Ethics in a Technological Age

• Author: Daryl Koehn
• Date: 01 March 1999
• Published date: 01 March 1999
• DOI: http://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