Chapter 3: "Moral Methodology and Information Technology"

Jeroen Van Den Hoven

Quote:
"If an engineer were to remark after a philosophy paper on the trolley problem t
hat one needed a device that would allow one to stop the train before it reached
the fork int he track, and sensors to inform one about living creatures on the
track, and preferably a smart combination of both, the presenter would probably
remark in the case of the whole problem would not arise the invention misses the
philosophical point of the philosophical thought experiment"
What I expect to learn:
I expect that the use of computer and computer science is associatied with the d
evelopment of application use to it.
Review:
To proceed IT in the ethics is not very different from thr way we ought to pro
ceed in the other departments of ethics of technology and engineering, although
there are certainly differences between the moral problems occasioned by the dif
ferent types of technology and there are certainly specific properties of comput
ers that need to be accomodated in our moral thinking about them. Ever since the
sixties, applied ethics has been growing. Every conceivable profession and clus
ter of issues has established in the meanwhile a special or applied ethics named
after itself-from "library ethics" to "sport ethics" to "business ethics". The
format of the explicit methodological account provided in many applied and profe
ssional ethics textbooks usually refers to the application of normative ethical
theories, such as utilitarianism, kantianism, or rawlsian justice as fairness, t
o particular cases. An important criticism of all generalist positions is the ob
jection formulated by Elizabeth Anscombe. She has pointed put that rule-based ap
proaches are all vulnerable to the porblem of acting under a description: "An ac
t-token will fall under many possible principles of action how can we tell which
act description is relevant for moral assessment. And how do we evaluate the ac
tions of persons who, according to us, fail to see the morally significant descr
iptions of what does? McDowell claims that instead of establishing rules of mora
l salience, as Barbara Herman has suggested, people should have capacities to ap
preciate salient features of the situation, or "capacities to read predicaments
correctly."
There is a methodological alternative to both pure generalism and pure particu
larism that combines the strengths of both and accomodates in one model the rati
onale for generalizing modes of moral thinking . The model combines elements of
both methodological extremes. It allows for appeals to considred judgments and i
ntuitions concerning particular cases, and it acknowledges the appropriateness o
f appeal to general principles that transcend particular cases. It accomodated t
he particularist objection to the Engineering View of moral justification, witho
ut giving up the principle of the supervenient application of moral reasons as e
xplained. It is dynamic and supports the nonmonotonicity of everyday moral reaso
ning.
What I have learned:
I learned it is clear that coherence conceptions of moral justifications are con
genial to the phenomena of belief and defeasible reasoning than are approaches m
odeled after the engineering model. This is a second important virtue of WRE.
Integrative questions
1.) What is Moral Methodology?
2.) What is WRE?
3.) What is design turn in applied ethics?
4.) What is value sensitive design?
5.) What is Jeroen moral perspective?