Assessing Value-Laden Technology

Technological innovations—tools, artefacts, and processes—open up new possibilities of human action and thereby increase the domain of our positive freedom. Technology is inherently value-laden, since such an intended increase of freedom may be a good or bad relative to human values. The use of tools may also involve unintended and unwanted by-products and side effects. Therefore, technology should not develop in a deterministic or random manner but should be guided by reasonable democratic principles. Technology assessment (TA) is a pattern for the evaluation of technological projects and products by their costs and benefits, risks, and profits. Using philosophical distinctions and arguments as its method, this paper explains, elaborates, and illustrates Niiniluoto’s formula TA = 6E + S for TA. The first E is effectiveness, the ability of the new tool or solution to produce its intended effects. This is the main concern of the engineer. The second is its economic profit, based on the monetary exchange value of the product. This is the domain of economic theories. Effectiveness and economy, and efficiency as their combination, are not the only relevant dimensions of TA. As products of design, artefacts have esthetic qualities, studied today in applied esthetics. The relations of tools to the health of their users are studied in ergonomics. The relations of human technologies to the health of the natural environment and sustainable development are treated in ecology. Technical tools and their effects can always be evaluated by ethical standards which concern their moral worth. Technological systems have also an impact which is social in the broad sense, since they can lead to changes in the communicative, legal, institutional, and political spheres of society.