IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 82

Technological Stewardship and Responsible Innovation
common assumption that ethical responsibility is
something that comes naturally to " good " people
or that ethical analysis is primarily concerned with
establishing the " correctness " of individual choice.
Similarly, we wish to challenge an unexamined technological
utopianism that ignores the moral dimensions
of technology design and use. This is amplified
by the values of " technological solutionism " and
" market fundamentalism, " long ingrained in the
high-tech culture, which have likewise taken root in
educational instructions, curricula, and instruction
[3], [4]. We find that many of our current students,
aware of the high-profile moral failures of Silicon
Valley, are receptive to the critique of these values;
still, it is important for them to acknowledge that
" nerding harder " [5] is not the appropriate answer
to many ethical problems; social, legal, and policy
approaches must also be considered.
We see a kind of techno-utopianism in less obvious
places-even, for instance, in the resistance to recognizing
limits to technological responses. For example,
those who have quite understandably grown weary of
Silicon Valley control have recently been calling to
produce " ethical algorithms " without considering that
perhaps ethics (properly understood) can't be mechanized.
Knee-jerk " fix the tech " approaches betray
a kind of " techno-utopian " response insofar as they
reveal a techno-monocularity that has lost the ability
to even imagine real alternatives. Minimally, we want
our students to come away from our classes with the
sense that doing ethics is an ongoing interdisciplinary
and collective praxis that necessitates venturing outside
the comfort zone of technical expertise [6].
How can we provide undergraduate engineering
and computing students with this thoughtful kind of
disruption in a meaningful and constructive way?
Reflecting on our experiences as ethics educators,
we have come to think of our principal task as one
of defamiliarization. In one sense, this is nothing
new; it has been the central task of philosophy for
over 2,500 years. Situating it within the experience
of engineering and computing students, however,
requires special care.
The term defamiliarization, originating in the Russian
Formalist School of literary criticism, refers to the
practice of challenging the audience with presentations
of everyday things in uncommon ways, so as to
break audiences' habits of perception and generate
new insights and perspectives [7]. In one of the readings
in Charles's class, Czech author Cˇapek [8] (famous
82
for introducing the word " robot " to the world) adopts
a faux-naïve attitude toward technology, extolling the
virtues of his new vacuum cleaner (not to keep his
house clean, but rather to produce a constant supply of
" dense, uniform, heavy, and mysterious " dust in its little
pouch) and his new coke stove (not to heat his house,
but to provide material for the vacuum cleaner). Cˇ apek
[8] subverts a conventional functional account of
technology to explore the peculiar accommodations
human " owners " make for their technological " helpers, "
thereby complicating the distinction between the
two in a humorous and insightful way. Similarly, we
aim to break students out of accepted perspectives on
their technical domains and uncritical approaches to
ethics and to expose them to a diversity of ontologies,
epistemologies, and values.
* Uprooting agency: Students' perceptions of their
relationship to technology tend to be quite simple:
rational " users " interact with neutral " tools. "
We aim to challenge them with a more complex
notion of agency: a function of cultivated dispositions
and habituated practices emerging out of
practical engagement in the world. Phenomenological
philosophy and science and technology
studies (STS) provide empirically rich descriptions
that reveal the unfounded nature of many typical
assumptions about agency, assumptions that also
sustain and encourage naïve views of ethics.
* Diversifying lenses: Drawing on different classical
ethical theories (e.g., utilitarianism, deontology,
virtue ethics, and care ethics) can help to show
students both the importance and the limitations
of different interpretative frames. For example,
classical theories tend to be human-centered or
can tacitly deploy culturally specific and uncritical
value assumptions.
* Transforming identity: We challenge students to
reconceive what it means to be a full-fledged professional
in their area of choice. We want critical
ethical engagement to become more than a sideshow
or diversion, but rather an essential element
of our students' personal and professional lives.
In this article, we briefly report on our efforts to
bring these concerns into our ethics courses and
relate some of our students' experiences.
Uprooting agency
To open students' eyes to the real scope and complexity
of ethical responsibility, we must challenge the
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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