A post by Char Brecevic

This past summer, I taught a course on technology and innovation ethics at the University of Notre Dame. To my surprise, many of my students proved to be staunch technological determinists. According to these students, humans may be the creators of technologies, but their fate is ultimately controlled by their creations. We have little say in what technologies we develop, how we design them, and where they get applied. To make matters worse, although not unexpected given their determinist leanings, many students seemed fairly unconcerned about the lack of democratic deliberation in these various decision-making processes.

I had hoped that discussing nuanced accounts of responsibility in the innovation ethics literature (e.g., Grinbaum & Groves 2013; Vallor 2016; Ladd 1991) would help shine a light on how these young people might chart a new course—one marked by mindful, intentional, and answerable approaches to technological innovation. I was also hoping that the need for identifying key stakeholders and allowing them to take their rightful seats at the proverbial table would become readily apparent. The result was largely underwhelming. Perhaps the readings were a tad too long to hold an undergraduate’s attention. Perhaps the beautiful summer weather made it difficult to fully appreciate the import of what we were discussing. Or, perhaps, I needed a new pedagogical vantage point from which to make sense of my students’ seemingly apathetic and unfazed response to the mounting ethical challenges we humans face in our increasingly technologized environments.

Starting from the final hypothesis, my intent in this short piece is to offer a humble reflection rather than a declarative proposal concerning how educators working in this area ought to proceed. Serendipitously, I recently found myself crossing intellectual paths with John Dewey, and this encounter made me realize that he might have some valuable insight for educators, like me, who are hoping to change the hearts and minds of our future scientists, engineers, and innovators. Put very simply, I read Dewey as suggesting that the pedagogical obstacle at play is not one concerning the content of assigned readings, disciplinary differences among enrolled students, or general indifference. Rather, the obstacle is an imaginative one.