Technology is not only the result of scientific progress and advances in the field of engineering. Rather, the research focus Technology Ethics highlights that technology and society influence, constitute and shape each other. From this perspective, the development of new technologies is a social process for which also empirical assumptions about social realities, conceptions of humanity and concepts of a “good life” also play a vital role. Furthermore, the use of technology is an active, at times even resistive process of appropriation taking place within complex socio-technical arrangements.
Therefore, the development and appropriation of technology is not only based on technical and economical decisions. Considerations also include decisions on how we want to understand and to shape individual life and societal coexistence. Accordingly, plenty of ethical questions concerning technology arise.
Within the research focus Technology Ethics we, firstly, study specific technologies which raise ethical questions, such as technologies for the elderly or affective computing. However, technologies are inseparable from their societal contexts. Secondly, we therefore also focus on the relations between technology and society. A third cross-sectional issue comprises the questions of how ethical expertise (and also expertise from the social sciences and the humanities) can be used to shape the development and the use of technologies according to the Ethics Centre‘s concept of an "ethics in the sciences".
