Moral aspects of Technology(Case study: Moral Impact of Mobile Phone communication on the society)

Essay by piyushUniversity, Bachelor'sA, March 2004

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HU 341

Moral Literacy and Moral Choices

Term Paper

Moral aspects of Technology

Motivation:

It might appear strange that while our synopsis and the presentation dealt primarily with Communication, especially personal communication as applied to the special case of mobile communication, this term paper deals with the idea of technology as a whole. However, it can be justified on the grounds that what is true for one technology will in essence be true for others as well, hence it is better to deal with the idea of technology in general and then apply the resulting principles to any technology.

The motivation for this term paper was a very interesting question which was raised during the presentation. However I would give a brief overview of the presentation before I go into that.

Our presentation basically dealt with the idea of personal communication and the moral issued implicated by it as applied to the special case of mobile phones.

We began by defining the idea of personal communication and then went on to explore the various moral theories related to technology in general. The biggest question in front of us was, is it the use of a technology which defines its moral worth, or is there something inherent to the technology itself which is good or bad. The first school of thought was propounded by those philosophers who believe that it would be inappropriate to ?make technological instruments the scapegoats for those who wield them?. The second school of thought was proposed by those philosophers who believed that there is something inherent to any technology itself which was of consequence. According to them, the message itself is either irrelevant or unimportant. The most prominent philosopher in this regard was Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).

In his book, ?Medium is the Message,? McLuhan...