Abstract
Technical artefacts are subject to normative judgements, in particular evaluative judgements, as a matter of course: we speak of good saws, poor drills, and so forth. These judgements concern the instrumental value of artefacts: a saw is good as a saw, a drill is poor as a drill. In this essay I investigate whether we can also attribute non-instrumental value to artefacts, where we would judge an artefact to be good or bad not in the sense of being an instrumentally good saw or poor drill but being a morally good saw or bad drill. Adopting an overall view of normativity that takes reasons for action or thought as the fundamental notion and that links the value of anything that has value to the existence of reasons to create or promote it in case of positive value or goodness and to the existence of reasons to eliminate or fight it in case of negative value or badness, I defend a view that artefacts can be evaluated as bad or good not on the basis of how they are used but on the basis of their design. Additionally I look into the question whether this analysis applies to an equally extent to judgements of artefacts as bad and judgements of artefacts as good and show some form of asymmetry between the two. Finally I extend the analysis beyond the class of technical artefacts to moral judgements of other artefacts, notably works of art.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This ignores the aspect of uncertainty, that is, that we typically cannot be sure which state of affairs will result from an action. This aspect is central to formal theories of action, such as the theory of rational choice. I will, however, ignore this aspect in this paper.
- 3.
Dancy (2000, p. 159).
- 4.
One may judge that it requires further argumentation that ‘value as such’, the value that a state-of-affairs has such that one has reasons to bring it about, is moral value. I will not do so here, however, and, for reasons of simplicity, equate the notions of non-instrumental value and moral value.
- 5.
I have elsewhere emphasized a distinction between artefact kinds as primarily functional kinds, defined by a particular form of use, like ‘knife’, and artefact kinds as primarily structural kinds, defined by minimally an operational principle and possibly further details about it make-up. This distinction will matter only in Sect. 12.4 and I will not elaborate it here; see note 7 for more details.
- 6.
Indeed Hansson (2006), following Godlovich, includes the absence of undesired (side-)effects in the functional characteristics of technical artefacts.
- 7.
See (Franssen 2009) and (Franssen 2013) for more details about the distinction between functional kinds and artefact kinds. The term ‘artefact kind’ for the more narrowly defined kind is my own; the term ‘functional kind’ is of course widely used, but seldom with the understanding that it is just one way among several of classifying artefacts (or other items to which functions are attributed, such as biological items) into kinds.
- 8.
My analysis supposes that the instrument emerging from the design actually is capable of performing as intended to a sufficient extent. An instrument of torture that was designed so grossly inadequately that one could not possibly use it to inflict pain on anyone and would even find positive applications once its failure as an instrument of torture had become obvious could hardly be termed a bad artefact and would therefore pose a counter-example to the present analysis. However, most accounts of technical artefacts contain some form of success condition for the realization of the designer’s intentions for an item to be a member of a particular artefact kind; e.g. Thomasson (2003).
- 9.
Could it ever be different? Suppose that someone builds a copy of Kafka’s torturing machine in order to see whether such a device was possible at all, or to see how it could work, or merely as an idiosyncratic way of expressing admiration for the story. Could this person claim that this copy was not a bad machine because it would not have been ‘informed’ by bad intentions? Surely we would judge that there was something definitely perverse about this motivation.
- 10.
There is of course the question whether it is true that artefacts make our lives go better. This is an aspect of the issue whether there is such a thing as ‘progress’. I cannot take up this question here. For an interesting treatment, see Rescher (1980).
- 11.
The reasons, however, cannot be compelling, because for instance one of the other options on the table may be to design a thing that is superior to the one under consideration. How to conceive of this modal notion of ‘should be designed’ is highly dependent on how we individuate the artefact kind at issue and how we individuate the act of designing it. This is an issue where there is still much unclarity, and I cannot satisfactorily discuss it, let alone solve it, in this paper. The issue returns in the next section.
- 12.
There will be some fine-tuning at work in the background: the need must itself be reasonable, otherwise one cannot have a reason to satisfy it, and the particular artefact must be operational and not malfunctioning, otherwise one cannot have a reason to use this artefact. See Franssen (2006) and (2009) for more details concerning this fine-tuning.
- 13.
There is a whiff of paradox here. How can the receptacle be inviting if one does not have a reason to use it? But there is actually no conflict, because ‘inviting’ should be interpreted as a behavioural term, which does not require reasons or intentionality.
- 14.
Stalin famously addressed writers as ‘engineers of the soul’ during a meeting in 1932, to express his wish for an ‘industrialization’ of literature in support of the building of socialism. He may have borrowed the expression from the Russian avantgardist author Sergei Tretiakov, who in 1926 had referred to writers as ‘psycho-engineers’. See Golomstock (2011, pp. 26 and 84).
- 15.
I would even claim that for a relatively narrow set of traditional responses associated with artworks, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ convey the same normative content as ‘good’ and ‘poor’ do.
- 16.
Some people might even want to include Kafka’s ‘In the penal colony’.
- 17.
One might claim that, by celebrating the Nazi image of the blond and tall Arian, the film partook in the Nazi definition of the Untermensch. Then why not label the average Hollywood film or U.S. television series as morally bad for celebrating an ideal of human beauty that the majority of the population falls grossly short of? Because we do not kill plain people? Neither was there any systematic killing of Untermenschen in 1935.
- 18.
Cf. the story by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote’.
- 19.
Eventually it was not cremated with him, although for almost a decade after Saito’s death the fate of the painting remained a mystery.
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Franssen, M. (2014). The Good, the Bad, the Ugly… and the Poor: Instrumental and Non-instrumental Value of Artefacts. In: Kroes, P., Verbeek, PP. (eds) The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7914-3_12
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