Humanism Today
ETHICAL ISSUES IN TECHNOLOGY
Vern Bu/lough
Developments
in technology usually do not in themselves raise ethical or moral
issues. Instead it is the use to which these developments are put which raises basic
questions, and from the perspective of history almost any use of a product of
technological
innovation can be made into a moral issue. A good illustration of
this is the button which developed in the late medieval period. On the surface the
button seems harmless enough, yet the Old Order Amish felt it was wrong to
wear buttons because they were not mentioned
in the Bible. Wearing or not
wearing buttons became a moral issue for them.
Fortunately
few people adopted the attitudes ofthe Old Order Amish. Moreover
the Old Order Amish, like most of the rest of us, were inconsistent. The horse
drawn plow is not mentioned in the Bible, neither are buggies, nor iron pots for
cooking,
iron stoves, or chimneys, neither glass windows nor any number of
other things developed after the Christian Bible was committed to writing. The
point of this illustration
is to emphasize
that we, both as individuals and a
society, select the kind of technological
issues on which we take a stand.
What kind of ethical issues should we be concerned with? One such issue is the
traditional one associated with technological change and which goes by the term
Luddism. The term originated
from a series of disturbances
in Yorkshire
in
England in 1812 when croppers (shearmen) endeavored
to stem the rapid rise
and installation of the cloth dressing machinery. Though the Luddites ultimately
were unsuccessful
in preventing technological
innovation, and the name often
seems to imply a kind of blind unreasoning opposition to technological change,
it is often forgotten
that they had good reasons for their hostility. Though we
regard the devices about which they were protesting as ultimately helpful, we
forget that a single spinning Jenny displaced some nine or ten warp spinners and
thirteen or fourteen abb (weft) spinners while a scribbling