our technological world. The potential benefits of “respecting people as things,” then, undermine Kant’s traditional distinction between intrinsic value and instrumental value, and they are not the only factors to do so: in chapter three I argue that more advanced and more pervasive technology has also blurred the line between humans and things – machines, for example – and between natural things and artifacts, and it has become increasingly difficult to discern where the human body ends and the non-human thing begins. We are in a sense “folded” into non-humans, so that we delegate action to external things (objects, tools, artifacts) that in turn share our human existence with us. It is just this hybridization that necessitates treating people as things and, fortunately, that makes this course of action easier to pursue. Again, my counterintuitive conclusion is that instead of treating people B u le ti n o ti in þ if ic Distributed Morality in a Technological World – Knowledge as Duty 3 like means, we can improve their lives by recognizing their part-thingness and respecting them as things. In turn, the concept of “respecting people as things” provides an ethical framework through which to analyze the condition of modern people, who, as increasingly commodified beings, are becoming more and more thing-like anyway. In my book, I use this construct to interrogate the medicalization of life (chapter two), cybernetic factors (chapter four), and the influences of globalization (chapter five).