The Researches On Mitcham's Thoughts Of Ethics Of Technology

Carl Mitcham's thoughts of ethics of technology took the merger of science and technology as a premise, took his thoughts about conceptual, epistemological, and metaphysical ones as foundation, and all his moral issues were concentrated on the high-tech fields.According to the differences of research techniques, Mitcham divided the researches on ethics of technology into two kinds of traditions which were the continental or phenomenological tradition in philosophy and the Anglo-American analytical tradition. The question of responsibility was the core of Mitcham's thoughts of ethics of technology. Through analyzing the scientific responsibility and the engineering responsibility, Mitcham considered that the scope of responsibility was enlarged to the society and the public. Because of the roles rising sharply and the difficulties to investigate responsibility, the responsibility was limed. He proposed two solutions which were public participation and technology assessment in order to solve the responsibility difficulties. Public participation was the reflection of democracy in technology field. It could help the public to maintain their own benefit, and let the public participate into the decision process of technology with experts. Besides, the scientists and technologists also had responsibilities to educate the public and carry forward their professional idealism tradition. Through further reconsidering the responsibility question, Mitcham pointed out that the duty which was taking more into account during the engineering design should be sparkplugged, so the huge waste of manpower, physical resources and financial resources in the research and development of technology could be avoided, and the puzzle doom of technology could also be far away. Taking these thoughts as the basic principles, Mitcham discussed the ethics of engineering, the ethics of biomedicine, the ethics of environment as well as the ethics of information technology specifically. Mitcham believed that the design in engineering caused 'making' change into 'thinking' and the idealized model of engineering was precisely the ultimate question of discussions of ethics of engineering. During discussing ethics of biomedicine, Mitcham believed that the nature had its own adjustive actions which could help human regulate technology if human respect the nature and let it play its role. Regarding the current popular viewpoints about substantial questions to environmental protection, Mitcham pointed out that these viewpoints could not be believed blindly and suspicion was needed here. During discussing ethics of information technology, Mitcham considered that deprivacywould be a good solution to the privacy questions in medical and information fields. Finally, he suggested to popularization the ethics of technology education in our technology universities and also among scientists and technologists.Mitcham's thoughts are significant to our nation's development of this field. When we use his thoughts as references, we must know that there are many difficulties to put his thoughts into practice because of the social, political, and economic factors of our nation.