Amid the growing interest in the relationship between technology and human flourishing, philosophical perfectionism can serve as a fruitful lens through which to normatively evaluate technology. This paper offers an analytic framework that explains the relationship between technology and flourishing by way of innate human capacities. According to perfectionism, our human flourishing is determined by how well we exercise our human capacities to know, create, be sociable, use our bodies and exercise the will, by engaging in activities that ultimately produce (...) valuable output. The paper introduces technology affordances to this framework, to show how affordances enable or restrict the exercise of human capacities, thereby impacting levels of human flourishing. One implication of this analysis is that it highlights how technology affordances can cause the privation (absence) of flourishing, by impoverishing capacities. The upshot is that privation may bring about robustly bad unflourishing, especially given that technology and its affordances have the power to degrade the human capacities in the long run. By linking how human capacities are shaped by affordances, we can achieve a better understanding of the ethical implications of technology on human flourishing. (shrink)

Technologies are undeniably having a decisive, transformative impact on Earth, yet the currently prevailing empirically orientated approaches in the philosophy of technology seem unable to get to conceptual grips with this fact. Some thinkers have therefore been trying to develop alternative methods capable of clarifying it. This paper focuses on Vincent Blok’s call for rehabilitating an ontologically oriented approach. It reconstructs the rationale of his method as well as its key elements and structure. Elucidating Blok’s emphasis on the experience of (...) climate change, the paper clarifies his call for a terrestrial turn in the philosophy of technology. This turn is indisputably needed, but Blok’s conceptualisation of Earth is problematic: Apart from its speculative nature, it underestimates the impact of humans on Earth. Blok seeks to clarify how ontic phenomena, especially particular technologies, can have an ontological impact, but there is a friction between his Heideggerian concept of the world as grounding inner-worldly beings and the idea of technologies as founding a new world. Identifying the elements where the undoubtedly required ontological approach needs to be rethought, the paper suggests that we need more mundane conceptualisations of both Earth and the world, accompanied by more attention to ontic processes. (shrink)