Techno-Moral Change
The term "techno-moral change" refers to the tendency of new technologies to change a society's sense of rightness, wrongness, and what good practice and proper behavior looks like.
A recent paper on the subject attempted to create a taxonomy of mechanisms through which technologies impact our moral beliefs and practices across three primary domains: they change the way we make morality-related decisions, how we relate to other people (and other conscious beings, more generally), and they change the way we perceive things.
Mechanistically, technologies influence our behavior across these domains (according to the researchers behind that paper) by increasing our range of options, changing the costs of making various choices, enabling or making more evident different sorts of relationships, changing the nature and scale (and capacity to handle) the burdens and expectations of our different sorts of relationships, adjusting the balance of power in our relationships (and larger-scale groupings), and changing our overall perception of everything, including how we organize and parse these perceptions (the mental models we use, the type of information we transmit and store, etc).
This framework is meant to help organize and clarify the tangle of concerns that arise when new technologies pop up out the ether and start messing with our sense of everything, including what it means to live a moral life and make moral choices.
For instance, if a pill were developed that could end obesity, allowing anyone who takes it to slim down and eliminate the risks associated with obesity, what moral responsibility does society have to make this pill available to anyone who wants it?
Does that responsibility change if it's very expensive?
Does it matter that the pill might initially only be available to a small segment of society?
What sorts of side-effects would be acceptable trade-offs for the benefits this pill offers?
What would this change do to our sense of body-image? Our health-related judgements (based on superficial aesthetic perception) of other people? Our sense of who's a good parent or a bad parent based on whether their kids are obese, which in this new theoretical paradigm would imply they either gave their child the pill or disallowed the same?
Would the deployment of this pill on a large scale improve overall health outcomes at the expense of body diversity, and would that be a valid tradeoff?
What would be a reasonable price for this sort of health outcome, and what other goals should we be willing to put off or give up in exchange?
These questions have become incredibly important and timely as treatments (derived from diabetes medications) that allow folks to lose weight with remarkable reliability and at stunning speed have emerged over the past few years, but researchers have been thinking about them since at least the 1980s, when a paper was published on the matter, using the topic as a thought experiment to help us imagine moral questions that are likely to be sparked by technological developments such as this one.
Similar thought experiments have been conducted on bioethics, social justice, our relationship with other lifeforms, technology-derived human enhancements (giving ourselves a variety of superpowers, basically), what happens as the way we give birth (or otherwise propagate the human species) changes in small or fundamental ways, and how we might approach the moral complexities of grand-scale endeavors like geoengineering.
On that last point, how might we judge whether the potential downsides of solar geoengineering (reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth by adding sulfur to the atmosphere, which then reflects more sunlight back into space) is worth the potential benefits (reducing the impacts of global warming, in the short-term).
The relevant theory seems to be sound, but we don't currently know if those theories would perform as intended in real life, at the necessary scale.
If we were to discover that flying planes filled with sulfur particles high enough and then releasing those particles into the air would reduce global average temperatures by let's say 1.5 degrees Celsius, buying us time to bring global greenhouse gas emissions down without suffering the significant, horrible anticipated impacts of a 1.5 degree-increase in global temperatures in the meantime, would it be moral to invest in this type of geoengineering?
What if, as anticipated, the impacts of doing so would be unevenly distributed, helping many areas at the expense of severely messing with a few?
Would it be moral for a single country to make this choice for everyone else, even against the wishes of other governments?
What if doing so would kill the Amazon rainforest or destroy a coral reef that's vital to the health of a major oceanic ecosystem? Would protecting a slew of other ecosystems justify that destruction?
What if doing so would reduce the amount of electricity generated by all the world's solar panels (because of the decrease in solar energy reaching the surface of the planet)?
Would an individual or company doing this sort of geoengineering independently be doing the world a service? Engaging in vandalism? Terrorism? An act of war?
We don't know yet, but we're reaching a point at which the technologies connected to these questions are here and becoming increasingly tangible, workable, and deployable.
The use of techno-moral change-related frameworks is intended to help us struggle through these questions, ahead of time, so that when such technologies arrive, we're ready for some of the heavier issues that they'll spark—not just of the practical variety, but of the grander, moral and philosophical variety, as well.