Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.961009080818.3325D-100000@fox.ksu.ksu.edu> Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 14:46:28 -0500 From: kerry miller <mailto:astingsh@KSU.EDU> Subject: Re: Tech & Values To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Tom: > It would be interesting to raise this conference to a more metaphysical
> level; but, alas, I see no great outcry to discuss these types of
> underpinnings.
...>
> regardless of the value judgement, the technolgies and the humans are not
> separable either as the creators or the recipients
>
Tom, your radical relativism is great to see, but I expect you'll find its a bit much for this list to take in all at once - you'll have to go more slowly over some of the intervening steps, e.g. that 'who can say' is a rhetorical device obscuring the fact that the people who are themselves involved are the ones who _do_ say, and act; that, conversely, people who are not themselves involved shouldn't interfere with decisions that have been made, but only work towards subsequent ones; that, in general, 'objectivity' leads to just the kind of confusion of is and ought (past and future), that results in the 'quantification,' if you will, of acts into bins of goodness and badness; that therefore, 'value judgements' cannot be the basis of action *on someone elses' behalf*, despite all the talk about inalienable human rights.
Imo, it is just these kinds of underpinnings that discussion here needs to scrutinize - and assimilate - so that more mundane questions of where to find hospital beds don't have to keep getting raked over the coals.
======== Re your comment about history and sustainability: "Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects." --Herodotus
kerry