Doing Good With Technologies

20th century technologies like cars, the Internet, and the contraceptive pill have altered our actions, changed our perceptions and influenced our moral ideas, for better and worse. Upcoming technologies are bound to fulfill their own unique social roles. How can we advance this social role so that it will support the good live and limit undesired changes? This book explores whether we can take a forward looking responsibility to optimize the social roles of technologies. In doing so, the book discusses three issues: first, it aims to understand the social role of technologies; second, it explores what it means to accept responsibility for this social role, and; third, it searches for some forward looking tools that help us to see how new technologies may influence human behavior. In a rather unique approach, this book combines the influential sociological research of Bruno Latour on the social impacts of technologies with the contemporary Aristotelianism of Alasdair MacIntyre.

Katinka Waelbers is a researcher at the philosophy department at the Maastricht University. Her research interests range broadly in bio-ethics, philosophy of technology, environmental philosophy, and political philosophy. She studied Science & Policy (BSc and MSc) and Philosophy (Ba and MSc) at the Utrecht University. She participated in multiple research projects in bio-ethics, environmental ethics, and ethics of technology at the Utrecht University (1998-2005). In 2005, she decided to focus on the philosophy of technology and she went to the University of Twente. There, her work focused on responsibility and future technologies such as nano-technology, IT, and the intelligent car of the future. Since november 2010, she is employed at the Maastricht University to reflect about the future techno-social and techno-moral change. She authored multiple articles and reports, and published several books.