Knowledge without wisdom → Science without scrutiny →Technology without net social benefit
Much has been written in our previous essays about the hazards of technological development with respect to social welfare in the largest sense of that term. In this essay, we take a brief look at some parameters of useful ethical limitations on technological development. To be clear, given all that we have considered already about how technological advance can have an automatic deleterious effect on human capacities – the more technology does for us the less we need to do for ourselves, and therefore the less we need our innate capacities and the more fragile they become over time, as well as the very real possibility that technology (or Technique in Ellulian terminology) represents a kind of spiritual force that is deleterious to spiritual health, and acquires a kind of supra-scientific ideological momentum that is expressed by scientism and technocracy. The jury is still out on these important questions, and so, to repeat, we do not wish to be understood as saying that so long as certain ethical requirements are met then technological progress should continue apace, but rather we are proposing the obverse, on which we think all sides should be able to agree: that if certain ethical preconditions are not met in a particular sphere of technological endeavor, then that line of development should not be pursued, and should in fact be prohibited by law.
For heuristic purposes, we shall examine some of these ethical parameters as they impact the various phases of the productive process in modern political economy: conception, research & development, production, distribution, consumption and final disposition.
By “conception” we mean the original idea and its evident purpose. This ought always to be something which in some way improves the human condition, either helping people to meet needs not currently met by industry and technology, or enabling them to meet them better through improvement of productive processes. Moreover, the need in question ought to be an existing need with a natural basis, not a contrived and artificial “need” which exists solely to provide an excuse to be met by lucrative technological development. Hopefully this requirement does not need further explication. A good example of a violation of this principle is the recent “gain of function” experimentation to develop human contagious pathogens that then (supposedly) require the purchase of concomitantly developed “vaccines” to protect human health.
This seguès nicely into the research & development area. Research which in and of itself poses a risk to the lives and health of the citizenry ought to be prohibited. The biological research mentioned above is one example. Nuclear research another. Advanced weaponry research a third, and so forth. (That weapons development and production is privatized is a moral problem in the first place.)
Now the productive process itself is where the ethical rubber truly meets the road. There can be no ethical production, high-tech or otherwise, unless and until what conventional economics calls “externalities” are accounted for as surely the “internal” bottom line of the manufacturer. The impact of the productive process itself on all communities with which it interfaces must be scrutinized objectively. Both in how an industry obtains the materials it transforms into products, and how its effluents and byproducts impact the local community, must be seen as a matter of liability for which it should be legally and financially accountable. Any industry which is a net polluter ought to be prohibited from operating, and likewise any industry who introduces toxic byproducts into the local environment. With respect to how it obtains raw materials, we only need consider the example of the exploited child labor in the Congo and elsewhere that undergirds the extraction of lithium to provide the batteries that power the new “green” electric vehicles, which create Elon Musk’s Tesla “success.” There is much more that could be written on this head, but we are only providing a brief overview in this essay, so space does not permit.1
Distribution involves transportation and sales. Transportation should not put at serious risk either the transporter or the population at large. We see how this principle was violated in the recent, calamitous toxic train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio. Sales is possibly the least ethically challenged area, but we experienced some price gouging during the recent Covid Plandemic when supply chains were seriously disrupted, reminding us that the medieval “Just Price” principle remains ethically relevant today. We add to this the question of marketing and advertising, where psychological trickery is rife, making it almost a species of witchcraft….it would not be tolerated in a sane society.
On the consumption side, every product should be safe and not in any way generate deleterious health consequences for its consumer. If it does, the manufacturer of the product must be held fully legally liable, particularly when it is clear that it knew or should have known of the danger its product represented to the consumer.
Suppose all of these ethical metrics are met, and yet the consumer, after having used the product to the end of its natural life, is left with an item that is not biodegradable and requires additional expense to properly dispose of — is this an ethical production process? No, it is not. Here is one more “externality” that is really an “internality” in that it was implicit from the beginning of the production cycle. The only satisfactory resolution to this problem is to make all manufacturers responsible for the complete recycling of products which do not biodegrade. The principle should be to return the earth to its pre-production pristine state, to the status quo ante, and this should be the legal requirement of every manufacturer. It is notable that some years ago several German manufacturers were beginning to voluntarily experiment with the implementation of this idea.
The purpose of this essay was to provide a brief overview of the ethical considerations involved in modern production, a productive process which is rapidly advancing technology. The list hardly makes the claim to be exhaustive, but it is hoped that this short list of economic ethics gives the reader some insight into the kinds of conditions which ought to have been laid on the productive process in the first place, but generally were not, leading to many of our current social and environmental problems. If we can establish a consensus that manufacturers, who generally seek to solve these problems by a headlong rush into ever more advanced technologies (which in their turn create more advanced problems), must be held accountable for all the social costs they externalize, we might find that the pace of technological development slows considerably, and it may still occur to many at some point that the whole rush to solve social problems with technological means is a fool’s errand. Or maybe, just maybe, it will result in technology developing in ways that are truly humane. In either case, a win for humanity!
1It must be stated parenthetically that the productive process in ALL manufacturing, not just high tech, ought to satisfy the elementary requirements of social justice to assure equitable return on labor, not just on capital. This is the innate problem of capitalism which we have addressed elsewhere and do no need to belabor here; notwithstanding, it must be mentioned along with the other problems mass production brings to society...under capitalist production methods class division in society, and the ensuing “social problem” it generates, are ineluctable.