Materializing Morality: Design Ethics and Technological Mediation

During the past decade, the ‘script’ concept, indicating the actively prescribing role of technologies in human actions, has acquired a central place in STS. Up to now, the concept has mainly functioned in descriptive settings. This paper will deploy the concept in a normative setting. When technologies play a role in the coming about of human actions, they give material answers to the ethical question ‘how to act?’. This implies that engineers are doing ‘ethics with other means:’ they materialize morality. The paper will explore the implications of this insight for engineering ethics. It first augments the concept, by developing the notion of ‘technological mediation’ and showing that scripts can be seen as a form of mediation. After this, it investigates how the concept of mediation could be made fruitful for design ethics. It does so by discussing how the ambition to design technologies with the explicit aim to influence human actions raises moral questions itself, and by elaborating two methods for anticipating technological mediation in the design process: ‘anticipation by imagination’ in the form of a ‘mediation analysis’; and an augmented version of constructive technology assessment.