Does development ethics address technology sufficiently?

From December 2-4 the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA) organized a conference in Valencia, with this time a focus on “how various social actors can and ought to take responsibility for acting on poverty and expanding human development” (see here for info about this conference). I submitted and presented a small paper arguing for more attention for technology and the responsibility of engineers within development ethics. I drew a bird’s-eye view of relevant changes within the field of ethics and technology and thinking about the responsibility of engineers there. In some cases, I argued, development ethicists should also be an ethicist of technology and vice versa. I ended my paper with a short example of the Spoken Web, to illustrate the sort of research I would like to see more (see here for my paper).

David Crocker and Luis Camacho at a plenary session of the IDEA conference

Both attending the conference and reading David Crocker’s new book (Ethics of Global Development – Agency, Capability and Deliberative Democracy, 2009) have made me ponder about the following question: where does ‘development & technology ethics’ take place? In this paper I base my claim that hardly any attention has been paid to ethics, technology and development on two quite limited bodies of literature: academic, English-language publications in development ethics and ethics of technology (although the former is emphasized more than the latter). Yet this claim has been challenged in several ways.

Firstly, at the conference I was introduced to Luis Camacho, a philosopher of technology from Costa Rica who is also engaged in development ethics. He has written mostly in Spanish, although he also has some English-language work that he promised to send to me. I look forward to reading it and readily admit that there may be a lot of relevant work in Spanish and other languages that I have no access to unless I learn to master more languages – although during a little internet search after this meeting I found the book Philosophy of Technology in Spanish Speaking Countries, (Carl Mitcham, ed, 1993) to which Camacho made a contribution. This will allow me and other people interested in the topic of this paper to have at least a peek into what is going on elsewhere.

Secondly, David Crocker – whom I also had the pleasure to meet at the conference – includes in his book a chapter in which he situates development ethics as an integral part of what he calls “development theory-practice”. He convincingly argues for a development ethics that goes “beyond theoreticians and include development policy makers, politicians, activists, journalist, and citizens.” Seen in that light, was not at least a part of the 1970s appropriate technology movement implicitly doing development ethics in critiquing the role of technology in development and proposing practical alternatives? And more recently, was Indian activist Vendana Shiva (2001) then not doing development ethics when she criticized the UNDP’s view on technology as it was revealed in their Human Development Report 2001, which had as a subtitle “making new technologies work for human development”? It may then seem that I have been looking too much at academic contributions.

Thirdly, there are disciplinary divides within (English-language) academia that I may not have bridged sufficiently in this paper, considering my emphasis on the places where academic ethics formally takes place, namely as a sub-discipline of philosophy. Yet in response to my Spoken Web example Sandra Smeltzer, a communication scholar, commented that there already exists a huge amount of ‘critical’ literature about ICT for development. Of course my claim was, although I have chosen to illustrate my point with an ICT example, about technology in the broadest sense and not only about a specific technological domain. This being said, I admit that I do not have a good overview of all work on technology / ICT for development taking place in other disciplines than philosophy and ethics. Yet it is likely that geographers, communication scholars, and academics from other empirical fields sometimes also engage with their topic in a philosophical/ethical way. Smeltzer’s comment actually fits in nicely with Crocker’s book, as he also discusses the linkages between research taking place in ethics and in the empirical disciplines.

Rather than disqualifying my paper, I see these three points as future challenges or points of attention for the sort of research that my paper calls for. David Crocker suggests that “some development theorypractices are better than others insofar as they explicitly include and successfully integrate the various components” and his book in combination with the conference helped me to form a broader and more explicit picture of those components.