Horizons of Care: from Future Imaginaries to Responsible Innovation

Horizons of care: from future imaginaries to responsible innovation

Christopher Groves

ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGEN),Cardiff University, UK

[email protected]

http://cardiff.academia.edu/ChristopherGroves

Abstract

Science and Technology Studies and, in particular, the sociology of expectations has shown in detail how the evolution of emerging technologies is shaped by promises, and the future imaginaries that underlie them. But beyond the specific content of the projected future, there is the act of projecting itself, what we might call our relationship to the future horizon. As Niklas Luhmann notes, “[…] the essential characteristic of a horizon is that we can never touch it, never get at it, never surpass it, but that in spite of that, it contributes to the definition of the situation”. Aside from investigations of particular expectations or imagined futures, we may find that what renders consistent a wide range of imagined futures, technological and otherwise, is how they perform and relate to the future as the horizon of the present – how they, for example, empty and commodify it, open it up or close it off, or render it tangible in the present as a latent stake in the hazards of action. Attention to the quality of future-orientation is therefore important because this quality defines how we shall live with uncertainty, whether we amplify or reduce it, and how we inscribe our relationships with future inhabitants of the planet (human and non-human) into our present. Drawing on examples of the future horizons of nanotechnologies, I suggest that sensitization to the implicit future horizons of technological imaginaries can point up central ethical and political contradictions within them, and sketch how a future horizon informed by care ethics can help us think productively about the meaning of responsible innovation, both in nanotechnology and more widely.

Biography

Chris Groves' work focuses on how people and institutions negotiate and deal with an intrinsically uncertain future – one increasingly imagined against the backdrop of global environmental change and accelerating technological innovation. Along with the ethical and political implications of a range of

http://cardiff.academia.edu/ChristopherGroves

mailto:[email protected]

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future-oriented discourses and practices (e.g. risk management, precautionary regulation, building resilience), he examines how our ideas about what it means for individuals and whole societies to take responsibility for their futures are being changed by emerging technologies (such as the convergence between bio- and nanotechnology and personalised genetic testing). The monograph Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics (Brill, 2007), co-authored with Professor Barbara Adam (Social Science, Cardiff University), examines these themes in depth.

1. Introduction

Speaking about responsible innovation today, I want to talk about the essential tension

within that concept, an at first sight perhaps uncomfortable conjunction of two words. Socially,

we are excellent at innovation, but much poorer at understanding and practicing what it might

mean to innovate responsibly. Or: making futures is easy, yet doing so responsibly is not.

Following some introductory remarks on imaginaries, I want to do three things: (1) examine the

sense in which this problem becomes manifest in modernity as an ethical problem of

responsibility. (2) sketch a diagnosis of the socio-cultural roots of this problem, which draws on

my previous work on nanotechnology and my collaborations with the time theorist, Barbara

Adam; and (3) sketch a future direction in which I think our thinking about responsible

innovation needs to move.

These three steps will contextualise our use of technology as part of a wider socio-

cultural concern - making sense of and giving shape to an uncertain future. Forms of knowledge

and regimes of truth, social practices as goal driven activities, ethical frameworks and desire,

considered as a socially-organised force, are all equally implicit within this concern. Although

the examination of imaginaries of the future, defined by Joan Fujimura (2003) as 'visions of

future possibilities around which scientific practices and communities are organized' is a


contribution understanding how we make sense of an uncertain future, an additional perspective

is also needed. Going beyond what I will suggest are problematic metaphors of vision, we need

to be able to speak of how societies live the future within the present, of the different styles in

which they do this. I want to talk about the concept of a 'future horizon' as a contribution to this

project. This is intended both as a response to Fujimura's call for a 'sociology of the future' to

study the social determinants of future imaginaries, but also as an attempt to establish a link

between STS, on the one hand, and moral and political philosophy on the other. From a

sociological analysis of how the uncertain future is domesticated, with the aid of technology and

otherwise, we can open up a new ground for ethical and political thought - a critical theory of

uncertainty. In this respect, the project I outline here has much in common, methodologically

speaking and otherwise, with the approach taken by Peter Paul Verbeek here at Twente on the

ethics of technological mediation - a body of work to which I will return in the final section of

my talk.

2. Consequentialism and the temptations of foresight

We begin with an analysis of the ethical tension within the idea of responsible

innovation. Innovation is inherently a future-creating activity: by bringing something new into

the world, it can change the world itself. If we are to explain what responsible innovation is to

mean, then we must be able to explain what it means to take responsibility before the event, ex

ante, for the future that the activity of innovation helps to create.


Modernity, as many sociologists from Weber and Durkheim through to Zygmunt Bauman

have argued, involves both social differentiation and reintegration: new divisions of labour and

the multiplication of social roles, but also attempts to formulate new overarching moral

principles. The purpose of these principles was to replace the vanishing moral certainties of the

worldview of medieval Europe, which J. B. Schneewind (1984) calls the "divine corporation",

with God at the head as its CEO. In the medieval moral frame, what it meant to act responsibly

was fixed with an eye on the past, on rules that carried the deontological authority of religious

revelation.

But a world in which traditional bonds were being loosened by the rise of science,

mercantile and then industrial capitalism, and new political philosophies of equality was, by

contrast, increasingly future-oriented - a world that could be improved. Such a world requires a

consequentialist morality, where right and wrong are made to depend on outcomes. It is the

world of Max Weber's Zweckrationalität. As Henry S. Richardson has pointed out, the ideal

moral agent of this emerging consequentialist age is, therefore, Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian

subject, a subject who strives to assess, with precision, the contribution each act she performs

makes to the aggregate happiness of society. Foresight is the badge of the responsible agent, and

scientific, utilitarian precision is offered as the benchmark of good foresight. Vision is the

condition of progress, as in the Roco quotation.

The problem is that the perspective of a perfect utilitarian agent is ultimately impossible

to adopt, as to overcome uncertainty would require foresight capable of covering the entire span

of the consequences of any act. The utilitarian philosopher J. J. C. Smart blithely proposed that,


in most circumstances, the utilitarian can assume that the "remote effects of his actions tend

rapidly to zero, like the ripples on a pond after a stone has been thrown into it" (Smart and

Williams 1973, p. 64). This implies that the moral agent has both first and second order

responsibilities. Responsible for assessing the consequences of an action, the agent is also

responsible for deciding when she must put her futurescope away, as it were, and make up

his/her mind to act. Sometimes, as Smart notes, in situations that are relatively routine, this

second order responsibility is undemanding. With respect to other activities, however, the

opposite is true – and technological innovation is one such. An age of innovation and

improvisation is also necessarily an age of surprises, some of which are unwanted, as a variety of

authors from Edward Tenner to Ulrich Beck have documented.

The problem here is that, to exercise foresight, one must have access to reliable

knowledge about the world. The standard of reliability for such knowledge in modernity is

generally provided by natural science. However, as Ian Hacking (1986) and others have pointed

out, the potential of advanced technologies for creating unforeseen 'interference effects' is written

into the way they are emebedded within contemporary societies. Their pervasiveness and

proximity to each other creates the likelihood of nasty surprises. Yet, as Luigi Pellizzoni (2004)

has observed, according to the legal principle of reasonable foreseeability, an agent can be

absolved of liability even if later found to be causally responsible for creating harm, so long as

the agent was inescapably ignorant of the potential consequences of his or her actions at the time

of acting (Pellizzoni 2004). If the 'state of the art' in science could not have predicted certain

consequences at the time of acting, then how can someone be judged responsible for producing

them? Yet at the same time, this condition of ignorance is, on Hacking's account, still a form of


culpable ignorance. We have become aware, thanks to living in technological societies where

phenomena like PCB pollution, asbestos-related illnesses and BSE are widespread, that we can

expect the unexpected. Nonetheless, how can we take responsibility for avoiding consequences

that, even if we suspect they may be in wait for us or others, we cannot foresee?

The idea that foresight is a prerequisite for moral agency is therefore problematic.

Metaphors of clear vision, as Robert Romanyshyn (1989) has shown, are a key element within

how modernity approaches the future. Yet they help to obscure the reality of the new

uncertainties that haunt technological societies. A better metaphor for our situation is perhaps

provided by Walter Benjamin's extended riff on Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus: 'The storm

irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned...the storm is what we call

progress'. Like Klee's angel, we modern consequentialists have our face turned towards the past,

even as we think of ourselves as confronting an open future. The 'state of the art' of scientific

knowledge is rooted in the past - it is, if you like, a picture of the world as it has existed up until

the point where it makes new innovations possible. From this picture, we can extrapolate what

the world may be like in the future. But once scientific knowledge hasbeen translated into

technology and innovation – actual transformative interventions in the world – the world as it has

hitherto been framed within the lens of science may no longer exist – this is, essentially,

Hacking's point. Our reliance on science prompts us to imagine the future as 'stationary', in the

words of French economist Andre Orlean (2010). In fact, experiences of nasty technological

surprises demonstrate that, thanks to innovation, we often find that (as it were) the future is no

longer what it used to be.


This is not just a problem of knowledge. Its root is something that Hannah Arendt has

identified as an inescapable feature of human finitude. Finitude, the foundation of Schneewind's

divine corporation, is re-encountered just at the moment when modernity’s achievements hold

out the prospect of infinite knowledge, infinite progress. In fact, it is precisely the transformative

power of technology and scientific knowledge that underlines our finitude, for Arendt. She

pointed out that the finitude of humans, the human condition, is not the same as a fixed,

immutable human nature. Rather, it depends on the power of humans to remake their world and

themselves. What humans beings create through subjective effort takes on an objective form that

then conditions their existence in turn (Arendt 1998, 9-10). The production of new futures

through innovation changes the conditions of subsequent human action, leading to unanticipated

consequences. Even if human beings entirely remodelled themselves through bioengineering, or

left the Earth for another planet, they could not escape their fundamental finitude.

So here we have the ethical tension at the heart of responsible innovation. The social use

of science promises the transformation of the future, but in transforming it relies on foresight that

is nonetheless rooted in hindsight. Yet despite claims that we are now living in 'risk societies'

where consciousness is being transformed by awareness of reflexive risk, the illusion of foresight

remains something that people – in the media, in governance, in business and more widely – are

firmly wedded to. How and why? I will now address this question, by introducing the concept of

future horizons.


3. Living the Empty Future

Nanotechnology shows us, again and again, evidence of the social power of the foresight

metaphor to crystallise debates on responsibility, and evidence also of the seductiveness of future

visions through which the intangible is made tantalisingly yet deceptively tangible. Questions as

to whether the benefits of nanotechnology will outweigh the risks populate media debates,

alongside Eigler's IBM logo spelled out in xenon atoms, nanosubs and bots, and the mechanical

metaphors of gears and other widgets through which ideas of bio-engineering are elaborated.

Critics of nanotechnology imaginaries often see in them attempts to give an illusory unity

to the messy, multidisciplinary reality of science and technology at the nanoscale. Consequently,

they see a need for a politics of imaginaries, an interrogation of future visions and the

assumptions on which they rest. Jose Lopez's 2004 article 'Bridging the Gaps' is a classic of this

approach. He suggests that future visions of revolutionary nanotechnology rest on a rhetorical

remodelling of the past that creates a technologised interpretation of human history. He discusses

how K. Eric Drexler’s visions of mechanosynthesis, and Mihail Roco and W. S. Bainbridge's

account of NBIC convergence both attempt to gather authority for their vision of the future by

re-tooling the past along technological determinist lines. For Lopez, the imaginaries of such

narratives depict the history of 'human interaction with nature and the development of

technology as ‘nothing more than the attempt to manipulate atoms, initially clumsily but

increasingly with more precision'.

Such critiques of imaginaries, and how they are used to mobilise legitimacy and frame


debates, however, do not touch upon the seductiveness of the idea of foresight as such. Why does

the assumption that we are facing the future with open eyes continue to dominate our ideas about

responsibility?

I've explored the need for foresight as a function of historical shifts in ethical

frameworks. Now I want to consider a broader range of historical conditions behind its

transformation into such a central, organising trope for understanding our relationship with the

future. This will take us beyond a preoccupation with imaginaries alone.

Different imaginaries, with nanotechnology as with other technologies, are visions of

counterfactual future possibilities. But as Anthony Giddens has pointed out, thinking and

imagining the future as a field of counterfactuals achieves prominence only in modernity

(Giddens, 1991). Viewing the future in terms of mutually exclusive possible worlds is a

necessary support for a consequentialist style of ethics. But how – and when – did it become

possible to think of the future in terms of a collection of possibilities in the first place?

Taking a lead from 'historians of the future' such as Reinhardt Koselleck and Lucian

Hölscher, it is possible to see how futurity means different things at different times and in

different places, and, as a result, is experienced as making different demand on the present. In

other words, the future, as a dimension of the present, has to be thought of as socially

constructed. All societies face an uncertain future, but in positioning themselves to confront it,

they adopt different stances. They develop and exhibit a range of styles of living the future,

different ‘future horizons’. Just as future imaginaries may differ widely between societies, or


between different groups within a society, so may these styles or horizons. But what they share is

that they shape and sustain imaginaries.

Imaginaries are generally treated as belonging to the symbolic order. Joan Fujimura notes

that what distinguishes imaginaries from fantasies is that they are 'collective enterprises and not

simply an individual's dreams' (Fujimura, 2003, p. 192). They can function performatively as

ways of producing the future in the present within the order of representation, providing what

Emilio Mordini calls a 'symbolic template' 'that generates a sense of identity and inclusiveness'

(Mordini, 2007, p. 30).

Yet the production and reproduction of imaginaries implies more than just symbolization.

It demands that we ask a Foucauldian question: why do some imaginaries get reproduced more

widely? At certain times it becomes possible to talk of the future in terms of endless frontiers, the

perfectibility of humanity, and so on. The reason lies perhaps in what Foucault, adapting the

classical sense of the word, calls ethos, a style of life. Only here it is not the body and self, as in

Foucault, that is worked on - but the future as such. It is made into an object of knowledge, of

action, and of desire, and becomes a source of ethical demands. From out of this multifaceted

labour, imaginative depictions of the future are woven.

A style of living the future, which Barbara Adam and I (2007) have called a future

horizon, is therefore an ethos, in Foucault’s sense: a heterogeneous set of practices, patterns of

desire, forms of knowledge and ethical imperatives which 'hang together' in producing and

reproducing social forms in the present. The elements of such an ethos exhibit a certain


consistency in how they construct the future as object of knowledge, desire, action and ethics.

This concept of a style of living the future is foreshadowed in Reinhardt Koselleck's

notion of a 'horizon of expectations' [Erwartungshorizont] (Koselleck, 2002) and Lucian

Hölscher's 'future horizon' [Zukunftshorizont] (Hölscher, 1999). Their use of the word ‘horizon’

resonates with the work of Heidegger and of Gadamer, and its metaphorical value is captured

nicely by Niklas Luhmann, who writes that "[...] the essential characteristic of a horizon is that

we can never touch it, never get at it, never surpass it, but that in spite of that, it contributes to

the definition of the situation" (Luhmann, 1976).

Hölscher documents how early modernity saw a widespread re-organisation of the

temporal character of experience, one that made imaginaries, as representations of possible

future worlds, possible in the first place. In medieval European culture, he suggests, the future

was thought of mostly in terms of the future states or condition of a individual person or thing

(Hölscher, 1999, pp. 19-20). From the 16th and 17th centuries onwards, however, European

culture manifests the idea of the future as such: a unified realm of potential, interconnected

events. Barbara Adam and I have suggested (2007), a number of divergent styles of living this

future emerged. These we taxonomised as a set of ideal types: for example, an abstract future,

where the future was interpreted as the deterministic product of Newtonian physical laws, an

open future, in which the future was the horizon of collective political action, and as the 18th

century passed into the19th, an empty future horizon.

It is this empty future horizon, I suggest, which ultimately makes the promises of


foresight so seductive. Hölscher documents how such a style of living the future emerges within

Europe and the United States towards the end of the 19th century, and then begins to coalesce in

new imaginaries. He names the new ethos the "mechanization of the future" [Technisierung der

Zukunft]. Hölscher identifies the growth of railways as a major influence on how progress began,

for the first time, to be conceptualised as a quantitative measure: faster travel realised by new

machines, carrying greater numbers of passengers, whole nations crossed in a single day.

Whereas the Enlightenment had dreamed of the moral perfection of humanity, the late 19th

century dreamed of abundance, realised through myriad avenues of technological ingenuity.

Hölscher identifies certain technologies as a driving force behind the mechanisation of

the future. But they play their shaping role amidst a wider confluence of knowledge, action and

ethics, within which new forms of expert knowledge have significant influence. The future

increasingly becomes constructed to fit within the grids made available by systematic and

mathematized forms of knowledge – physics (especially thermodynamics), engineering, and

economics. The future is increasingly experienced as an empty field of possibilities, but at the

same time it becomes a gridded Cartesian space in which specific values can be assigned to

particular possibilities.

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which emerged in the second half of the 19th century,

exemplifies counterfactual, future-oriented expert knowledge. Quantification of potential

outcomes, in order to render them commensurable with each other, became an increasingly

influential way for State actors to justify policy choices and build consensus for political

decisions, as Theodor Porter (1996) has argued. As is revealed in this quotation from CBA


pioneer Jules Dupuit, the goal for such thinkers was to dissolve the conflicts of politics into the

bureaucratised routines of administrative decision-making. CBA and the spreading use of

actuarial practices of risk accounting, in Nikolas Rose's words, 'brought the future into the

present and made it calculable' (Rose, 1999, p. 247).

In the same period as colonial powers were mapping, standardizing and extending

frontiers into supposedly 'uncivilised' or 'unoccupied' territories, the future was, as Anthony

Giddens suggests (Giddens, 1991, pp. 111-112) also being colonised. The ability to use new

forms of knowledge and practice to exercise foresight and plan ahead of the present meant that

those social actors, including states, able to leverage these forms and the added legitimacy they

brought gained the advantage of decisively shaping the future territory in which others would

later have to make decisions and deal with consequences. In the age of the empty future, all were

equally able to imagine new possible futures, but in the end, some futures were created more

equal than others.

These new practices help to shape the forms in which the new consequentialist ethical

imperatives of modernity were made manifest. Utilitarianism and neo-classical microeconomics

were translated, as the 19th century passed into the 20th, into the new sub-discipline of welfare

economics. Maximising material well-being through an increased satisfaction of individual

preferences, became the measure of all social progress.

At the same time, as Hölscher shows, the new style of living the future makes possible

imaginaries of plenty, abundance, comfort and so on. I mentioned that desire is a key element in


any ethos of the future. Are these imaginaries of plenty where expressions of desire characteristic

of the empty future may be found? Things are more complex than this. The empty future

manifests desire in two forms. On the one hand, mapping the future – driven by the desire to see

ahead, to exercise foresight – affirms that there is a boundary between ways of acting that are

risk aware and rational, and others which are unruly, risk-blind, and dangerous. The desire for a

symbolic taming of uncertainty to take place is inseparable, however, from an opposed desire,

one which finds in accumulation and plenty, not the means of satisfying wants, but instead a

compulsion to create more uncertainty, to open up more potential for more and more

accumulation. This desire is the death drive at the heart of modernity that Marshall Berman

(1983) finds in Goethe's Faust.

‘In the world’s more advanced industrial countries, development has followed more authentically Faustian forms. Here the tragic dilemmas that Goethe defined have remained urgently in force. It has turned out – and Goethe could have predicted it – that under the pressures of the modern world economy the process of development must itself go through perpetual development. Where it does, all people, things, institutions and environments that are innovative and avant-garde at one historical moment will become backward and obsolescent in the next.’ (p. 78)

Mapping the future creates the power to act, but the power to act - to innovate - and to

shape the territory in which others will have to live is also a power to create new uncertainties,

allowing the symbolic drama of mapping to, in due course, be once again acted out. There is thus

a two-sided dynamic of desire that maintains the coherence of the empty future as an ethos, and

sustains our attachment to consequentialism, and to foresight, even in the face of nasty surprises.

The empty future is the modern frontier spirit: the positing of new certainties in order to

transgress them.

Ian Welsh has noted the affective charge associated with the colonisation of the future,

which drives innovation beyond the limits of socially ratified rationality, beyond the strictures of


cost-benefit analysis, and which is acknowledged here in this statement, made in a time of crisis

for the British nuclear industry, by the then head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Sir John

Hill,.

I hope we will not lose all sense of striving for the future or of interest in the undiscovered, nor refuse to make any journey unless every step can be counted and measured in advance. The road to successful and economic power stations is uncharted. I hope we can maintain our resolve to continue the exploration. (Sir John Hill, speaking in 1971).

The need for more efficient techniques, for increased satisfaction of preferences, also

creates a desire for novelty for its own sake, even if it is costly and a step into 'uncharted

territory'. The same dynamic of desire can be seen at work with respect to nanotechnology,

conceived of as the 'new new thing', in Richard Jones' words (Jones 2011). At work within the

'empty future's' imaginaries of abundance and progress, then, there is something deeper: rational

assessment of risk accompanies a wider, non-rationalisable dynamic of development for

development's sake. The seduction of foresight, and the tension within the concept of responsible

innovation lie in how an empty future ethos couples a desire for rationalised autonomy to a

desire for the 'new new thing'. It is thus the empty future, as an unquestioned style of living the

future (and which contains a variety of heterogeneous elements), which is the real obstacle to a

coherent concept of future-oriented responsibility.

4. Conclusion: Horizons of Care

The modern emphasis on foresight, I have suggested, clouds the reality of how

uncertainty is experienced but also of how it is, as the same time, a source of value in industrial

and post-industrial societies. As I suggested earlier, technological societies confirm the reality of

human finitude. Now we have seen how they also hold out the lure of infinity - of living an

empty future, a vacant space of pure potential. The quotation from Timothy Mitchell here reveals


only half the problem: the uncertainty caused by the quest for certainty is, though troubling, an

excess within modernity which, despite destabilising it, nonetheless also sustains it.

To ease the tension within the concept of responsible innovation, we need an ethos, a

style of living the future that is more appropriate to our rediscovered finitude. Academic and

policy discourses that attempt to articulate what responsible innovation might mean have begun

to approach this problem. 'Responsiveness' (von Schomberg 2011), and other similar concepts

have been invoked in order to emphasize that the views of a range of social actors outside the

innovation process have to find an effective position within it, in order to shape the direction of

innovation in ways that meet social needs. An epistemology of multiple perspectives is often

called for, both as a way of exposing potential hazards which might have been overlooked from

dominant scientific and policy perspectives, and as a way of articulating explicitly what a wide

range of stakeholders want from innovation. Bringing multiple perspectives to bear in the ‘social

assessment’ of technologies thus allows the imaginaries invoked by boosters of new technologies

to be interrogated.

An epistemology of multiple perspectives implicitly acknowledges finitude, both by

pointing to the limitations of scientific foresight, and by recognising that innovation takes place

against a backdrop of sometimes incommensurable and competing values, rather than being

answerable only to the value of efficiency or maximisation. How far does it acknowledge,

though, how closely the desire for control and the desire for new uncertainty are bound together

within the institutions and practices at the heart of technological innovation?

In closing, I want to suggest some ways in which a different ethos needs to be more

explicitly articulated for responsible innovation, one that acknowledges the enduring presence of

the empty future as a style of life and that seeks to cultivate a different style, beginning from


within this problematic ethos. I have argued elsewhere {Groves 2011} that, implicit in feminist

discussions of care can be found a different style of living the future. Feminist ethicists, notably

Sara Ruddick and Joan Tronto, have argued that doing moral philosophy through the lens of care

is less a question of finding different foundations for morality, and more a matter of changing the

relationship between moral theory and practice. Ethics – and politics, for that matter – for care

theorists, become less about how and why to apply moral principles and more about cultivating

attitudes, dispositions and capacities – in the terms introduced by my talk, forms of knowledge,

practice, and ethical guidelines as core elements of a future horizon – that are suited to protecting

and sustaining human relationships in the face of uncertainty and insecurity.

Beginning from parental and other forms of personal care, care ethicists highlight the

role of listening, intuition, attentiveness to what others need in order to flourish, and tending to

these needs. But care, as an ethical perspective, also leads to other forms of social action,

designed to build social structures and institutions which embody solidarity and mutual risk-

sharing across time, as Tronto and other feminists concerned with the political significance of

care, such as Eva Kittay and Fiona Robinson, have argued. The theory and practice of care

constructs the future as the totality of the singular futures of others we care about, together with

the conditions of their flourishing – very different to an untenanted future of pure possibility to

be seized and colonised at will.

In relation to technology, the idea of care offers a different starting point for thinking

about responsibility, and one that connects with the analysis of technological artefacts offered by

Peter-Paul Verbeek (2011). Verbeek, echoing Arendt's account of finitude, sees technology as

morally significant because of the ways in which it conditions human agency. Design, for

Verbeek, is therefore an inherently moral activity as it aims to embed within technological


artefacts qualities that are actively designed to positively enhance specific forms of human life.

Verbeek presents his ethics as a kind of 'good life' ethics of technology, a technologically-

mediated vision of eudaimonia.

If we consider this perspective through the lens of care, then it can help develop an

alternative way of thinking about the part played by desire in living the future. The qualities we

need to seek in technological artefacts might be ones that enhance human capacities to flourish in

the face of uncertainties and surprises. In place of the coupled impulses of future-mapping and

the desire for the ‘new new’, both of which are rooted in the urge to quantify the future, we

might find a desire for the qualitative enhancement of values that stand for the resilience and

flourishing of richer forms of life. Technology would then become a tool of care, a way of

promoting solidarity and risk sharing, for example, rather than just the satisfaction of individual

preferences.

Examining a technology within the context of a 'good life' ethics of care suited to human

finitude would base itself on the recognition technology is not, in and of itself, essentially

alienating, destructive or dehumanising. Aware of the seductions of foresight, and the dynamics

awakened by them, a future horizon of care would aim to actively ‘culture’ technologies as part

of assemblages of knowledge, practice, ethics and desire in which the primacy accorded to

foresight-based knowledge within the ethos of the empty future is transferred to the ethical goal

of flourishing and the diverse forms of knowledge needed to support it.


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Documents

Horizons of Care: from Future Imaginaries to Responsible Innovation