Cultivating humanity: towards a non-humanist ethics of technology

Abstract

Ever since the Enlightenment, ethics has had a humanist character. Not ‘the good life’ but the individual person now has a central place in it, taken as the fountainhead of moral decisions and practices. Yet, however much our high-technological culture is a product of the Enlightenment, this very culture also reveals the limits of the Enlightenment in ever more compelling ways. Not only have the ideals of manipulability and the positivist slant of Enlightenment thinking been mitigated substantially during the past decades, but also the humanist position that originated from it. The world in which we live, after all, is increasingly populated not only by human beings but also by technological artefacts that help to shape the ways we live our lives — technologies have come to mediate human practices and experiences in myriad ways (cf. Verbeek, 2005).