Abstract
Politicians and engineers are increasingly realizing that values are important in the development of technological artefacts. What is often overlooked is that different conceptualizations of these abstract values lead to different design-requirements. For example, designing social media platforms for deliberative democracy sets us up for technical work on completely different types of architectures and mechanisms than designing for so-called liquid or direct forms of democracy. Thinking about Democracy is not enough, we need to design for the proper conceptualization of these values. As we see it, we cannot responsibly engineer and innovate and shape technology in accordance with our moral values without engaging in systematic and continuous conceptual engineering: This is not only an academic, or theoretical issue, it is also not simply an issue for public policy or politics, or regulators, it has become a central problem for engineering and the world of technology. In this paper, we present a framework for doing the necessary conceptual work in the context of requirement engineering. We draw on the literature on conceptual engineering to lay out a methodology to (1) assess different conceptions and (2) to develop new conceptions. Moreover, we integrate this methodology with extant approaches in the philosophy of technology which aim at designing technological artefacts ethically. In the final section we apply this integrated framework to freedom in the context of social media networks.
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Notes
In Delft we have been working for decades on translating ethical values into design requirements. At the end of 2020. though, we realized that because our current conceptual framework might be inadequate, we need to engage in conceptual engineering if we want to do requirement engineering correctly. With a group of philosophers of technology, we started mapping out the terrain; arguing that many debates in the philosophy of technology should be seen as conceptual engineering problems. This resulted in a popular science piece in February 2021 (Santoni De Sio et al., 2021) and a recent academic paper (Veluwenkamp et al., 2022). From September 2021 on, we started talking about the ideas presented in the current paper in workshops and conferences.
Inferentialism about conceptual engineering has been defended in (Jorem & Löhr, 2022). It is important, however, to note that by claiming that inferential roles are a suitable place for conceptual engineering, one is not committed to metasemantic inferentialism, i.e., the position that inferential roles are explanatorily basic. The metasemantic referentialist (who holds the purported reference is explanatorily basic), for example, does not deny that expressions have inferential roles [as we have explained in (Veluwenkamp et al., 2022)]. Moreover, the position is also compatible with both atomist and holist ways of concept individuation [as (Löhr, 2022) has argued].
Inferential relation can be spelled out in terms of the utterances one is disposed to accept, or in terms of utterances one is committed to. Another point of contention is what the reference point for the inferential roles is. Individualists hold that it is the speaker’s commitments or dispositions that determine meaning. Alternatively, one can hold that it is society that determines which commitments or dispositions are correct [see also (Sinclair, 2017)]. For our purposes in this paper these distinctions do not matter.
Work in linguistics and sociology (e.g., by the sociologist Zerubavel, the linguists Lakoff and Sapir), but also research in cognitive psychology and the philosophy of mind (e.g., Ned Block’s work on access consciousness) have independently shown that having access to a concept or an effective prototype activation pattern may determine awareness perception and thought processes.
Reverse conceptual engineering is supposed to be normatively neutral. This can be contrasted with the use in which genealogies are usually being deployed. Because genealogies are often presented as subversive or vindicatory. A subversive genealogy undermines a practice by showing that it has a disreputable history, while vindictive genealogies use the historical development to justify a practice. Nietzsche’s moral genealogy is, for example, one of the paradigmatic examples of a subversive genealogy. Nietzsche argued against our conception of morality, exactly by exposing its disreputable origins: “the value of [moral] values should itself, for once, be examined—and so we need to know about the conditions and circumstances under which the values”. However, a worry with this kind of argument is that it seems to suffer from the genetic fallacy. This fallacy consists in a confusion of the origins of a belief with its justification (Klement, 2002). Whether Nietzsche’s argument actually suffers from the fallacy is a matter of debate (Loeb, 2008), but it is important to see that this problem does not occur if we restrict ourselves in the discovery phase to a normatively neutral description of the historical development of a specific concept.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to members of the Frankfurt School Philosophy Forum and the OZSW who have commented on oral presentations of the paper.
Funding
This research is supported by the Delft Digital Ethics Centre. The research of Herman Veluwenkamp is part of the research programme Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, which is funded through the Gravitation programme of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO Grant No. 024.004.031).
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HV and JvdH together conceived of the conceptual engineering approach to Design for Values. HV developed the concept and took the lead in the writing of the paper. Both authors have done multiple integrations and revisions of the draft.
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Veluwenkamp, H., van den Hoven, J. Design for values and conceptual engineering. Ethics Inf Technol 25, 2 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-022-09675-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-022-09675-6