Ethical Idealism, Technology and Practice: a Manifesto

Abstract

Technology has become one of the main channels through which people engage in most of their everyday activities. When working, learning, or socializing, the afordances created by technological tools determine the way in which users interact with one another and their environment, thus favoring certain actions and behaviors, while discouraging others. The ethical dimension behind the use of technology has been already studied in recent works, but the question is often formulated in a protective way that focuses on shielding the users from potential detrimental efects. Nevertheless, when considering collateral ethical benefts that the use of technology could bring about, virtue ethics and the notions of “practice” and “practical wisdom” present new opportunities to harness this potential. By understanding the combination of technology, its users and their interactions as a system, technology can be seen as the space where most of its users’ daily practice happens. Through this practice, users can get the chance to collaterally develop and enhance their ethical awareness, sensitivity and reasoning capabilities. This work is shaped as a manifesto that provides the background, motivations and directions needed to ask a complementary question about the ethics of technology that aims towards the potentiality behind the use of technology. Instead of focusing on shielding the users, the proposed ethical idealist approach to the ethics of technology aims to empower them by understanding their use of technology as the space where the development of their practical wisdom, understood in the virtue ethics’ sense, takes place.