Emotions, values and technology: illuminating the blind spots

ABSTRACT

Responsible innovation and ethics of technology increasingly take emotions into consideration. Yet, there are still some crucial aspects of emotions that have not been addressed in the literature. In order to close this gap, we introduce these neglected aspects and discusses their theoretical and practical implications. We will zoom in on the following aspects: emotional recalcitrance, affective forecasting, mixed emotions, and collective emotions. Taking these aspects into account will provide a more fine-grained view of emotions that will help to improve current and future approaches and procedures that incorporate emotions.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotions
• values
• responsible innovation
• collective emotions
• affective forecasting
• mixed emotions

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the ‘Developing socially responsible innovations’ project team for their input during our project meetings.” also the participants of the TU Delft Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section Research Day 2018 for their helpful feedback on a draft of this paper. We would also like to extend our gratitude to two reviewers for their valuable suggestions and critique.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Steffen Steinert is postdoctoral Researcher at the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft. Steffen’s main research interest is philosophy of technology and he has also focused on ethics of robotics and ethical implications of brain-computer interfaces. He is particularly interested in ontology of technology, the relation between values and technology, and the connection between technology and emotions.

Sabine Roeser is Professor of Ethics at TU Delft (distinguished Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor). She is also the head of the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft. Her research covers theoretical, foundational topics concerning the nature of moral knowledge, intuitions, emotions, art and evaluative aspects of risk, but also urgent and hotly debated public issues on which her theoretical research can shed new light, such as nuclear energy, climate change and public health issues.

Notes

1 An example for the social struggle regarding emotion norms is the gendered dimension of some emotion norms. Females are not supposed to have or show certain emotions, like rage. Recently, emotion norms regarding female rage has been questioned and its political potential has been defended (Chemaly 2018).

2 Of course, one should not overlook important differences between health and technology here. For example, negative health issues (e.g. sickness) are often involuntary, whereas the risks of technology are often human-made and hence partially avoidable (Roeser 2014).

3 Here is Salmela’s full rendering of his proposal:

I propose that a collective emotion is appropriate if it is felt for a group reason that emerges from an internally coherent group ethos whose aspects have not been adopted or maintained by ignoring counterevidence that is available to the group members (24).

4 We would like to point out here that there are multiple ways of specifying rationality and that being rational, in the sense outlined by Salmela, may not be sufficient for moral correctness. For example, an individual can be rational and a racist.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under [grant number MVI-14-048]. This publication is part of the project Value Change that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 788321.