Ethics in a Technological Age

AuthorDaryl Koehn
Date01 March 1999
Published date01 March 1999
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/0045-3609.00040
Ethics in a Technological Age
DARYL KOEHN
When we think of ethics in business or in the professions,
we typically focus on whether the employees, clients, and
various other stakeholders are being treated with respect.
Ethicists have devoted a great deal of energy to showing how certain
practices, such as employment at will or whistle-blowing or in-
formed consent, either foster or damage healthy personal relations.
While often insightful, these discussions completely overlook a cru-
cial question: What does it mean to act in an increasingly techno-
logical age? Can we simply apply some set of standard ethical
categories to evaluate good and bad practices in business or medi-
cine? Or is it perhaps the case that many of our business and pro-
fessional practices are ethically problematic because technology
itself is not morally neutral?
This paper argues that there are two radically different concep-
tions of skill or art dating from classical times—the technological
and the professional. Neither is morally neutral. The technological
view, the more worrisome of the two, is triumphing. Technology
should not be thought of as the collection of modern devices or even
the process of automation. Technology is better understood as the
triumph of unrestrained invention. This unrestrained invention, in
turn, is leading companies and professionals to treat their stake-
holders and clients with less respect, to make less deliberate
choices, and to violate people’s rights. Technology creates a mind-
set which reduces every practical issue to a question of efficiency.
As a result, we collectively are becoming desensitized to many
moral dimensions of our lives and our actions. Although we think
we are free to use technology well or badly, we are, in some respects,
© 1999 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. Published by Blackwell Publishers,
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.
Daryl Koehn holds the Cullen Chair of Business Ethics and is the director of the Center for Busi-
ness Ethics Studies and the editor of the Online Journal of Ethics at the University of St. Thomas
in Houston, Texas.
Business and Society Review 104:1 57–90
misled. Technology increasingly is using us at the same time as we
believe we are freely employing it. This article is a modest attempt to
get us to attend to the ways in which our lives are being trans-
formed by technology and to some of the ethical consequences that
are the result of technological skill supplanting a more professional
idea of art.
TWO DIFFERENT IDEAS OF SKILL OR ART
To see what is at stake in the triumph of technology, it is helpful to
contrast two very different and competing conceptions of skill—the
technological and the professional. The technological account sees
all skills and knacks as basically, ethically good. This pro-art view
dates back to the Greek philosopher Protagoras. Protagoras viewed
skill as a form of pure human invention designed to help overcome
man’s deficiencies. Since our skill enables us to survive, art is mor-
ally good. We devise architecture to build houses and weaving to
manufacture clothing because, unlike animals, we have no thick
furry coats to protect us. Early man invented weapons to compen-
sate for his relative lack of natural defenses such as large size, great
speed, or horns. Men and women could use spears to kill attacking
animals or to hunt prey and could deploy tools to work the land.
Technology must be ethically good because what is ethically good
promotes human life. Technology does not merely aid us. Our
capacity to invent is itself defining of what it means to be a human
being rather than an animal governed by instinct.
This first model of skill or art posits an unrestrained ability to
invent. Our ability is limited only by what we can conceive. Further-
more, art is nothing other than a certain cunning foresight. Since
we can foresee that we will die if we do not eat, we look for animals
we can kill. Since we can anticipate that we are likely to fare ill in a
fight with large animals, we hit upon the idea of creating weapons
capable of being thrown from a distance and of penetrating the ani-
mal’s hide. We invent spears.
The second model treats art as essentially moral but it does not
see every skill as artistic. Art is moral because, and only to the
extent that, it is a form of constrained skill. Aristotle is the main
defender of this view. Arts, unlike actions, are productive. That is,
they culminate in a product existing apart from their maker. The
58 BUSINESS AND SOCIETY REVIEW
hero is a great actor but not a true artist. His courageous actions do
not exist apart from him. When he dies, he will no longer be acting
valiantly. The clothing or car manufacturer, by contrast, is an artist
because she produces a product—a sweater or an automobile—
that may very well outlive her. The doctor, too, is an artist, working
with the patient to produce health in the patient’s body. In this sec-
ond view, the morality of an art derives from the quality of the thing
produced. The ethically good and true artist and technician is able
to reveal something of what it means to be human at the same time
as she reveals through the medium of the product what sort of a
thing a computer, table, healthy body, or tragedy is.
Not just anyone with a knack qualifies as a true artist. A robber
with a knack for pickpocketing may have foresight but she is not an
artist because she produces no product. Nor is the builder with an
ability to throw together a shoddy house a true artist or technician.
The true and good architect is sensitive to the needs and desires of
those who will dwell within the house. Frank Lloyd Wright was a
man of great art because his houses reminded us that our dwellings
are in nature and made of natural products. Each house high-
lighted this complex symbiosis between humans and their environ-
ment. Similarly, the good banker grasps the financial needs of her
clients. The banker who truly understands the truth of her prod-
uct—the saving, lending, and exchange of money—does not simply
respond to her customers’ expressed needs. She is able to educate
them as to the time value of money and suggest cash management
services they might not even have imagined. In other words, she
reveals the truth of money. The good doctor understands health
and all her efforts go into developing skills promoting the genuine
health of her patients. The product—health—governs and regulates
her skill. She does not set out to learn or invent other practices
such as a way of killing patients very quickly. Such methods do not
belong to her medical skill. Almost anyone could kill a patient. Real
medical skill requires grasping what it means for organic beings to
function at the height of their powers.
The professions with their focus on client and customer needs
are quintessential arts. Unlike the first model, the second model
—the professional understanding of art—does not conceive of arts
as mere cunning. The cunning person is able to set a goal and then
devise ways of achieving that goal, irrespective of what that goal is.
Such a person is not much interested in disclosing the meaning of
DARYL KOEHN 59

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