Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

New Books in Technology · Feb 15, 2012 · 1h 4m

“Guns don’t kill people; people do.” That’s a common refrain from the National Rifle Association, but it expresses a certain view of our relations to the things we make that also affects our thinking about the scope of ethics. On this traditional view, human persons are moral agents, and artifacts, or products of technology in general, are just tools; they have no moral significance in and of themselves. In his new book, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Peter-Paul Verbeek, professor of philosophy at the University…