An artefact or system created by persons that can alter the conditions of personhood. Technology is an entity, but not a person — it is something, not someone.
Technology and the Person
Technology is always a work of the person: only a being endowed with reason and freedom can devise tools and systems that exceed what is merely natural. Yet precisely because technology proceeds from personal action, it can profoundly alter the conditions of that action — for good and for ill.
The Personalistic Norm demands that technology serve the unfolding of personhood and not infringe upon the dignity of the person. Where technology surveils, manipulates, or reduces persons to their functions, it becomes an instrument of the oblivion of the person.
Technology as a Morally Neutral Reality
Technology as such is neither good nor evil. It is an expression of the creative reason of the person and belongs essentially to the unfolding of human personhood. Medical technology saves lives, communication technology makes community possible across distances, tools ease labour — all this serves the common good and the dignity of the person.
It is not technology itself, but its misuse by persons, that renders it a problem. Only when technology is deployed against the Personalistic Norm — when it surveils, manipulates, instrumentalizes, or reduces persons to functions — does it become an instrument of the oblivion of the person. The moral evaluation therefore always concerns the action, not the technical means as such.
Technology as a Threat
In the ontology, technology is defined as the domain of the relation “endangers”: a technology can endanger the essential characteristics of the person. This concerns in particular:
- Artificial Intelligence: simulates person-behavior without being a person — the danger of confusing simulation with actuality
- Genetic technology: intervenes in the genetic constitution of the person — touches the first dimension of personhood
- Surveillance technology: endangers privacy and thereby the interiority of the person
Surrogacy, too, can be understood as technology in a broader sense: a systematic procedure that subjects the beginning of personal life to the conditions of a contract and thus makes the person into a commodity — a form of instrumentalization.
Technology and Transhumanism
Transhumanism is the most consistent form of the union of technology and the oblivion of the person. It seeks to overcome personhood itself through technology. Whether cryptocurrencies, which translate personal relations into algorithmic processes, or the vision of a fusion of human and machine — the transhumanist error consists in confusing technical augmentation with moral perfection.
Ontological Classification
- Superclass: Entity
- is essentially distinct from: Person (technology is something, a person is someone)
- Subclasses: Artificial Intelligence, Genetic technology, Surveillance technology
- Relation: endangers (the essential characteristics of the person)
Surveillance Technology
Surveillance technology comprises technologies that endanger the privacy of the person. As a subclass of Technology, it directly touches the interiority of the person — that domain of personal life which belongs to the essence of personhood and is proper to the person as someone.
The personalist perspective recognizes in surveillance a particular danger for the dignity of the person. Where interiority is systematically illuminated, the person is degraded to a transparent object. The freedom of the person — the capacity for self-determination and for the unobserved unfolding of one’s own life — is undermined.
Surveillance technology can thus become a subtle but effective form of practical oblivion of the person. This holds especially when it is combined with Artificial Intelligence.
Ontological Classification
Superordinate concept: Technology
Ontological relations:
- endangers: the privacy of the person
- threatens: interiority, freedom
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Spaemann, Robert (2006): Persons. The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’. Translated by Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The distinction between someone and something as the basis of the critique of technology)