TY - JOUR
T1 - Technology Development as a Normative Practice
T2 - A Meaning-Based Approach to Learning About Values in Engineering—Damming as a Case Study
AU - Nia, Mahdi G.
AU - Harandi, Mehdi F.
AU - de Vries, Marc J.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Engineering, as a complex and multidimensional practice of technology development, has long been a source of ethical concerns. These concerns have been approached from various perspectives. There are ongoing debates in the literature of the philosophy of engineering/technology about how to organize an optimized view of the values entailed in technology development processes. However, these debates deliver little in the way of a concrete rationale or framework that could comprehensively describe different types of engineering values and their multi-aspect interrelations in real engineering practices. Approaching engineering values from a meaning-based perspective, as in this paper, can be a reliable method of tackling such a controversial problem. This paper therefore proposes that technology development be considered a systemic normative practice and attempts to provide a comprehensive view of various built-in values, their different origins and features, and a way of prioritizing them in real engineering processes. Studying two cases of the Zayandeh Rood Dam and the Abbasi Dam will lead to practical insights into how to understand norms in technology development and incorporate them into engineering practice.
AB - Engineering, as a complex and multidimensional practice of technology development, has long been a source of ethical concerns. These concerns have been approached from various perspectives. There are ongoing debates in the literature of the philosophy of engineering/technology about how to organize an optimized view of the values entailed in technology development processes. However, these debates deliver little in the way of a concrete rationale or framework that could comprehensively describe different types of engineering values and their multi-aspect interrelations in real engineering practices. Approaching engineering values from a meaning-based perspective, as in this paper, can be a reliable method of tackling such a controversial problem. This paper therefore proposes that technology development be considered a systemic normative practice and attempts to provide a comprehensive view of various built-in values, their different origins and features, and a way of prioritizing them in real engineering processes. Studying two cases of the Zayandeh Rood Dam and the Abbasi Dam will lead to practical insights into how to understand norms in technology development and incorporate them into engineering practice.
KW - Dooyeweerd’s ontological account
KW - Normative constitutive rules
KW - Normative practice
KW - Normative regulative rules
KW - Normativity
KW - Technology development
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85033454370&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4c394319-25c8-4d0e-a910-0605f46f9ef3
U2 - 10.1007/s11948-017-9999-7
DO - 10.1007/s11948-017-9999-7
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85033454370
SN - 1353-3452
SP - 1
EP - 28
JO - Science and Engineering Ethics
JF - Science and Engineering Ethics
ER -