Two Relationships Between Technology and Values

In many of my previous posts, I have assumed there are human values both independent of technology, and capable of providing benchmarks against which to measure the value of technological change. But technology itself often affects human values. I think some of these effects are crucial to any ideal of progress, but others threaten its very possibility. Here's a preliminary classification:

1) Technology that gives us a better understanding of the world and ourselves: Here, technology can play a crucial role in revealing to us the partiality or flat wrongness of our assumptions. The telescope revealed the shortcomings of a geocentric worldview, occasioning all manner of responsive revisions in elite and popular thought. Philosopher Charles Taylor would call such breakthroughs, and many of their social repercussions, "epistemic gains," which permit us a clearer and better view of the world and ourselves.

2) Technology that blunts or otherwise obscures our understanding of the world and ourselves: As Joel Garreau has argued, humans beings are not merely the authors of technological change, but also its objects, to an extent barely imaginable in earlier times. The convergence of genetics, robotics, information technology and nanotechnology (GRIN) has radically altered our sense of the possible in the realm of self-manipulation.

I'd like to focus on one angle here: the potential for "cosmetic pscychopharmacology" to dampen or reverse negative emotional states. (I focus on the term "cosmetic" to distinguish between the therapeutic alleviation of abnormal states (such as depression), and the enhancement of emotion to the point of feeling "better than well." So "cosmetic" is meant to designate, not the triviality or superficiality of the intervention, but rather, how different it is from classic methods of restoring health to a norm.)

On a purely individualist and hedonist account of well-being, we should welcome such a development--bring on the soma! But if we share Martha Nussbaums's account of emotions as judgments of value, a great deal is lost here. The technology may well have "extended human capacity," but for what end? And, more importantly, has it diminished the possibility of our rightly discerning our ends?

To bioethicists like Carl Elliott, using drugs to alleviate mild alienation may lead to self-betrayal, since intuitions about the worth or worthlessness of forms of life around us are constitutive of our identity. Peter Kramer counters that current drugs don’t dispatch such intuitions, but only relieve the negative affect they generate in those who hold them. But this response does not begin to address the social concerns raised by future technological interventions.