Technology and Values: A Philosopher's Perspective

It sometimes seems that everyone is worrying about what has happened to our traditional values. Pick up the magazine section of your local newspaper almost any Sunday and it is as likely as not to include a comment or two on the contemporary "values crisis" in America. Newsweek, celebrating the Fourth of July back in 1970, attempted to give some substance to this journalistic pastime. Its editors asked a panel of well-known historians-Eugene Genovese, Staughton Lynd, Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Daniel Boorstin, and Andrew Hacker (reading from left to right on the political spectrum)-to reflect on "the spirit of '70: . . .what ails the American spirit" (July 6, 1970). Of the comments offered by the panelists, Arthur Schlesinger's reflections most clearly focused on reasons for the values crisis (all the authors except Boorstin admitted that there is a crisis of one kind or another): "America is unquestionably experiencing an extreme crisis of confidence .... If the crisis seems today more acute in the United States than anywhere else, it is not because of the character of our economic system; it is because the revolutions wrought by science and technology have gone farther here than anywhere else. ... Every nation, as it begins to reach a comparable state of technical development, will have to undergo comparable crises." It is this focus on technology as a causative factor in the undermining of traditional values that is our concern here. All sorts of social critics agree with Schlesinger that technology is at the root of our contemporary malaise. Not all of them blame technology, however, and a spectrum of technology evaluations can be set up in close parallel to the Newsweek spectrum of reflections on the "crisis of the American spirit." In what follows I want, first, to spell out a spectrum of technology assessments. (The phrase "technology assessment" has in the last