Digital Divide?: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide
Digital Divide?: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide
Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Technology as empowerment: a capability approach to computer ethics
Ethics and Information Technology
Human capabilities and information and communication technology: the communicative connection
Ethics and Information Technology
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Nussbaum's version of the capability approach is not only a helpful approach to development problems but can also be employed as a general ethical-anthropological framework in `advanced' societies. This paper explores its normative force for evaluating information technologies, with a particular focus on the issue of human enhancement. It suggests that the capability approach can be a useful way of to specify a workable and adequate level of analysis in human enhancement discussions, but argues that any interpretation of what these capabilities mean is itself dependent on (interpretations of) the techno-human practices under discussion. This challenges the capability approach's means-end dualism concerning the relation between on the one hand technology and on the other hand humans and capabilities. It is argued that instead of facing a choice between development and enhancement, we better reflect on how we want to shape human-technological practices, for instance by using the language of capabilities. For this purpose, we have to engage in a cumbersome hermeneutics that interprets dynamic relations between unstable capabilities, technologies, practices, and values. This requires us to modify the capability approach by highlighting and interpreting its interpretative dimension.