P-P Verbeek: ethics, political action, and technological mediation

Abstract

This article was written on the basis of a paper we gave at the 5th Luso-Brazilian Colloquium on Ethics and Political Philosophy, and seeks to provide a perspective on Verbeek's thinking on ethics and technological mediation, based on the view of mediation described in Don Ihde's post-phenomenological inter-relational ontology and on the concept of ‘script’, developed by Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, in two domains, design and politics. It also seeks to confront Verbeek's position with a critique of his proposal for design methods for technological artefacts, on the one hand, and his proposal for political action, on the other, which in our view results from his position being too intentionalist, despite being within the framework of Ihde's post-phenomenological position. We therefore propose that, starting from the technological mediation described by Verbeek, and taking into account the criticism made, we think about the ethical and political question from the assumption that society is made up of a set of functionally differentiated social subsystems, in accordance with Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems. In a preliminary point, we will deal with the domain of ethics in the design and development of technological artefacts as they raise the issue of mediation. To do this, we turn to the article ‘Materialising Morality: Design, Ethics and Technological Mediation’ (2006), a summary of the work ‘What Things Do. Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design’ (2005). His position on the subject is set out more extensively in his work “Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things” (2011), of which the article in question is a part. In a second point, we will deal with the political dimension using the article ‘Resistance Is Futile: Toward a Non-Modern Democratisation of Technology’ (2013). Finally, in a third point, we critique Verbeek's position, placing ourselves in a sphere other than that deriving from the ‘intentions’ of technology, but suggesting that of Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems, since the current state of technological advancement has placed non-human agency on an equal footing with human agency, and there may even be an asymmetrical situation in which the human being is diminished and their life is defined by the system or distinct technological artefact that modifies the conditions of freedom and ethical responsibility (Herrera-Veja, 2025, pg. 12) and, to this, we would add, of political action.