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Technology and Values provides a highly useful collection of essays organized around issues related to science, technology, public health, economics, the environment, and ethical theory. The editors present effective introductions that provide background information as well as philosophical tools and case studies to facilitate understanding of the variety of issues emanating from the most significant developments in technology, including the effects on privacy of the widespread use of computers to store and retrieve personal information and the ethical considerations of genetic engineering.
Can we use technology in the pursuit of a good life, or are we doomed to having our lives organized and our priorities set by the demands of machines and systems? How can philosophy help us to make technology a servant rather than a master? Technology and the Good Life? uses a careful collective analysis of Albert Borgmann's controversial and influential ideas as a jumping-off point from which to address questions such as these about the role and significance of technology in our lives. Contributors both sympathetic and critical examine Borgmann's work, especially his "device paradigm"; apply his theories to new areas such as film, agriculture, design, and ecological restoration; and consider the place of his thought within philosophy and technology studies more generally. Because this collection carefully investigates the issues at the heart of how we can take charge of life with technology, it will be a landmark work not just for philosophers of technology but for students and scholars in the many disciplines concerned with science and technology studies.
Maps interconnections between science, technology, and society in order to understand both benefits and costs.
We all live our daily lives surrounded by the products of technology that make what we do simpler, faster, and more efficient. These are benefits we often just take for granted. But at the same time, as these products disburden us of unwanted tasks that consumed much time and effort in earlier eras, many of them also leave us more disengaged from our natural and even human surroundings. It is the task of what Gene Moriarty calls focal engineering to create products that will achieve a balance between disburdenment and engagement: “How much disburdenment will be appropriate while still permitting an engagement that enriches one’s life, elevates the spirit, and calls forth a good life in a...
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America is a wonderful and magnificent country that affords its citizens the broadest freedoms and the greatest prosperity in the world. But it also has its share of warts. It is embroiled in a war that many of its citizens consider unjust and even illegal. It continues to ravage the natural environment and ignore poverty both at home and abroad, and its culture is increasingly driven by materialism and consumerism. But America, for better or for worse, is still a nation that we have built. So why then, asks Albert Borgmann in this most timely and urgent work, are we failing to take responsibility for it? In Real American Ethics, Borgmann asks us to reevaluate our role in the making of Ameri...
Analyzes value changes arising from new university-industry research relationships.
Activists, scientists, and scholars in the social sciences and humanities explore in productive dialogue what it means to democratize science and technology. The contributors consider what role lay people can have in a realm traditionally restricted to experts, and examine the socio-economic and ideological barriers to creating a science oriented more toward human needs. Included are several case studies of efforts to expand the role of citizens -- including discussions of AIDS treatment activism, technology consensus conferences in Europe and the United States, the regulation of nuclear materials processing and disposal, and farmer networks in sustainable agriculture -- and examinations of how the Enlightenment premises of modern science constrain its field of vision. Other chapters suggest how citizens can interpret differing opinions within the scientific communities on issues of clear public relevance.
Contextualizes the "Science Wars" from interdisciplinary sociological, historical, scientific, political, and cultural perspectives.