The Sanctity of Life, Moral Responsibility, and Human Therapeutic Cloning

This paper shows that the sanctity of life argument does not resolve the moral dilemma of human therapeutic cloning, because it gives unequal weight to the lives of the embryos that would be destroyed and of those with diseases who could be saved by therapeutic cloning. The bulk of the paper is devoted to demonstrating the moral equivalence of action and inaction, a claim that I demonstrate by proposing a game theoretic interpretation of the moral nature of agency. As a consequence of this equivalence, one cannot simply decide not to intervene and let the consequences be as they may: the decision not to allow cloning is a decision to allow people to die needlessly and must be justified by more than the claim that agency is not involved in these deaths. The option of sanctifying life is thus not available, as in either case our actions have resulted in deaths that we could have prevented. We must choose who will live and who will die. I argue in the final section of the paper that we can make this difficult choice on the basis of a modified version of the distinction between biological and biographical life, prioritizing the biographical over the biological, and the biological over the metaphysical. This priority demands that research into therapeutic cloning go forward.

Technology for Life and the Problems of Critical/Postmodern Technology Theory

In this paper, I argue for an alternative way of thinking about technology, that of “technology for life.” Technology for life would serve the goal of creative self-making. Developing a theory of technology for life would require a theory to accomplish three goals: it would be critical, constructive, and democratic. While the two main bodies of political theory regarding technology—critical theory and postmodernism—are quite effective at criticism of technology, they are much weaker with regard to being constructive, and any attempt that they do make at constructive technology while at the same time furthering democratic goals founders on their intellectual roots. I suggest as an alternative a critical pragmatism rooted in Chales Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, and show that such an approach can be simultaneously critical, constructive, and democratic.

Technology and Pragmatism: From Value Neutrality to Value Criticality

This paper examines how pragmatism can enhance both the understanding of technology and social responses to the problems that technology creates. I begin by offering a superficial reading of the relationship between technology and values in John Dewey. Dewey appears to take an instrumentalist view of technology that sees technology as value-neutral. This view is seriously flawed, as shown especially well by scholars working in the Social Construction of Technology approach. I then develop a pragmatic/constructivist alternative approach to technology based on Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics that sees technology as fundamentally constructed and therefore value-laden in ways quite similar to the SCOT program. But whereas the SCOT program is quite limited in its ability to criticize the values embedded in technology, the pragmatic/constructivist alternative is inherently critical because of the way it uses science, understood as hypothetical, experimental reasoning that is responsive to experience, to promote critical inquiry into technology.

The Illiberal Culture of E-Democracy

Efforts to create e-democracy do not necessarily enhance liberal democratic politics, tending instead toward illiberal polities because of the underlying technological culture of e-democracy. Technologies are not value-neutral artifacts but rather social practices in which values and meanings are central elements. The complex of values and meanings creates a culture to each technology that is implemented along with that technology. Implementing a technology thus moves society in the direction of the underlying culture of the technology. Electronic liberal democracy cannot be constructed by simply adapting Internet-based technologies as is because the underlying culture of those technologies, when implemented in specifically political practices, runs counter to the principles of liberal democracy. Three aspects of that culture in particularthat the Internet is a commodity, that direct democracy is the most preferable form of democracy, and that the Internet is an individualized public forum-shape the culture of e-democracy in ways that undermine key practices of liberal democracy such as representation and constitutionalism, social equality, and the autonomy of civil society.