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Towards a Social Ethics of Technology: A Research

Prospect
Richard Devon
The Pennsylvania State University

Introduction
Most approaches to ethics focus on individual behavior. In this paper, a
different approach is advocated, that of social ethics, which is offered as a
complement to individual ethics. To some extent, this is an exercise in
renaming some current activities, but it is also intended to clarify what is a
distinct and valuable ethical approach that can be developed much further
than it is at present. What is described here as social ethics is certainly
practiced, but it is not usually treated as a subject for philosophical inquiry.
Social ethics is taken here to be the ethical study of the options available t o
us in the social arrangements for decision-making (Devon 1999; see also a
follow-on article to the present one, Devon and Van de Poel 2004). Such
arrangements involve those for two or more people to perform social
functions such as those pertaining to security, transportation,
communication, reproduction and child rearing, education, and so forth. In
technology, social ethics can mean studying anything from legislation t o
project management. Different arrangements have different ethical tradeoffs;
hence the importance of the subject.
An illustration of social ethics is provided by the case of abortion (a
technology). The opponents of abortion take a principled position and argue
that abortion is taking a life and therefore that it is wrong. The opponents of
abortion believe all people should be opposed and have little interest in
variations in decision making practices. The pro-choice proponents do not
stress taking a position on whether abortion is good or bad but rather on
taking a position on who should decide. They propose that the pregnant
woman rather than, say, male dominated legislatures and churches should have
the right to decide whether or not an abortion is the right choice for them.
The pro-choice position would legalize abortion, of course, hence the debate.
The pro-choice position, then, is based on social ethics. Very clearly,
different arrangements in the social arrangements for making a decision about
technology (abortion in this case) can have very different ethical
implications and hence should be a subject for conscious reflection and
empirical inquiry in ethics.

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There is no shortage of illustrations of the role of social ethics in technology.

Consider the question of informed consent in the case of the Challenger. The
launch decision was made in the light of a new and considerable risk, of which
the crew was kept ignorant (Boisjoly 1998; and see Vaughan 1996). This
apparently occurred again in the case of the Columbia (Ride 2003). Informed
consent, absent here, is a well-known idea and represents a social arrangement
for making a decision. The skywalk of the Hyatt Regency failed because of a
design change that was both bad and unchecked (Petroski 1985; Schinzinger &
Martin 2000, p. 4). A bad decision is one thing, an unchecked decision means
that the social arrangements for decision-making were inadequate. The
original design was also bad (very hard to build) and this was largely because
the construction engineers were not consulted at the outset. Similarly, this
was a bad social arrangement for making decisions, and it may be compared t o
the concurrent engineering reforms in manufacturing that use product design
and development teams to ensure input from both design and manufacturing
engineers among others. An unchecked, faulty design decision by a
construction company was also the cause of the lift slab failure during the
construction of Ambience Plaza (Scribner & Culver 1988; Poston, Feldman,
& Suarez 1991). The Bhopal tragedy was the result of a failure in a chemical
plant where many safety procedures were disregarded and almost every safety
technology was out of commission (Schinzinger & Martin 2000, pp. 188191). The global oversight of Union Carbide at the time rested on the word of
one regional manager, which was not a safe management practice either
(McWhirter 1988).
It is hard to find a textbook on engineering ethics that takes project
management as a worthy focus for analysis. Schinzinger and Martin (2000, p.
3-5) do have a good engineering task breakdown but it is not focused on
management. And project management is not usually prominent in
engineering curricula. Where it is present, ethics is usually not included (e.g.,
Ulrich & Eppinger 2004). Yet, as the examples above suggest, it is very easy
to see the importance of project management in most of the famous case
studies of engineering ethics.
Studying only individual behavior in ethics raises a one-shoe problem. It is
valuable to lay out the issues and case studies and to explore the ethical roles
of the participants. However, what we also need to study are the ethics
involved in how people collectively make decisions about technology. A
collective decision has to be made with participants who have different roles,
knowledge, power, personalities, and, of course, values and ethical
perspectives. This is the other shoe. How do they resolve their differences
and, or, combine their resources and wisdom? And insofar as engineering

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ethics only focuses on engineers and not on the many other participants in
decision-making in technology, it exacerbates the problem (Devon 1991).
Studying ethics and technology means looking at both individual and
collective behavior in the production, use, and disposal of technology. This
broad scope may be contrasted with the best-developed sub-topic of
professional ethics applied to engineering, which has concentrated on roles
and responsibilities of working engineers (see Figure 1).
Figure 1

Ethics and Technology

Social Ethics

Design Process
Project
Management
Organizational
Behavior

Individual Ethics

Professional
Ethics
Engineers
Other
Professionals

Policy

Legislation

Other
Individuals

Social ethics includes the examination of policy, legislation, and regulation,

and such topics as the life and death of the Office of Technology Assessment

Social
Responsibility

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in the United States (Kunkle 1995). It also provides a useful method of

inquiry into ethical issues in the design process (Devon & Van de Poel 2004)
and in project management. These are very practical areas in which
researchers may well attract corporate and public funding. As noted above,
many of the case studies that are currently popular in texts and websites on
engineering ethics may best be reduced to issues of poor project management:
that is, reduced to social rather than individual ethics. See, for example,
http://www.onlineethics.org/ and http://ethics.tamu.edu/. The social ethics of
technology is not simply a matter of extending the scope of ethics t o
collective decision-making. The method needs exploring and developing. And
we need empirical studies of the ethical effects that different social
arrangements have for decision-making. Research, a lot of research, is the
next step.
Fortunately, social ethics is practiced ubiquitously; even professional codes
have plenty of statements that concern the social ethics of technology. And
the codes themselves represent a social arrangement that has been
commented upon extensively. What is lacking, and what is proposed here, is a
clear scholarly methodology for developing the field.
Politics or Ethics
As with Aristotles view of both ethics and politics, ethics is seen here as the
practical science of finding the right goal and the right action to achieve that
goal. Engineering ethics, as it has been traditionally viewed, is a subset of this
larger domain of the ethics of technology, since many others join engineers
in the way technology is created and used. Whereas engineering ethics has
tended to answer the question what makes a good engineer good, a social
ethics of technology asks what makes a good technology good (Devon 1999).
Traditionally, ethics has primarily been the study of appropriate standards of
individual human conduct (Nichomean Ethics 1990). Anything about
appropriate social arrangements has been referred to as politics,
notwithstanding Aristotles view of ethics a subset of politics, which he
viewed as the supreme science of correct action and obviously a collective
process (Aristotle Politics; Apostle & Gerson 1986).
Engineering ethics has been affected by this dichotomy between what is
ethical and what is political. An exchange in the IEEE Spectrum revealed this
distinction clearly (IEEE Spectrum December 1996; February 1997; March
1997). After well known experts on engineering ethics had engaged in a

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roundtable on the subject, several engineers wrote letters that included the
argument that two of the ethicists had confused a political stance with
ethics (IEEE Spectrum February 1997). The topic was the work of engineers
in various technologies such as chemical and other warfare technology, and
even working on the Cook County Jail. The ethicists in question did, in fact,
indicate personal opposition to such technologies and the letter writers were
making ethical defenses of working in such fields of engineering.
The letter writers in this case clearly felt that engineering ethics, as
presented, was excluding their values and, worse, condemning them. The same
experience occurred in the newsletters and meetings of a small, short-lived
group called American Engineers for Social Responsibility, in which I
participated. A single set of values was presented under a general rubric for
values, implicitly excluding (pejoratively) those who held other values, some
of whom told us as much. On the other hand, many engineers who feel there
are major ethical problems with the deployment of their skills can gain little
solace from codes of engineering ethics, and not much more from the
discourse of their professional societies.
We presently have no satisfactory way of handling this type of
discourse/conflict within engineering ethics, beyond making optimistic
injunctions such as calling for employers to accommodate any disjuncture
between the ethical profiles of employees and the work assigned to them by
the companies that employ them (Schinzinger & Martin 1989, p 317; Unger
1997, pp. 6-7) This frustration has led to protest emerging as a theme in
engineering ethics, and this, in turn, gets rejected by many engineers as being
politics rather than the ethics.
There is a way of dealing with the problem. Taking a social ethics approach
means recognizing not only that the ends and means of technology are
appropriate subjects for the ethics of technology, but also that differences in
value systems that emerge in almost all decision-making about technology are
to be expected. The means of handling differences, such as conflict resolution
processes, models of technology management, and aspects of the larger
political system, must be studied. This is not to suggest that engaging in
political behavior on behalf of this cause or that is what ethics is all about.
That remains a decision to be made at the personal level. Rather, the ethics
of technology is to be viewed as a practical science. This means engaging in
the study of, and the improvement of, the ways in which we collectively
practice decision making in technology. Such an endeavor can enrich and
guide the conduct of individuals, but it is very different than focusing on the

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behavior of individuals in a largely predetermined world in which their options

are often severely constrained.
The Scope and Method of Social Ethics
The social ethics of technology is not just a consequentialist approach. The
desired outcome is taken to be good technology, but the process of getting
there (right social action) is also very important in social ethics. Rather than
look at right action in principled terms, focused on the individual, an action
may equally be ethically evaluated on the basis of the social process leading up
to it.. Deontological social ethics means that if the process is a good one, the
results will take care of themselves. Practitioners may view the right process
as the best they can do and tolerate a wide range of outcomes as a result. So,
for example, if we establish good democratic information flows and decisionmaking in the design process, we will have answered the question of what is a
"good" technology with one solution: one produced by a good process.
Similarly, we may still take a social consequentialist approach and examine
the outcomes, just as we do at the individual level, and change the social
arrangements to achieve the types of outcomes that seem ethically desirable.
Virtue ethics might also be applied with examples of establishing decision
making groups of virtuous people. It all sounds familiar, but it is not studied as
a science of ethics.
Technology is socially constructed. Technological designs express what we
want and they shape who we are. People in all walks of life are involved in
demanding, making, marketing, using, maintaining, regulating, and disposing
of technology. Design is the focal point of technology. It is where societal
needs meet technological resources in a problem-solving context. As we
design technology, so we design our lives, realize our needs, create
opportunities, and establish constraints, often severe, for future generations.
It is the design process that creates the major transformations of society and
the environment that technology embodies. Early stages of the design process
determine most of the final product cost and this may be emblematic of all
other costs and benefits associated with technology (National Research
Council 1991). The similarity between applied ethics and design has been
noted (Whitbeck 1996). Design may be the best place to study ethics in
technology. Design affects us all. However, not all of us are involved in
design, and this asymmetry has great import for the social ethics of
technology.
Most decisions about technology are collective, to which individuals only
contribute, whether in a product design and development team, or in a

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legislature. The nature of such collectivities varies enormously. There are

many different varieties of organizations in industry, and many different
governmental bodies. Consider the area of risk management, for example. In
addition to personal judgment, there are many different institutions involved
such as legislatures, regulatory agencies, tort and common law, insurance,
workers compensation, government industry agreements, and voluntary
standard-setting organizations (Merkofer 1987). One can examine individuals
purchasing a consumer product, and the subsequent use and disposal decisions
that follow. Family members and friends play a significant role in all these
stages, not to mention advertising, insurance, laws, and community codes.
This is not to deny that individuals are very important in innovation, buying
commodities or making administrative decisions, but the autonomy implied
by a sole focus on individual ethics may exaggerate the ethical space that is
usually available and distract attention from more powerful social realities.
Accepting that we have complex social arrangements for handling
technology, it is also true that these arrangements are mutable. For example,
in the last three decades, international competition has revealed different
approaches to the social organization of industry. The long dominant topdown scientific management approach is steadily being replaced by flatter
organizations with more participatory management (Smith 1995). Product
design and development teams are replacing the old sequential approach t o
engineering. These changes occurred because they made companies more
competitive, but they also have profound ethical implications for the people
who work for the companies. A case can be made that the ethical situation
improves in some ways for the employees with the change to participatory
management. Similarly, greater sensitivity to customer needs also has an
ethical benefit even though tradeoffs are not hard to find (Whiteley 1994). In
fact, not viewing the social relations of production as a variable made U.S.
industry very slow to see what their competition was doing.
To summarize, decisions are usually made collectively and in social
arrangements that represent one of many possibilities. Further, changes in
these social arrangements must have an impact not just on the technology but
on the ethics involved in the technology, both as product and in the processes
that create that product. Surely, then, we can consider the study of these
social arrangements as appropriate subject matter for the ethics of
technology. Dewey argued in much the same way for a scientific and
experimental approach for ethics in general. What is needed is intelligent
examination of the consequences that are actually effected by inherited
institutions and customs, in order that there may be intelligent consideration

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of the ways in which they are to be intentionally modified on behalf of

generation of different consequences (Dewey 1996, p. 305).
Project Management and Social Ethics
Since the way technology is created and managed in society is vast and
complex, how can we hope to study it systematically? One answer is that
there is a lot of work to do close at hand, such as the design and operation of
product design and development teams and other forms of project
management. For example, as noted in the Introduction, many failures that
are used as case studies in engineering ethics seem to have project
management pathologies at the heart of them. Apparent examples are: not
checking a design and not enforcing worker safety rules in the Ambience
Plaza lift slab collapse (op cit.), assigning the person with the wrong
competency and, again, not checking a design in the chemical plant explosion
at Flixborough (Taylor 1975), failing to exercise design control over changes
during construction of the Citicorps Building in New York (Morgenstern
1995), and the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City (op cit), not providing proper
training in handling toxic chemicals in the case of the Aberdeen Three
(http://ethics.tamu.edu/ethics/aberdeen/aberdee1.htm), and not maintaining
proper management, and oversight of a plant at Bhopal (op cit.). Although
there are dramatic ethical issues involved in these cases, none of the disasters
seems to reduce well to a problem of individual ethics. They are prime case
studies for teaching project management and social ethics, however. For
further analysis of such case studies, see Devon and Van de Poel (2004).
An excellent exception to most case studies is the study of the DC-10 failures
and crashes (Fielder & Birsch 1992). This set of studies explicitly engages in
social ethics by examining the role of corporate and regulatory behavior, and
revealing, for example, that engineers concerns at subcontractors such as
expressed in the Applegate memo had no legal means of reaching the FAA
which was responsible for the regulatory oversight. This was an arrangement
that could have been different.
The Role of Cognizance
Up to this point we have made a case for a social ethics of technology. Now,
two general values are suggested that are important in realizing a social ethics
of technology. Cognizance is important. We have an obligation to understand
as fully as possible the implications of a technology. While such
understanding seems to be increasingly characterized by uncertainty, we are

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still obliged to do the best we can. There is simply no point making ethical
judgments in a state of reparable ignorance.
Some texts have appeared that provide new resources in areas where
information has been lacking. For example, it is now possible to have some
idea of the global social and environmental changes that create the life cycles
of consumer products (Ryan, et al. 2000; Graedel & Allenby 2003). This is at
least a surrogate for inclusion (see below). But it is still easier for engineers t o
understand a lot about how a technology works as a technology, while having
a limited understanding of its possible uses and its social and environmental
impacts in extraction, production, use, and disposal. Experts are usually paid
for their technical expertise and not for their contextual understanding nor
do their bosses usually ask for it. It is irritating to wrestle with, and to solve,
the technical issues of a problem, only to be confronted with social issues such
as marketability, regulatory constraints, or ethical concerns (Devon 1989). I t
is a recipe for producing defensive behavior. So, it is not enough to call for
cognizance, we need a methodology. And, while cognizance can be achieved
by social responsibility approaches at the individual level, the methodology
suggested will show how social ethics can powerfully supplement the
conscience and awareness of individuals.
The Role of Inclusion
This brings us to our second general value: we need to make sure the right
people are included in the decision making. Deciding who the right people
are should be a major focus in the social ethics of technology. Who they
might be is a point of concern in any industry where the clients, customers,
design and manufacturing staff, sales engineers, lawyers, senior management,
and various service units such as personnel are all relevant to a project. And
there will be other stakeholders such as environmental agencies, and the
community near a production plant, a landfill, a building, or a parking lot.
The classic article by Coates on technology assessment is instructive in this
regard (Coates 1971). Inclusion might be viewed as the difficult task of adding
stakeholder values to shareholder values, but that would be a misleading
representation.
Neglecting different stakeholders will have different outcomes at different
points in history. Neglect your customer and you risk losing money. Fail t o
design for the environment and you may pay heavily later. Neglect safety
standards and you risk losses in liability as well as sales. Neglect
underrepresented minorities and the poor by placing toxic waste sites in their
communities and you may get away with it for a long time, but probably not

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for ever. In general, neglecting stakeholders, even when you are free to do so,
is a calculated risk and rarely ethical. The consequences of failure can be
severe. Nuclear energy technology ground to a halt with huge amounts of
capital at stake, in part, because the stakeholder issue was so poorly handled.
Once the public trust had gone, even reasonable arguments were discounted.
Involving diverse stakeholders helps with the problem of cognizance since
this diverse representation will bring disparate points of view and new
information to bear on the design process. There is also evidence that
inclusiveness with respect to diversity generates more creativity in the design
process (Leifer 1997) and facilitates the conduct of international business
(Lane, DiStefano, & Maznevski 1997). Creating more and different options
allows better choices to be made. While the final choice made may not be the
most ethical one, a wide range of choices is likely to provide an alternative
that is fairly sound technically, economically, and ethically. To some extent
then, the broader the range of design options that are generated, the more
ethical the process is. Thus, increasing representation in the design process
by stakeholders is ethical in itself and it may be in its effect on the final
product or process, also, by expanding cognizance and generating more
options. One area of design that is growing rapidly is inclusive or universal
design which studies adaptive technology for what used to be those with
disabilities. It is now embracing a continuum approach to human needs and
abilities with much interest, for example, in aging effects (Clarkson, et al.
2003). It is clear that such designs often have benefits for the average
consumer such as ramps to buildings, and wider, better grip pens. This reflects
the power of diversity that comes from more inclusive social processes in
design.
Democratizing design is not straightforward. Experts exercise much executive
authority. Corporate and government bosses think the decisions are theirs.
Clients are sure that they should decide since they pay. And the public is not
always quick to come forward because we have strongly meritocratic values.
Purely lay institutions like juries are sometimes regarded with suspicion. Yet
in Denmark they have been experimenting with lay decision-making about
complex issues like genetic engineering. Lay groups are formed that exclude
experts in the areas of the science and technology being examined. At some
point, such experts are summoned and they testify under questioning before
the lay group. Then the lay group produces a report and submits it t o
parliament. These lay groups ask the contextual questions about the science /
technology being examined: what will it do, what are the costs and benefits
and to whom, who will own it, what does it mean for our lives, for the next

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generation, or for the environment. The results have been encouraging, and
industries have become increasingly interested in the value of these early
assessments by the general public for determining the direction their product
design and development should take (Schlove 1996).
The Decision Making Process
So far it has been argued that:

There should be a social ethics of technology because most

decisions about technology are made socially rather than
individually
The social arrangements for making such decisions are variable
and should be a prime subject for study in any social ethics of
technology
Two key questions about such social arrangements are, who is at
the table and what is on the table?
Enhancing cognizance is essential to ethical decision making
Representation by stakeholders in the design process is desirable
Diversity in the design process opens up more choices, which is
ethically desirable and could well benefit both the technology and
the marketability of the technology.

The process of decision-making advocated here implicitly sees technology as

always good and bad. The key is to find out in what ways the technology is
good and bad, and for whom. The process that is suggested is a democratic
one.
In some recent views of design, a set of norms has emerged which are
reputedly good for creativity; better quality, shorter time to market and
customer satisfaction. These norms include openness, democratic information
flows, conflict resolution, diversity, non-stereotyping behavior, listening t o
stakeholders, assessment of tradeoffs (Devon 1999). In general, these values
derive from the democratic values of our political system and render more
seamless the relationships between technology and the socioeconomic
system.
Social and Individual Ethics Compared
To illustrate the distinctive nature of a social ethics approach, it will be
compared with engineering ethics, which has primarily been characterized by

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an individual ethics approach with social issues appended via the concept of
social responsibility. The comparison is provided in Table I.
Table I: Social and Individual Ethics Compared
Social Ethics of Technology

Engineering Ethics (Individual)

Subject population

Everyone

Engineers

Target process

Social
arrangements
for Individual accountability
making
decisions
about
technology
Inclusive
process
and Fiduciary
loyalty
and
cognizance
conscience
(social
responsibility)
Seamless
connection
to Political
values
and
social and political life
processes
are
seen
as
externalities

Key loyalties
Conceptualization

The debate in IEEE Spectrum ground to a halt over a clash of opinions and
an irreconcilable disjuncture between what is ethics and what is politics. Using
a social ethics framework, the differences of opinion would be treated as
normal, and the idea of a boundary between ethics and politics would be
rejected as detrimental to both ethics and politics. The discussion would focus
on assessing the technologies and the social arrangements that produced
them. Asymmetries between those who control the technology and those who
are affected by the technology would characterize at least a part of this
discussion.
Recent coverage of the plight of workers in secret government site, Area
51, in Nevada by the Washington Post (July 21, 1997) may be illustrative for
this discussion. The workers are sworn to secrecy and the government denies
the worksite even exists. According to the account, the workers are exposed
to very damaging chemicals through disposal by burning practices. Their
consequent and severe health problems cannot be helped nor the causes
addressed, because, officially, nothing happened at no such place. While
ethical defenses of weapons production exist, the situation as it is described in
the Washington Post, reveals a problem. The problem is occurring where
there is a large asymmetry in the social arrangements for decision making in
technology between those who control it and those who are affected by it. A
social ethics of technology provides a framework for discussing these

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arrangements that brings everyone to the table. And much could be done here
without jeopardizing national security. A good result of such a discussion
would be the generation of a variety of options in the social arrangements for
pursuing the technology at hand, some of which would surely be safer for the
workers health.
Social Ethics of Technology in Practice
If the social ethics of technology is so important, it is reasonable to assume
that we are already doing it. This appears to be true. A social ethics of
technology is at work in legislatures, town councils, and public interest groups.
Elements may be found in books on engineering and even in codes of
engineering ethics. The tools are those of technology assessment, including
environmental impact assessment, and management of technology. But these
tools, like the social ethics of technology, are poorly represented in the
university. There is no systematic attempt to focus in the name of ethics on
the variety and efficacy of the social processes involved in designing,
producing, using, and disposing of technology.
In education, for example, two of the best texts on the sub-field of
engineering ethics address a lot of social ethics topics (Schinzinger & Martin
1989; Unger 1997). They study both means and ends, and both individual and
social processes. But the subject matter is always reduced to the plight of
individual engineers, their rights and social responsibilities. As the authors of
one text summarize their views, We have emphasized the personal moral
autonomy of individuals (Schinzinger & Martin 1989, p. 339). They note
that there is room for disagreement among reasonable peopleand there
is the need for understanding among engineers and management about the
need to cooperatively resolve conflicts (op cit., p. 340). But this is said as a
caveat to their paradigm of understanding individual responsibilities. A decade
later they reiterate this view in a text with far more social and environmental
issues than they had before: Engineers mustreflect critically on the moral
dilemmas they will confront (Schinzinger & Martin 2000, p. ix). A social
ethics approach would view these statements about value differences and
management/employee conflicts as starting points and systematically explore
the options for handling them. Further, even the emphasis on employeemanagement conflict is perhaps exaggerated by the focus on the individual.
There are also some win-win options in conflictual situations as seen by
accomplishments in negotiation and in design for the environment practices.
An individual ethics approach tends to set the individual up with a choice
between fiduciary responsibility and whistle blowing. This disempowers

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engineers and others who work in technology, by excluding alternative

approaches.
In our political system, we have a great need for objective assessments of
science and technology with the public in mind and involved. The demise of
the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) is much to be regretted and
reflects our ambivalence about practicing what we are calling here the social
ethics of technology (Kunkle 1995). The OTA was something of a role
model internationally and its loss came as a surprise in many countries.
So is social ethics really ethics or is it politics? The answer is both. It is a
position that clearly has political implications, and it is a position that
includes, at times, a study of political processes as they affect technology.
However, many other disciplines are subject to the same observations, such as
economics. Drawing sharp boundaries between disciplines denies reality. Try
separating civil, environmental, and chemical engineering, for example. And
individual ethics also takes a political position: one which stresses individual
accountability and fiduciary loyalty, and which reduces almost everything else
to an externality, perhaps for the conscience to consider. That is, the
individual ethics approach, as epitomized by professional codes, denies most
of the contextual reality of technology and owes little to the political values
of the larger democratic society. This individualized worldview, in turn, can
diminish the design process technically as well as ethically. When extended by
social responsibility considerations, individual engineering ethics leaves many
engineers behind who view it as engaging in politics.
Aristotle states that the good is the successful attainment of our goals
through rational action, and there is no higher good than the public good, he
reasoned, because we are essentially social and political by nature (Aristotle,
Nichomachean Ethics, Book Six, Section 8, p. 158; Book 10, Section 9, pp
295-302). Design is, in the Aristotelian sense, a science of correct action.
Ethics is an integral part of all aspects of our designs and all our uses of
technology. Technology is human behavior that, by design, transforms
society and the environment, and ethics must be a part of it.
It has been said that Socrates set the task of ethical theory, and hence
professional ethics, with the statement the unexamined life is not worth
living (Denise, et al. 1996, p. 1). In this paper, it has been suggested that the
unexamined technology is not worth having.

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Aristotle. Aristotles Politics, H. G. Apostle and Lloyd Gerson, eds. and trans., Grinnell, Iowa:
The Peripatetic Press, 1986.
Boisjoly, R. personal communication after a lecture at Penn State, 1998. See also
http://onlineethics.org/moral/boisjoly/RB-intro.htm
Clarkson, J., Coleman, R., Keates, S. & Lebbon, C. Inclusive Design. London: Springer, 2003.
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