Dewey, Ethics, Technology: What Can Pragmatist Philosophy Teach Us About Ed-Tech?

This is a presentation I gave at Stockholm University on 27.09.2024. See the abstract below: John Dewey may be commonly identified as a philosopher of education, but his work on ethics has made him one of the most prominent moral authorities of his time, and in recent years he has been increasingly recognized for his contributions to the philosophical study of technological progress. This talk presents an overview of Dewey’s key positions in ethics and philosophy of technology and demonstrates how Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy can help us understand and assess the role and impact of emerging educational technologies. I start by discussing Dewey’s notion of habit, an overarching category of dispositions towards specific kinds of action and thought that shape and filter our experience. For Dewey, reflection upon habits enables us to determine the goals and values we want to pursue in our lives and consciously choose the means of achieving them. As such, much of Dewey’s ethics is concerned with an inquiry into how to develop good habits – those that ameliorate the quality and depth of experience, both for us and those around us. At the same time, Dewey recognizes that moral life cannot be reduced to an individual pursuit of virtue and flourishing. He posits that experience and the good life inherently play out in and are shaped by our interactions with others. Consequently, he contends that to be desirable such interactions need to occur in the conditions of democracy – understood here not as a commitment to a set of procedures of governance, but a way of living together characterized by cooperation for the achievement of shared goals and values, and creation of equitable conditions for individual development of all. Understanding technology broadly as all human creations that help us engage with reality, Dewey recognized tools for their immense capacity for introducing change – for him, technologies both create new circumstances by opening new possibilities of action and help us develop habits to accommodate such new situations. At the same time, he did not subscribe to technological determinism that characterized many prominent theorists of technology of his time. Dewey’s suggestion that the meaning of specific artefacts can only be described through a reference to how they are incorporated in users’ practice (and not, e.g., to designers’ intentions) is strikingly modern. Dewey’s ethics combined with his writing on technology provides fertile ground for the analysis of the functions, as well as individual and societal impact of the tools that surround us. Do they produce desirable habits? To what extent can users reflect upon and shape the habits produced by their tools? How are interpersonal relations affected by technology use? To what extent are the technology’s users in control of its functioning and purposes? Are the benefits and burdens introduced by the technology distributed in an equitable way? I argue that such questions are especially relevant in the context of technology use in schools – places where students develop enduring dispositions for thought and action and learn the roles they will enact throughout their lives as members of democratic communities. The combination of several significant threads in Dewey’s work that I attempt in this talk provides a fruitful foundation for a critical examination of the ethical impact of educational technologies.