A Technomoral Politics

A Technomoral Politics
Author: Aradhana Sharma
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2024-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452972346

Examining anticorruption battles and transparency laws to ask: what makes for good governance, and can it limit liberal democratic politics as much as encourage it? Good governance is meant to empower citizens, increase democratic participation, and make states transparent and accountable, yet this liberal democratic imperative can also promote populist authoritarian rule. Bringing together discourses on ethical goodness with the technicalities of governance as expressed in laws and policies, Aradhana Sharma develops the concept of “technomoral politics” to navigate this fraught topic. With a focus on the work of activists, citizens, and state officials, she offers an ethnographic account of the contradictions and dangers of good-governance politics in twenty-first-century India. A Technomoral Politics follows the evolution of a group of activists in New Delhi led by Arvind Kejriwal from 2008 to 2014 as they morphed from a protransparency NGO to a mass movement against state corruption to a populist party that promised to change the political system through laws and policies. Sharma explores the technomoral framing of state opacity and corruption as well as the limits of the law in resolving these issues, probing such themes as the contradictory relationship between transparency and bureaucracy and the classed and gendered nature of democratic state institutions. By examining scalar dimensions of good-governance politics, from the hyperlocal work of activists to global trends, A Technomoral Politics illuminates the paradoxes, limits, and risks of a system that is meant to spread liberal democratic principles but that also ends up promoting antidemocratic, populist-authoritarian forms of rule. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

Technology and the Virtues

Technology and the Virtues
Author: Shannon Vallor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019049851X

New technologies from artificial intelligence to drones, and biomedical enhancement make the future of the human family increasingly hard to predict and protect. This book explores how the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics can help us to cultivate the moral wisdom we need to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology
Author: Shannon Vallor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 697
Release: 2022
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019085118X

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology gives readers a view into this increasingly vital and urgently needed domain of philosophical understanding, offering an in-depth collection of leading and emerging voices in the philosophy of technology. The thirty-two contributions in this volume cut across and connect diverse philosophical traditions and methodologies. They reveal the often-neglected importance of technology for virtually every subfield of philosophy, including ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, and political theory. The Handbook also gives readers a new sense of what philosophy looks like when fully engaged with the disciplines and domains of knowledge that continue to transform the material and practical features and affordances of our world, including engineering, arts and design, computing, and the physical and social sciences. The chapters reveal enduring conceptual themes concerning technology's role in the shaping of human knowledge, identity, power, values, and freedom, while bringing a philosophical lens to the profound transformations of our existence brought by innovations ranging from biotechnology and nuclear engineering to artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and robotics. This new collection challenges the reader with provocative and original insights on the history, concepts, problems, and questions to be brought to bear upon humanity's complex and evolving relationship to technology.

A Moral Technology

A Moral Technology
Author: Leo C. Coleman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017-05-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501707914

In India over the past century, electrification has meant many things: it has been a colonial gift of modern technology, a tool of national integration and political communication, and a means of gauging the country's participation in globalization. Electric lights have marked out places of power, and massive infrastructures have been installed in hopes of realizing political promises. In A Moral Technology, the grids and wires of an urban public utility are revealed to be not only material goods but also objects of intense moral concern. Leo Coleman offers a distinctive anthropological approach to electrification in New Delhi as more than just an economic or industrial process, or a "gridding" of social and political relations. It may be understood instead as a ritual action that has formed modern urban communities and people’s sense of citizenship, and structured debates over state power and political legitimacy.Coleman explores three historical and ethnographic case studies from the founding of New Delhi as an imperial capital city, to its reshaping as a national capital for post-independence India, up to its recent emergence as a contemporary global city. These case studies closely describe technological politics, rituals, and legal reforms at key moments of political change in India, and together they support Coleman’s argument that ritual performances, moral judgments, and technological installations combine to shape modern state power, civic life, and political community.

French Philosophy of Technology

French Philosophy of Technology
Author: Sacha Loeve
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2018-05-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319895184

Offering an overall insight into the French tradition of philosophy of technology, this volume is meant to make French-speaking contributions more accessible to the international philosophical community. The first section, “Negotiating a Cultural Heritage,” presents a number of leading 20th century philosophical figures (from Bergson and Canguilhem to Simondon, Dagognet or Ellul) and intellectual movements (from Personalism to French Cybernetics and political ecology) that help shape philosophy of technology in the Francophone area, and feed into contemporary debates (ecology of technology, politics of technology, game studies). The second section, “Coining and Reconfiguring Technoscience,” traces the genealogy of this controversial concept and discusses its meanings and relevance. A third section, “Revisiting Anthropological Categories,” focuses on the relationships of technology with the natural and the human worlds from various perspectives that include anthropotechnology, Anthropocene, technological and vital norms and temporalities. The final section, “Innovating in Ethics, Design and Aesthetics,” brings together contributions that draw on various French traditions to afford fresh insights on ethics of technology, philosophy of design, techno-aesthetics and digital studies. The contributions in this volume are vivid and rich in original approaches that can spur exchanges and debates with other philosophical traditions.

Doing Good with Technologies:

Doing Good with Technologies:
Author: Katinka Waelbers
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2011-06-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9400716400

20th century technologies like cars, the Internet, and the contraceptive pill have altered our actions, changed our perceptions and influenced our moral ideas, for better and worse. Upcoming technologies are bound to fulfill their own unique social roles. How can we advance this social role so that it will support the good live and limit undesired changes? This book explores whether we can take a forward looking responsibility to optimize the social roles of technologies. In doing so, the book discusses three issues: first, it aims to understand the social role of technologies; second, it explores what it means to accept responsibility for this social role, and; third, it searches for some forward looking tools that help us to see how new technologies may influence human behavior. In a rather unique approach, this book combines the influential sociological research of Bruno Latour on the social impacts of technologies with the contemporary Aristotelianism of Alasdair MacIntyre.

The People of India

The People of India
Author: Ravinder Kaur
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2022-09-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9354927343

The People' and 'New India' are terms that are being invoked freely to both understand and govern India as she enters her 75th year of post-colonial nationhood. Yet, there is little clarity on who these people of India really are, what they do, their desires, histories and attachments to India. Similarly, the phrase 'New India' is used far too loosely to explain away a dangerously confounding politics. In this book, some of the most respected scholars of South Asia come together to write about a person or a concept that holds particular sway in the politics of contemporary India. In doing so, they collectively open up an original understanding of what the politics at the heart of New India are-and how best we might come to analyse them. This brilliant collection put together by Ravinder Kaur and Nayanika Mathur includes original and accessible essays by leading social science and humanities scholars of South Asia.

Morality in a Technological World

Morality in a Technological World
Author: Lorenzo Magnani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2007-08-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139466895

The technological advances of contemporary society have outpaced our moral understanding of the problems that they create. How will we deal with profound ecological changes, human cloning, hybrid people, and eroding cyberprivacy, just to name a few issues? In this book, Lorenzo Magnani argues that existing moral constructs often cannot be applied to new technology. He proposes an entirely different ethical approach, one that blends epistemology with cognitive science. The resulting moral strategy promises renewed dignity for overlooked populations, both of today and of the future.

The Political Outsider

The Political Outsider
Author: Srirupa Roy
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2024-03-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503637999

Defying the dire predictions that attended its birth as an independent nation-state in 1947, the Indian republic is more than seventy-five years old. And yet, it is a place where criticisms of actually existing democracy are intense and strident. In recent years, the trope of victimized people suffering at the hands of a predatory elite and political dysfunction has reaped rewards. The populist language of redemptive outsiders pledging to combat a corrupt system has been harnessed in successful electoral campaigns, like the majoritarian regime of Narendra Modi. Tracking the shift from postcolonial nation-building to democracy-rebuilding, Srirupa Roy shows how the political outsider came to be a valorized figure of late-twentieth century Indian democracy, tasked with the urgent mission of curing a broken democratic system—what Roy terms "curative democracy." Drawing attention to an ambivalent political field that folds together authoritarian and democratic forms and ideas, Roy argues that the long 1970s were a crucial turning point in Indian politics, when democracy was suspended by the declaration of a national emergency and then subsequently restored. By tracing the crooked line that connects the ideals of curative democracy and the political outsider to the populist antipolitics and strongman authoritarian rule in present times, this book revisits democracy from India, and asks what the Indian experience tells us about the trajectory of global democratic politics.

Ethics of Data and Analytics

Ethics of Data and Analytics
Author: Kirsten Martin
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2022-05-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000566269

The ethics of data and analytics, in many ways, is no different than any endeavor to find the "right" answer. When a business chooses a supplier, funds a new product, or hires an employee, managers are making decisions with moral implications. The decisions in business, like all decisions, have a moral component in that people can benefit or be harmed, rules are followed or broken, people are treated fairly or not, and rights are enabled or diminished. However, data analytics introduces wrinkles or moral hurdles in how to think about ethics. Questions of accountability, privacy, surveillance, bias, and power stretch standard tools to examine whether a decision is good, ethical, or just. Dealing with these questions requires different frameworks to understand what is wrong and what could be better. Ethics of Data and Analytics: Concepts and Cases does not search for a new, different answer or to ban all technology in favor of human decision-making. The text takes a more skeptical, ironic approach to current answers and concepts while identifying and having solidarity with others. Applying this to the endeavor to understand the ethics of data and analytics, the text emphasizes finding multiple ethical approaches as ways to engage with current problems to find better solutions rather than prioritizing one set of concepts or theories. The book works through cases to understand those marginalized by data analytics programs as well as those empowered by them. Three themes run throughout the book. First, data analytics programs are value-laden in that technologies create moral consequences, reinforce or undercut ethical principles, and enable or diminish rights and dignity. This places an additional focus on the role of developers in their incorporation of values in the design of data analytics programs. Second, design is critical. In the majority of the cases examined, the purpose is to improve the design and development of data analytics programs. Third, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are about power. The discussion of power—who has it, who gets to keep it, and who is marginalized—weaves throughout the chapters, theories, and cases. In discussing ethical frameworks, the text focuses on critical theories that question power structures and default assumptions and seek to emancipate the marginalized.