In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

145 10 Technology: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Richard A. Cohen Introduction Based on a lifetime of careful investigation into the significance of human embodiment and technology, the work of Don Ihde has revolved around the central insight that technology represents an extension of human embodiment. Intimately related to this central insight Ihde has elaborated on two important corollaries. The first, which has far-reaching ramifications both within and beyond the subdiscipline called “the philosophy of technology,” is that there is no “bodily-sensory perception that is without its socio-cultural dimension” (BT 133). The human body is not first an object or a subject, but a way of being-in-the-world inseparable from sociocultural contextualization. Therefore the meaning of technology must also be grasped in terms of its sociocultural context. Of course, introducing the dimension of the sociocultural introduces the imperative force of moral values and the human judgments that sustain values. Examining this dimension—the role of morality and justice in relation to embodiment and technology—is the central concern of the present paper. Ihde’s second corollary already takes up this topic: the specific modification of the body’s essential sociocultural significance by its technological extension provides no basis for either utopian or dystopian glosses of its value. The extension of the human body through technology is both quantitative and qualitative, to be sure, but not such as to enable overarching blanket value judgments. These valuations of technology (or anything else for that matter) depend rather on metaphysical presuppositions that are necessarily external and untrue to a phenomenological-hermeneutic understanding of 146 Richard A. Cohen the human embodiment of which technology is the extension. As a philosopher , Ihde wisely rejects all a priori totalizing interpretations. Technology, whatever its contribution to human life, offers neither the universal panacea optimistically claimed by utopians nor the universal bane pessimistically declaimed by dystopians. True to the results of his earliest phenomenological investigations of perception, Ihde writes: “The possible uses [of technology] are always ambiguous and multi-stable” (BT 131). Another concern of this paper is to contextualize and in this way to criticize, along with Ihde, the false dyad of utopianism and dystopianism in understanding the significance of technology. I am in complete agreement with Ihde on the points above: technology is an extension of human embodiment; human embodiment, and hence technology , must be understood within sociocultural contexts; and finally, these contexts, and not the fantasy of a technology divorced from its proper fields of significance (body and world), provide the only legitimate grounds for the evaluations too broadly and hence illegitimately drawn by utopians and dystopians. Technology is “good” or “evil” as the human hand or foot are good or evil, or rather as human action, of which technology is an extension , is good or evil. Putting aside the metaphysical presuppositions of utopians and dystopians, the human body and the technologies that extend it are neither good nor evil a priori. Technology is, in a word, instrumental. Instruments can be used for good or evil, and are historically usually used for both. Nevertheless, evaluation is as essential to the sociocultural context of human being-in-the-world as is the latter’s technological dimensions. Indeed, to go one step farther, the thesis of this paper is that evaluation is a more profound dimension of being-in-the-world than technological instrumentality. Hence the latter must be grasped within an appreciation for the imperatives of the former. Despite their own evaluative zeal, it is precisely this, the priority of ethics in sociocultural life, which the utopians and dystopians fail to recognize. The human world attains its “humanity” insofar as it always already determines the meaning of “importance” as an ethical category. While both utopians and dystopians seem to value ethics, loudly crying “good” and “evil,” in the end they overvalue it and misunderstand the ethical character of sociocultural life. And by misunderstanding the place of ethics they inadvertently do something terrible: they undermine the possibility of a genuine appreciation for its role in human affairs. The thesis of this chapter is not, however, that technology is “valuefree .” In one sense, divorced from all else, in its pure instrumentality, technology is indeed value-free. But such is an analytical abstraction, essence divorced from existence. Technology is value-free in the way, as I have said, a hand is value-free. Technology, in other words, does not ultimately alter a [3.140.242...

Share