Abstract
According to the empirical turn, we should take empirical facts into account in asking and answering philosophical, including ethical, questions about technology. In this chapter, the implications of the empirical turn for the ethics of technology are explored by investigating the relation between social acceptance (an empirical fact) and moral acceptability (an ethical judgement) of a technology. After discussing how acceptance is often problematically framed as a constraint to overcome, a preliminary analysis of the notions of acceptance and acceptability is offered. Next, the idea of a logical gap between acceptance and acceptability is explained. Although the gap is accepted, it is also argued that the distinction between acceptance and acceptability does not exactly map on the descriptive/normative distinction and that both notions are maybe best seen as thick concepts. Next, it is shown how a coherentist account of ethics, in particular John Rawls’ model of wide reflective equilibrium can account for the relation between acceptance and acceptability.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that normative judgments about acceptability of a technology are also open to revision because of changes in the way the object of the normative judgment (the technology) is interpreted and described. This case comes closer to changes in statements about acceptance. For our purposes, however, this is not an interesting case; it may even be questioned whether in this case we are dealing with a normative judgment about the same technology.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is the result of various conversations with Peter Kroes about this topic. I thank him wholeheartedly for these (and other) fruitful, inspiring and thought-provoking discussions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the symposium on “Social acceptance in energy through democratic and administrative procedures” held on November 6, 2014 in St. Gallen (Switzerland) and at the SPT (Society for Philosophy of Technology) conference, held from July 2–6, 2015 at Northeastern University in Shenyang (China). I also like to thank Maarten Franssen for comments on an earlier version of the paper. Any mistakes in the paper are fully my responsibility.
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van de Poel, I. (2016). A Coherentist View on the Relation Between Social Acceptance and Moral Acceptability of Technology. In: Franssen, M., Vermaas, P., Kroes, P., Meijers, A. (eds) Philosophy of Technology after the Empirical Turn. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33717-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33717-3_11
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