Neutrality and Technology: Ortega Y Gasset on the Good Life

Abstract

New technologies such as human enhancement, robotics, GM food, and geo-engineering give rise to a good deal of controversy and disagreement. It is di cult to reach closure or consensus on these matters. Scientists and policymakers tend to cast the issues in a vocabulary of risk, probabilities, uncertainties, costs, and benefi ts. The general public, on the other hand, tends to react emotionally to new technologies. Both approaches, separately or combined, usually fail to deliver unanimous decisions and clear direction to public policymaking. The fi rst approach has the appearance of an objective and scientifi c way of dealing with the problems, but a closer inspection may reveal that the assignment of probabilities, distribution of risks, the choice of discounting rates, the way of dealing with uncertainties, and the economic valuing of costs and benefi ts and their allocation are based on choices and moral assumptions that can be reasonably disputed by reasonable and informed people. Disputes about the moral parameters of risk and cost-benefi t assessments are added to extant disputes about what the relevant facts of the matter are. When it comes to the second approach, emotional reactions, and the public scares and panic cascades to which they often give rise, enhanced by the new media, and prompt people to accept beliefs that are often unsupported by the best available scientifi c evidence, logic and mathematics.