An Argument for Ethical Technology

By Ryan Vosbigan

I want to describe my development from this class. When I started this quarter, I had just watched The Social Dilemma, so I was already thinking about the major concerns with social media and the internet. In the previous quarter, I took a social ethics course, where I became familiar with the study of ethics and what is the good and what is right.

I started the quarter believing that ethical technology was not directly relevant to my major, which was environmental management and protection. I limited my view of ethical tech to tech related to Silicon Valley, such as Google, Instagram, and Twitter, or to mechanical products. By reading Harvest and the Necessary and Sufficient Conditions, my understanding evolved to recognize that ethical technology encompasses far more. Ethical technology includes biomedical ethics and interacts with social ethics.

Many of our solutions to societal problems, like homelessness or communicating during a pandemic, are addressed by technology. One of the topics in my social ethics course was on licensing parents, where one philosopher argued that the potential for child abuse merits implementing a licensing program where parents need a license to have children. David Eggers addresses this problem in The Circle, where technologists created a set of programs to monitor parents and prevent abuse. In the end, the same issues with licensing parents arise with these programs that monitor everyone and record sudden movements, which is that these violate certain rights. Preventing something bad does not justify violating rights. This is just one example of the ways that I connected ethical technology to other topics and how I realized the extent of the concept of ethical technology.

Through this class, I began to consider the ways that technology has shaped the way I think about ethics. I find it fascinating that science fiction can provide thought-experiments to test how certain technologies would influence the world. While I was skeptical at first, I now agree that science fiction is an excellent way to study ethical technology. Reading and watching science fiction like The War of the Worlds and The Measure of a Man, have sparked important questions like what it means to be person with rights.

Something from this class that I will take with me is using active over passive voice. While, passive voice still riddles all my journals (including this one), I want to use active voice more frequently in all my writing. Recently, I had an interesting conversation during a lab meeting, where we discussed whether active or passive voice should be used in scientific writing (in the field of ecology). For the same reasons discussed in class (precision, clarity in meaning, and acknowledgment of biases), most of us agreed that active voice better fits scientific writing. One journal, Journal of Wildlife Management, even requires articles to use active voice.