ArticlePhilosophy & technology2021
How Do Technological Artefacts Embody Moral Values?
Article in Philosophy & technology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Implicit ethical choices in ultra-rare therapy development: researchers' perspectives on patient selection and communication, therapy value, and accessibility.BMC medical ethics · 2026Article
- CARE-HOUSE: developing a framework for conceptualizing social implications of digital health technologies in palliative care.BMC palliative care · 2026Article
- The calculator analogy: Epistemic virtues for using LLMs.Technology in society · 2026Article
- Adapting Ourselves, Instead of the Environment: An Inquiry into Human Enhancement for Function and Beyond.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Article
- Technology and the Situationist Challenge to Virtue Ethics.Science and engineering ethics · 2024Article
- Emotions and Digital Well-Being: on Social Media's Emotional Affordances.Philosophy & technology · 2022Article
- Ethics of digital contact tracing and COVID-19: who is (not) free to go?Ethics and information technology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
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Abstract
According to some philosophers of technology, technology embodies moral values in virtue of its functional properties and the intentions of its designers. But this paper shows that such an account makes the values supposedly embedded in technology epistemically opaque and that it does not allow for values to change. Therefore, to overcome these shortcomings, the paper introduces the novel Affordance Account of Value Embedding as a superior alternative. Accordingly, artefacts bear affordances, that is, artefacts make certain actions likelier given the circumstances. Based on an interdisciplinary perspective that invokes recent moral anthropology, I conceptualize affordances as response-dependent properties. That is, they depend on intrinsic as well as extrinsic properties of the artefact. We have reason to value these properties. Therefore, artefacts embody values and are not value-neutral, which has practical implications for the design of new technologies.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.