Abstract
Amid the growing interest in the relationship between technology and human flourishing, philosophical perfectionism can serve as a fruitful lens through which to normatively evaluate technology. This paper offers an analytic framework that explains the relationship between technology and flourishing by way of innate human capacities. According to perfectionism, our human flourishing is determined by how well we exercise our human capacities to know, create, be sociable, use our bodies and exercise the will, by engaging in activities that ultimately produce valuable output. The paper introduces technology affordances to this framework, to show how affordances enable or restrict the exercise of human capacities, thereby impacting levels of human flourishing. One implication of this analysis is that it highlights how technology affordances can cause the privation (absence) of flourishing, by impoverishing capacities. The upshot is that privation may bring about robustly bad unflourishing, especially given that technology and its affordances have the power to degrade the human capacities in the long run. By linking how human capacities are shaped by affordances, we can achieve a better understanding of the ethical implications of technology on human flourishing.
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Notes
I will be using the term technology as a shorthand for digital technology from here on.
As such, perfectionism is an objective account of the human good, standing in contrast with both hedonism and desire satisfaction accounts of the human good that are subjective accounts of the human good.
New capacities might emerge, resulting from human-technology interaction (e.g. cyborgs or human enhancement Ihde, 1990; Verbeek, 2008, 2011). While it is impossible to explore this issue here, the perfectionist framework I propose in this paper might be applicable to new, yet to be discovered capacities. One interesting avenue worth exploring is how different interpretations of perfectionism would apply to the distinction between existing and new capacities. The standard account of capacity perfectionism holds that we flourish when we exercise the capacities that are in our human nature (Bradford, 2016; Fletcher, 2016; Hurka, 1993). On this account, new capacities that are not in our human nature would arguably not contribute to flourishing. On another view of capacities, however, new capacities could be part of an account of flourishing. Antti Kauppinen has recently offered a new interpretation of perfectionism that rejects the idea that are capacities are explained by human nature, in favour of ‘telic perfectionism’ where “Flourishing consists in successfully realizing the formal aims implicit in the functioning of our fundamental capacities to a sufficient degree”. According to this view, flourishing is conceived in terms of the formal aims of our fundamental capacities, which makes them independent of human nature (Kauppinen forthcoming). Our fundamental capacities, therefore, could in theory include new capacities. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for prompting this discussion.
Kauppinen is referring the capacity for reason, but I am extending his argument to capture other capacities as well, since in its formal structure Kauppinen’s argument extends to other capacities as well.
Insufficient exercise of a capacity may come in degrees, but analyzing the level or intensity of capacity exercise goes beyond the scope of this paper.
In Kauppinen’s account, the capacity to know is the capacity for reason.
There is a potential objection to this argument, which goes as follows: that if a person is satisfied with not developing their capacities, then not developing those capacities is not a harm for them. To this objection there is the following reply: waste is a bad, on objective grounds: a good life for someone is determined jointly by their level of (subjective) well-being, and the degree to which they realize their potential (Masny 2022).
I have attended elsewhere to the question of how to respect to the choice not to develop and exercise capacities (Ferdman, 2019).
For an argument defending social media as a platform for virtue friendship see (Elder 2014; Petricini 2022). Additionally, it is important to stress that, for some (e.g. neurodivergent persons or persons with social anxiety), intercorporeality may work against developing positive social experiences (Bortolan 2023; Osler and Zahavi 2023). In these cases, the affordances of online communication may actually provide the action possibilities for exercising social capacities.
On the perfectionist view above, the badness of impoverishment is in that it is a waste of one’s capacity, and that waste is bad. One may argue that, intuitively, what is bad about the absence of virtue friendship is precisely the absence of the good of virtue friendship (the output), and not the wasted capacity. In response, the perfectionist could argue first that the capacity for virtue friendship is constitutive of the output (a virtue friend). This is in line with the discussion earlier on, of how the output is dependent on the exercise of the capacity (e.g. being on the summit of Mt. Everest contributes to the valuable output of achievement when one actually climbs it, and not by being dropped off by a helicopter). Second, following Machek above, living a life devoid of pursuits such as virtue friendships can be regarded as a kind of waste.
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I am very grateful to Wessel Reijers and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.
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Ferdman, A. Human Flourishing and Technology Affordances. Philos. Technol. 37, 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00686-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00686-9